I did time for refusing the draft. This new law won't work. | Your Turn

As of December 2026, young men will no longer be required to register with the Selective Service System (SSS) for a possible military draft, or report to the SSS each time they change their address. Instead, the SSS will try to register them all “automatically” on the basis of other federal databases.

The “self-registration” system in effect since 1980 has been a failure. Fewer than 40% of the men who turned 18 in 2023 registered with the SSS by the end of the year. Nobody tells the SSS when they move, or even knows they’re supposed to. The database of potential draftees’ names and addresses is so incomplete and inaccurate that it would be less than useless for a draft.

Draft registration resisters could potentially make reactivation of a draft unfeasible. We should thank them for their service in countering military adventurism.

Growing awareness of the failure of draft registration has led to proposals to abolish the SSS. Repeated bipartisan efforts have attempted to repeal the Military Selective Service Act. The most recent push came May 14. It has the support of a diverse coalition of anti-war, religious, feminist and civil liberties organizations. But rather than admitting failure, Congress gave the SSS a do-over.

To save their jobs, staff of the SSS came up with a proposal to use information collected for other purposes by other federal agencies to try to register young men automatically. Congress approved this scheme in December as part of a package of amendments to the annual defense bill, without any hearings or debate.

I refused to register for the draft

Trying to register young men automatically won’t produce a list that’s fit for the purpose of reliably and provably delivering induction orders. But the fiction that a draft is always available as a fallback enables Congress, the president and the Pentagon to plan for and commit the U.S. to larger, longer, less popular wars, without having to worry about whether enough Americans will be willing to fight those wars.

The new law authorizing automatic draft registration grants the SSS unprecedented power to require any other federal agency to share any information that the SSS thinks might help identify or locate potential draftees. I can find no precedent for such broad and unrestricted data-gathering authority. Even if a draft isn’t activated, the SSS database will be vulnerable to abuse and weaponization.

If a draft is activated, the SSS will have the same difficulty enforcing induction orders that it has had since 1980 enforcing orders to register – but the unwillingness of young people to be drafted won’t become visible until after the country is militarily overcommitted.

I was one of only 20 nonregistrants prosecuted in the 1980s before enforcement of the registration law was abandoned. I was convicted and spent four and a half months in a federal prison camp from 1983-1984. Only those whose public statements could be used to prove that our refusal to register was “knowing and willful” were even considered for prosecution. Show trials of outspoken draft registration resisters proved counterproductive, and nobody has been prosecuted since 1986.

A draft enables military overconfidence

Draft registration is part of “readiness” to activate a draft. The SSS is required by law to maintain contingency plans for both a general draft of young men and a Health Care Personnel Delivery System for men and women up to age 45.

Preparedness for a draft enables military overconfidence, even when a draft isn’t imminent. Keeping conscription on a hair trigger, like keeping nuclear weapons on a hair trigger, allows these weapons to be used as part of the arsenal of U.S. military and diplomatic threats.

The so-called automatic draft registration will inevitably fail, just as self-registration has failed. But the sooner automatic draft registration is recognized as a failure, the sooner U.S. war plans will have to be modified to remove misguided reliance on a draft as a fallback option.

Meanwhile, the White House is reviewing regulations to implement the change that is set to happen at the end of the year.

Asked whether the war against Iran might lead to a draft, the White House press secretary on March 8 said that President Donald Trump "wisely does not remove options off of the table." That leaves it up to Congress to take the draft off the table as a policy option for any president by repealing the Military Selective Service Act.

Now is not the time to step up preparations for a military draft.

— Edward Hasbrouck, California

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