Resistance News

Latest updates (background and FAQs; updates from my blog)

The Draft, Draft Registration, Draft Resistance, and "Selective Service"

FAQs on military conscription and compulsory national service from the National Resistance Committee and Resistance News

"A modern-day draft, if marketed carefully and cleverly, could foster patriotism via the investment of every family in the nation. A greater involvement of the population to include National Service could reach every social demographic within the U.S."

(Recommendations from the Selective Service System to the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service, December 2017)



[Front ranks of the West Coast mobilization against draft registration on Market St. in San Francisco, 22 March 1980. Photo by Chris Booth for Resistance News.]

What's the status of the draft, draft registration, and drafting women or requiring women to register for the draft?

There's been a lot of talk about the draft lately, but most of the public discussion of the issue has been by people unfamiliar with the history of the draft, draft registration, and draft resistance since the end of the Vietnam-era draft in 1975. This Web site will give you some of the facts that the Selective Service System won't tell you, that most reporters don't realize, and that most politicians don't want to admit.

Back in the 1980s, the US government put me and eight other then-young men in prison for refusing to agree to fight on the side of the people who would later become the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

Now a national commission appointed by Congress and the President is has recommended that Congress should try to extend draft registration to women. But Congress has a choice: It has before it bills either to expand draft registration to women, or to end draft registration entirely.

As I told the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service when i was invited to testify at one of their hearings in April 2019, "Any proposal that includes a compulsory element is a naïve fantasy unless it includes a credible enforcement plan and budget."

Anyone who thinks they can wave their cheerleader's baton and magically make every 18-25 year old woman in the USA sign up to kill or be killed on command ignores both the lessons of the history of draft registration since 1980 and the likelihood of massive resistance by young women.

Massive, spontaneous, unorganized grassroots noncompliance has rendered draft registration of men unenforceable since its resumption (after a five-year post-Vietnam hiatus) in 1980, despite a brief and unsuccessful (for the government) round of show trials in the 1980s.

Noncompliance will render any attempt to get women to register equally unenforceable. Women can (and some do) fight. But women also can (and many will) resist. There is certainly no reason to think that young women will be more willing to agree to be drafted than young men have been.

I asked the members of the National Commission, "How much are you prepared to spend, and how much of a police state are you prepared to set up, to round up the millions of current draft registration law violators or enforce a draft?" I got no answer, but Congress and the public need to demand one.

Anti-war and anti-draft activists are not alone in telling the National Commission and Congress that draft registration has failed. Even the former director of the Selective Service System who manages the start-up of the current registration system in 1980 has testified that the current registration database is "less than useless" and the Congress should end draft registration and repeal the Military Selective Service Act, rather than trying to expand it to young women as well as young men.

Proponents of draft registration need to face the facts, and recognize that, whether they like it or not, draft registration has failed. It's long past time to end draft registration entirely and abolish the Selective Service System.

Whereas, the Selective Service Act requires male U.S. citizens between 18 and 25 years to register with the U.S. government for potential military service, aids the government in its instrumentation of war; Therefore Be It Resolved that Veterans For Peace calls on the government of the United States to immediately revoke the Selective Service Act.

[Resolution approved by vote of the membership of Veterans for Peace, 2012]

We oppose both the draft and draft registration, for women or for men. We support legislation to end draft registration and abolish the Selective Service System; we support continued resistance to draft registration as long as it remains the law; and we support resistance to any attempt to reinstate the draft or compulsory national service.

There many reasons to oppose the draft, draft registration, and other planning and preparations for a draft such as contingency planning for the Health Care Personnel Delivery System (conscription of health care workers).

Some older people conceptualize opposition to the draft as an effort to protect young people against being drafted. But I think that this framing of the issue is rooted in unconscious ageism, and should be reversed: it is young people who, by their noncompliance with draft registration, have prevented a draft and thereby limited the U.S. government's ability to wage war and protected all of us, including older people, from even wider wars. There have been wars without a draft, but it is the perceived availability of the draft as the ultimate fallback that enables politicans and military officers to plan for endless, unlimited wars. Without a draft, war panning and warmaking is limited to wars that people can be induced to "volunteer" to fight.

The success of resistance to draft registration -- not lobbying, not protest, but noncompliance on a massive scale, spontaneous, almost entirely unorganized, and continued by cohort after cohort of young people for four decades -- has been one of the greatest (although almost entirely unrecognized) victories of nonviolent mass direct action in the Reagan years and after. But the full potential benefit of that victory by young people in protecting us all from war will not be realized until draft registration is ended, the Selective Service System and its cointingency planning for conscription is abolished, and -- most important of all -- there is public acknowledgement and recognition by politicians that a draft is not an option because it would be so widely resisted as to be unenforceable. Only then will military planning begin to be limited by the unavailability, even as a last resort, of the draft.

I don't want to be drafted. What should I do?

What if I'm not a U.S. citizen?

Almost all men between ages 18 and 26 who live in the U.S., including undocumented people, are supposed to register, regardless of citizenship or immigration status. This includes non-U.S. citizens, dual citizens, and undocumented U.S. residents. The exceptions are certain non-U.S. citizens who are in the U.S. as tourists or on "nonimmigrant" visas and therefore asre not considered "residents". The most severe administrative penalties for not registering with the Selective Service System are those against men who are not U.S. citizens: If you lived in the U.S. at any time between your 18th and 26th birthdays, but you didn't register with the Selective Service System, you could be deemed ineligible for naturalization as a U.S. citizen. However, the Selective Service System says that: