Why Switzerland Was Right to Reject a Draft for Women

A country that knows what real war looks like understands why drafting women crosses a line.

Last month, on November 30, Swiss voters overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to bring women into the national draft. Switzerland requires all men to serve. It has for generations. And I don’t think they’re wrong to keep it that way. The country’s neutrality is legendary, but its defense model is sober: prepare your citizens well in the remote event that the unthinkable arrives.

You can see the wisdom of that choice in any real warzone. In Ukraine, a handful of women served in infantry roles, but it was rare. Commanders didn’t like it. Most women gravitated toward frontline medical positions—stabilization points tucked just behind the zero line. They were still inside the blast radius, still under drones and artillery, but they weren’t the ones absorbing the worst of those suicidal infantry assaults.

The few women who did fight on the zero line left a deeper imprint on the men around them. I remember one case: a woman killed in an assault, her body recovered by her squadmates. I asked them what it was like to lose her. They didn’t give a political answer. They didn’t quote equality or rights. One of them shrugged and said, “Yeah… it somehow hurts worse. She shouldn’t have been here, but she was courageous for coming.”

That sentence captures a truth modern discourse keeps trying to deny. The psychological impact of women dying in close combat is real. It hits men harder than any intersectional theorist wants to admit. And that’s a good thing. If we ever reach the point where the death of a woman in a trench feels no different from the death of a man, then whatever civilizing instinct we have left will be gone. At that point, we’re not a society defending itself; we’re a species numbed into barbarism.

None of this diminishes the courage of the women who serve. But a draft is not a monument to individual heroism. It is a national decision about who a society is willing to coerce into absorbing the worst tasks a country can assign. And for all our modern ideals, every nation that still knows what war feels like draws the same line Switzerland just reaffirmed: men go first.

Even in an era of drones, that line holds. Technology can blunt some of the ugliness of war, but it can’t replace the basic arithmetic of holding ground. You still need bodies in trenches, people to clear buildings, hands to drag the wounded, and enough mass to stall an enemy advance. Even if unmanned systems spare future generations from some of the worst jobs, the logic remains: if a nation has enough men to fight, it shouldn’t be drafting women.

Ukraine taught me a strange mix of lessons about gender. When the full invasion began, women were allowed to leave the country. Men ages eighteen to fifty-nine were ordered to stay and fight. Was it ideal? No. But compared to the alternative—forcing women into a war launched overwhelmingly by men—it was a far better compromise. A society that still understands limits will protect women from the obligations it cannot escape itself.

War exposes what a culture truly believes. Ukraine’s mobilization policy made one priority clear: preserve your ability to rebuild. Women carry that burden disproportionately in ways no conscription law can neutralize. And for all the moral grandstanding in peaceful capitals, the societies staring at extinction rarely argue about gender parity in their casualty lists. When the stakes rise to national survival, the instinct is ancient: men fight first.

Humanity is a word invented by a species ashamed of its history, yet even in that history, you can still see a thread of restraint. We’ve managed, for the most part, to keep women out of the wars that men—not women—have started. That isn’t chauvinism. It’s an acknowledgment of biology, psychology, and the emotional architecture of a community under threat.

Switzerland’s vote wasn’t regressive; it was honest. A nation looked at the hardest question a democracy can face and chose not to expand the circle of people it is willing to force into uniform when the air raid sirens start. In a century that promises more instability, not less, that kind of clarity is worth preserving.

You can engineer a smarter missile or a cheaper drone. You can’t engineer your way out of human nature. Switzerland understood that. More countries should.