The Obama administration recently decided to lift the ban on women in combat drawing an end on the law that currently allowed men between the ages of 18 to 25 to register for a military draft according to the Associated Press.
Women have never been allowed to be drafted into military service.
If you meet the age requirement and fail to report for duty, you could be charged with a severe penalty, including felony charges according to the Examiner.
While neither the Obama administration nor Congress is in any rush to get women to register and sent out to fight, legally they may not have any other option eventually.
For more than three decades, it was constitutional to only register men for a draft according to a Supreme Court ruling. Women weren't deemed fit for battlefield positions, so there was no reason to register them for a possible draft into the armed services.
This has changed however, and now all artillery, front-line infantry, armor, special operations jobs will be open to female volunteers who meet the necessary physical requirements according to the Associated Press.
It will be hard for anyone to make the case that women should be kept away from registration at this point according to Diane Mazur, a professor at the University of Florida, and a former Air Force officer.
"They're going to have to show that excluding women from the draft actually improves military readiness," Mazur said. "I just don't see how you can make that argument."
The report by the Associated Press confirmed that the same groups that supported the end of the ban on women in combat also were behind including women in draft registration, stating it's a "matter of basic citizenship" according to the report.
"Women should have the same civic obligations as men," said Greg Jacob, a former Marine Corps officer and policy director for the Service Women's Action Network. "We see registration as another step forward in terms of equality and fairness."
This doesn't mean that people should be worried about receiving a draft letter however, as there is no national crisis making a military draft necessary. A poll conducted at Quinnipiac University recently determined U.S. citizens would be against a military draft by a large margin.
"The American people lost confidence in the draft as a means of raising an army when it ceased to require equal sacrifice from everyone that was eligible to serve," said Bernard Rostker, a former director of the Selective Service System and the author of "I Want You! The Evolution of the All-Volunteer Force" according to the Associated Press.
For the last 40 years, joining the military has been conducted on a volunteer basis, and women have become a huge part since. Approximately 15 percent of the nearly 1.5 million service members on active duty are women and 280,000 women served in Iraq.
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