Explanation - National Service: Women in Combat

By: Jaya Nayar

Introduction

Before getting into the substance of the PIC, a PIC is a plan-inclusive-counterplan. That means it’s a type of counterplan that does the aff, except it excludes a certain part of the aff.

Check out our card file here. 

The PIC

So what’s the women in combat PIC? What this PIC would do is either do the entirety of the aff but exclude women from the draft or it would do the entirety of the aff but take out all women from the military (this would also mean excluding women from the draft). The net benefit to the PIC is that women are frequently sexually harassed in the military.

A few notes on strategy: if debaters were to run Version 1 (only exclude women from the draft), they may run into a few problems. Women will be in the military anyway, so you don’t solve for your impact. However, the reason why this PIC is strategic is because you could argue there’s a difference between women who are forced to go into the military and women who voluntarily choose to. If debaters were to run Version 2 (exclude women from the draft and take them out of the military), they may also run into a few problems. It’s pretty hard to argue that women shouldn’t be allowed to go into the military at all because you’ll get into a progress (in terms of equality) vs. sexual harassment debate, which could be difficult to win.

Given these issues, Version 1 may be more strategic. While debaters may run into equality issues, it’s comparatively a lot easier to win that being excluded from the draft doesn’t really affect women’s status and that it’s good to not force women into the military given their disproportionately high rates of sexual assault.

AFF Answers

The aff answers versus the PIC are probably stronger than the PIC itself given the right evidence. Below are the best arguments from the file and strategy on how to use them.

1. Most, if not all, PICs out of women will have sexual assault as their only net benefit. The Brooks evidence in the file makes the strong argument that women are also disproportionately sexually assaulted in other venues, like college, but that doesn’t mean they should be excluded from places like college. This argument is especially convincing because it makes the PIC seem much more unreasonable and the arguments about progress in terms of equality much more reasonable.

2. The arguments under “combatting sexism” are good on the question of why including women in the draft is key to equality. They argue that it doesn’t make sense to have everyone serve except for women because that’ll just harm their status as citizens and cause them to be less respected, potentially increasing impacts like sexual assault in society more broadly.

There are also case specific answers (i.e. anti-militarism or civic engagement AC) debaters can read. They generally make these core arguments, but more specific to the subject matter of the 1AC.