US activists are mobilising against plans for automatic registration of potential draftees, warning of expanding militarisation and surveillance.
In the latest Broken Rifle blog, Edward Hasbrouck examines how the proposal could strengthen draft preparedness, enable data misuse, and sustain future wars.
This year the U.S. government is preparing for the largest change in its system of military conscription since 1980. Instead of requiring young men to put their names and addresses on a list to be used in the event of a draft, the government plans to try to register potential draftees “automatically” by using data from other Federal agencies, starting in December 2026.
Trying to register young men “automatically” won’t produce a list that can reliably and provably deliver induction orders. But it will produce a database that’s vulnerable to misuse for unrelated purposes. And maintaining the fiction that a draft is always available as a “fallback” will enable Congress and the Pentagon to continue to plan for and commit the U.S. to larger, longer wars, without having to worry about whether enough Americans will be willing to fight those wars.
The U.S. Is Always Planning And Preparing For A Draft.
There have no involuntary inductions into the U.S. military since 1973. But the Selective Service System (SSS) is required by law to be ready to activate a general draft of young men, and/or a draft of men and women in health care professions, whenever Congress and the President give the order.
Since 1980, all male U.S. citizens or residents have been required to register with the SSS when they reach age 18, and report to the SSS each time they change their address until they reach age 26.
Noncompliance is the norm. Fewer than 40% of men who turned 18 in 2023 registered with the SSS. Enforcement of the registration requirement was abandoned in 1986 after just 20 show trials of nonregistrants like me whose public statements could be used to prove that our refusal was “knowing and willful”. Those who quietly ignored the registration law found that there was safety in silence as well as safety in numbers.
The SSS database is so incomplete and inaccurate that it would be “less than useless” for a draft, according to testimony in 2019 by a former head of the SSS. “Absolutely nobody” tells the SSS when they move, as the Chair of the House Armed Services Committee noted at a hearing in 2021.
As the futility of draft registration has become more widely recognized, support for abolition of the SSS has grown. Since 2019, a bipartisan “Selective Service Repeal Act” has been introduced several times in Congress.
But rather than admitting failure, Congress decided to give the SSS a second chance. To save their jobs, SSS staff came up with a plan to try to enroll potential draftees “automatically”. Congress approved this scheme in December 2025 with no hearings or debate and little public notice.
“Automatic” Draft Registration Is A Bad Idea, And It Won’t Work.
If a draft is activated, the SSS will have the same difficulty enforcing induction orders that it has had enforcing orders to register. But the database compiled by the SSS will be vulnerable to abuse and weaponization, especially against transgender, nonbinary, and immigrant youth who are already under attack by the Trump regime.
The new law grants the SSS unprecedented authority to require any other Federal agency to hand over any information the SSS thinks might help identify or locate potential draftees.
As with the new conscription law in Germany, the SSS has also been given the authority to order potential draftees to provide the information needed to register them. But that can’t be done unless the SSS already knows an individual exists and where to deliver a questionnaire.
No Federal agency has the information needed to find all potential draftees. U.S. citizens aren’t normally required to report to any government agency when they change their residence.
Whether an individual could be drafted depends on sex as assigned at birth (regardless of current gender) and immigration and visa status. Obviously, no Federal agency has a complete list of undocumented immigrants (who are subject to the draft regardless of their citizenship) and their current addresses. But the SSS now has a mandate to try to compile one.
“Automatic” draft registration probably wasn’t intended as a data grab for Trump’s so-called “Department Of Government Efficiency” (DOGE). But DOGE already has access to the SSS database, and the SSS is already seeking expanded authority to share its database with other U.S. and foreign law enforcement agencies for immigration enforcement and other purposes.
Draft Registration Supports Militarism, Even If A Draft Isn’t Likely.
Preparedness for a draft enables military over-confidence and over-commitment, 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.
Draft registration resisters have, for 45 years, prevented re-activation of a draft. This is an extraordianry although largely unnoticed victory for quiet but widespread and sustained noncooperation by young people.
This U.S. experience carries an important and empowering message for young people in countries such as Germany, where a similar effort is being made this year to get young people to sign up for a possible draft: If enough young people simply stay home and ignore demands to enroll in the conscription registry, they can stop the move towards a new draft before anyone is ordered into the military.
There’s a common and well-meaning but ageist framing of anti-draft activism as work to protect young people against being drafted. But it’s young peoople, by refusing to agree to be drafted, who are protecting us all against the larger wars that a draft makes possible. We should thank them for their service in countering military adventurism. And we should strive to be allies to them in their struggle for youth liberation, of which the struggle against age-based military conscription is one element.
A New U.S. Anti-Draft Coalition.
Asked last month whether the U.S. war against Iran would lead to a draft, Trump’s spokesperson said he “does not remove options off of the table”. That leaves it up to the anti-draft movement and Congress to take the draft off the table and out of the hands of Trump or any President.
Just days after that White House statement, a coalition of more than forty organizations issued a joint statement opposing “automatic” draft registration and supporting the Selective Service Repeal Act.
What may be most noteworthy about this new anti-draft coalition is its diversity. It includes religious and other organizations concerned about the treatment of conscientious objectors (U.S. law has a narrow definition of conscientious objection that excludes most reasons for opposing a draft), secular anti-war activists, draft resisters, feminists, and civil libertarians.
The first task for the coalition is public education. Most people didn’t begin to learn about the plan for “automatic” registration until the proposed regulations to implement the scheme – which have not yet been made public – were submitted to the White House for review at the end of March. We need to get out the word to young people that they have, as my mentor the draft registration resister and nonviolent revolutionary Dave Dellinger titled one of his books, “More Power Than We Know” to defy the SSS.
“Automatic” registration is scheduled to start in December 2026. Anti-draft activists in the U.S. have until then to head off the inevitable fiasco by getting Congress to repeal the Military Selective Service Act and end U.S. planning and preparation for a military draft.
“Automatic” draft registration will inevitably fail, just as self-registration has failed. But the sooner it is recognized as a failure, the sooner U.S. war plans will have to be modified to remove reliance on a draft as a “fallback” option.
Edward Hasbrouck is an author, independent journalist, and editor and publisher of Resisters.info, the most comprehensive source of information about the draft, draft registration, and draft resistance in the USA. He was imprisoned in 1983-1984 for “knowing and willful” refusal to register with the U.S. Selective Service System. He is a member of the War Resisters League, the Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers Guild, and the Peace and Justice Studies Association, and works with a human rights project in San Francisco.
