Preparing for the Possibility of a Draft Without Panic
Conscription — a practice most Americans believe should be relegated to the dustbin of history — has returned as an uncomfortable topic of conversation among U.S. allies and adversaries alike. This has generated concern and even conspiracy theories among American voters. But a candid discussion would be healthier. The fact is, if the United States hopes to deter or defeat a Chinese attack on Taiwan, it should be prepared to effectively implement a draft. To be clear, this is a solution of last resort, but one that may be necessary.
Right now, U.S. mobilization has not been tested in decades. As a result, current ideas about how it would function are woefully out of date. Being prepared to execute a draft requires buy-in from across all branches of government — and society writ large.
At a minimum, the executive branch and Congress should actively pursue a more proactive approach. The National Security Council should take the lead on mobilization exercises. Congress should also get out ahead on expanding Selective Service System registration to all Americans between the ages of 18–25, thereby preventing future legal challenges to the current all-male registration system when time may be of the essence. Policymakers should also consider the skills that would be required in a future conflict and how the nation would sustain its economy while maintaining the human capital required in large-scale combat operations. Finally, the professional all-volunteer force should consider and train for a possibility in which they would have to absorb conscript forces into their ranks.
Changing Times
The world has watched as Russia and Ukraine wrestle to align operational requirements with social and political considerations. In August 2016, Norway implemented a universal conscription model — including, for the first time, a requirement for women. Sweden — which introduced an all-volunteer model in 2010 — reauthorized conscription in 2017. Lithuania reintroduced conscription in 2015 after removing it in 2008 and Latvia reintroduced conscription in January 2024 after removing it in 2006. France, which ended conscription in 1996, and Germany, which ended conscription in 2011, have recently begun political debates about the potential for future conscription. In a historic and controversial move, the Israeli government passed a law to conscript ultra-Orthodox men for the first time in history. The widespread resurgence of conscription across the globe has started to raise the question among Americans: Could a draft ever happen again in the United States? What would that look like?
A recent proposal to automate Selective Service System registration for men on their 18th birthdays coupled with debate that the current all-male registration should be expanded to include all Americans has generated public rumors that the nation is on a wartime footing. These concerns are unfounded, but Americans’ confusion and anxiety over the use of the draft is understandable. The nation’s last experience with the draft — the Vietnam War — was atypical and continues to generate controversial questions. Was the threat existential to America’s existence, requiring the level of conflict necessary to use a draft? Was the draft implemented equitably across race and social class? For many, the answer to both questions was “no.” Any use of a draft in a future conflict will require addressing the errors of Vietnam.
For several reasons, the United States actively decided to move from a mixed force of conscripts (draftees) and professional service members to the all-volunteer force in 1973. The all-volunteer force provides a smaller but more professionalized force than its predecessor, increasing the standards of those who serve across metrics including mental aptitude, physical strength, training, and unit cohesion.
Yet just because the United States transitioned to volunteers does not mean that the nation would never need to call upon a draft in the future. The United States may still need to mobilize forces in a conflict that poses an existential threat to the nation’s existence. Existing analysis indicates that the opening salvos of a conflict over Taiwan would generate U.S. casualty rates not seen since the two World Wars. In considering the possibility of a draft in support of a future Taiwan scenario, it is worth examining the history of the draft in the United States and the circumstances under which a draft was considered and enacted.
Prior to World War I, conscription was the exception — not the norm — for the U.S. military. For the first 140 years of American history, the peacetime military was a barebones institution, relying on mobilization of state militia forces to expand to meet threats and then quickly demobilized again. There was no large standing peacetime army. There were significant limits to the use of militia forces in the 19th century — namely, federalized militia forces could not be used outside the territorial bounds of the United States. Such constraints emphasize historical debates regarding the proper use of the military beyond its geographical borders and the nation’s role in the world — questions that were highlighted during the Spanish-American War, when the American military was deployed overseas for the first time.
The World Wars differed from anything the United States had previously experienced. War in Europe was not fought on the fringes — it crawled across the entirety of the continent. The introduction of trench warfare, chemical weapons, and a terrible revolution in munitions churned through men at a terrifying pace. Britain and France could not sustain their forces through recruitment alone and both resorted to conscription. For their part, American leaders sought an answer to mobilization that would provide the necessary manpower to prevail on the battlefield while maintaining domestic interests. Enter the 1917 Selective Service Act.
The priority for the architects of the 1917 Selective Service Act was designing a system to produce the required manpower with a selection mechanism that was as equitable as possible. They further prioritized making allowances for local involvement in a federal process and weighing competing priorities from different states, economic sectors, and societal interest groups. The challenge then, as it has been throughout U.S. history, was balancing the conflicting social mores of personal freedom and collective equality that are both foundational to the American experiment. In total, 2.8 million men were drafted in World War I.
When Adolf Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, the U.S. Army had fewer than 200,000 soldiers, a fraction of the more than 4 million serving at the end of World War I. As the page turned on another grim chapter in history, the United States once again found itself without a sufficient mobilization capacity to meet the operational demands of protracted conflict with high casualty rates. In the case of World War II, Congress moved to enact a draft before the United States was forced to join the war. This allowed for open debate on the parameters of conscription across American society before the constraints of mobilization were imminently necessary. Besides resulting in a more equitable application of conscription than in World War I, the peacetime draft prepared the nation to respond swiftly and decisively to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Over the course of the conflict, more than 19 million men were drafted.
Americans tend to look at conscription during the world wars through the lens of nostalgia, with the perception that these conflicts were more pure expressions of good versus evil than in recent conflicts. But the reality is that conscription was controversial among contemporaries. In World War I, 15 percent of men refused to register with Selective Service and a further 12 percent of those drafted deserted the military after induction. In World War II, nearly 375,000 men evaded the draft.
During the Cold War, the U.S. desire to deter Soviet aggression prompted political and military leaders to reinstate a draft in 1948. Even at the height of the Korean War, the manpower need was never so great as it was during the World Wars. More men were granted exemptions for education and dependence, especially in the 1960s interwar period. As time passed with minimal resistance to a peacetime draft, it became the new normal. However, the burden of service was no longer shared by all American men, as many in the upper and middle classes could avoid it with relative ease. When the demand for and deployment of conscripts increased as the United States entrenched itself in Vietnam, resistance to the draft grew rapidly.
In the years since the transition to the all-volunteer force, any discussion of reintroducing conscription has generated fear of returning to the Vietnam-era draft. However, current circumstances more closely mirror the political state of the nation in the mid-1910s than the 1960s. Today, the United States is as far from the last use of conscription during the Vietnam War as the drafters of the 1917 Selective Service Act were from the Civil War. While the United States has been involved in a number of conflicts in this time and has taken an ever-growing role in world affairs, domestic concerns are remarkably similar and the challenge of consensus-building in Congress is equally difficult. What is different is the existence of the all-volunteer force — an advantage that the U.S. military did not have preceding both World Wars. This offers a more professionalized force than existed before the World Wars and increases the threshold at which the conscription of citizens would be a politically viable option.
Contemporary Considerations
Set against this history, current debates about potential uses of conscription in peacetime fuel fears that the United States is on a path to a modern draft. At the same time, some commentators have recommended conscription as a solution to the military’s recruiting troubles or as a way to reinvigorate civic duty among an apathetic American populace.
Yet the threshold to execute a draft is high — as it should be. Conscription has never had a political constituency in Congress. It remains a serious, costly, and potentially deadly tool meant to protect Americans from the extreme consequences of an existential threat. Furthermore, a draft cannot happen overnight. Before a draft can be enacted, Congress would have to pass an amendment to the Military Selective Service Act reauthorizing induction, which would allow those registered with the Selective Service System to be conscripted into the military. Age-old debates over deferments, exemptions, service time commitments, and conscientious objector parameters, as well as newer debates like whether women should be included in the draft, will need to be hashed out. Assuming Congress has successfully amended the Military Selective Service Act, it is up to the president to call for a draft to begin. Once the president has authorized a draft, the Selective Service System must expand from four regional offices to 56 state and local offices nationwide and begin activating thousands of local draft boards.
All of these steps would be conducted under the full scrutiny of the American public, the media, and U.S. allies and partners — and will be visible to America’s adversaries. For the very reason that conscription is the nation’s option of last resort and will unfold before the eyes of the world, the mechanisms that oversee and administer the draft should be ready to work if they are needed. This makes recent legislative moves intended to shore up the Selective Service System all the more important.
We recently conducted a year-long study examining the potential challenges the United States may face in executing a draft, given that the systems and processes required to do so have not been stress-tested in over 50 years. And there are plenty of them: the potential for legal objections to the all-male registration system; the current rates of ineligibility for military service; the current strain on Military Entrance Processing Stations to meet steady-state requirements; a lack of data regarding expected exemption, deferment, or conscientious objector requests; a lack of general understanding across society of what may be required of alternative service for conscientious objectors; and a lack of training among the professionalized military on how best to absorb and fight alongside conscripts in the future. Each of these challenges is worth examining and rectifying for the sake of strengthening the nation’s ability to defend itself without advocating for a draft. The nation’s ability to credibly signal its potential to endure and prevail in a protracted conflict can serve as a deterrent to future conflict provocation by would-be adversaries.
As our research revealed, time will be of the essence in any conflict that would require a draft. Many of the challenges listed above can be reckoned with right now — saving valuable time when it will matter most. Congress can prevent drawn out legal battles regarding the constitutionality of an all-male draft by addressing the question of Selective Service System registration for all Americans between the ages of 18–25. Regular whole-of-government exercises testing the nation’s mobilization capacity can expose unforeseen logistical challenges and address them before they are stressed. And the Department of Defense, along with individual services, can study how conscripted forces would be trained, equipped, and absorbed within the context of the all-volunteer force.
Conclusion
The all-volunteer force was always intended to be supported by a stand-by draft. That being said, it should be understood — by political leaders, military leaders, and, perhaps more importantly, by the American public — that conscription is and must necessarily be the option of last resort. The political will that would be necessary to move the needle on any issue involving conscription is nearly insurmountable. As such, it is likely that the only circumstance where the reintroduction of conscription would be even plausible is a crisis of the highest order — the very same motivation that is spurring Ukraine, Taiwan, and many others to reexamine their conscription systems.
Taren Sylvester is a research assistant in the Military, Veterans, and Society Program at the Center for a New American Security.
Katherine Kuzminski is deputy director of studies and director of the Military, Veterans, and Society Program at the Center for a New American Security.
Image: U.S. National Archives
