Congress quietly moves US closer to military draft

A provision in this year’s NDAA will require the Selective Service System (SSS) to find a way to make registering for the draft automatic instead of letting 18-year-old males sign up themselves, which is current practice.

The SSS would have a year to try to construct a list of all potential draftees in the U.S. by pooling information from other Federal databases. “Automatic” draft registration will start a year after the 2026 NDAA is signed into law, unless the Selective Service is repealed before then.

This doesn’t mean that a draft is being activated right away, or that those registered will be sent induction orders — although preparing to do so is the sole purpose of making this list. This will, however, be the largest change in Selective Service law since 1980, and will move the U.S. closer to activation of a draft than at any time in the last half century.

To be sure, “automatic” registration is a response to a growing recognition that the current system is an abject failure in the face of pervasive noncompliance.

Few young men register voluntarily with the SSS, and almost none of them report their new addresses to the SSS each time they move. As a result, the current database is so incomplete and inaccurate that it would be “less than useless” for an actual draft, according to Bernard Rostker, who was Director of the Selective Service System from 1979-1981, testifying in 2019.The obvious congressional response would be to end the registration program and abolish the Selective Service System as a failure and unfit for its stated purpose, even if one supports a draft.

But neither Democrats nor Republicans seem willing to let go of their fantasies of a ready-to-go draftee list, which will allow them to plan for endless, unlimited wars without having to worry about whether enough Americans will be willing to fight them. 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. Both have broad bipartisan support.

The idea of “automatic” draft registration originated within the SSS during the Biden Administration and was introduced in Congress in 2024 by a Democrat. But a database-driven process aligns perfectly with Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and its penchant for automated aggregation, matching, and use of data originally collected for unrelated purposes.

“Automatic” draft registration won’t make a draft any easier to administer or enforce. “Garbage-in, garbage-out” merging of lists compiled for other purposes will result in a list of potential draftees and their mailing addresses that’s just as incomplete and inaccurate as the current one.

The draft still isn’t a feasible option, and abolishing the SSS remains the only realistic course of action. The lesson of the last forty-five years of draft registration, and of the quiet but persistent noncompliance by generations of potential draftees, is that young Americans want to make their own choices of which wars, if any, they will fight. We should thank them for their service in countering military adventurism. We’ll need to keep reminding military planners that calling draft registration “automatic” won’t make young people submit to a draft without resistance.

If a draftee doesn’t report for induction as ordered, the SSS will have no way to prove whether they did so “knowingly and willfully” or whether they didn’t get the message, aren’t actually subject to the draft, or assumed the induction order was a scam. They will be able to ignore induction orders with impunity until the SSS either tricks them into signing for a certified letter or sends FBI agents door to door to deliver induction orders.

The SSS “already knows who needs to register, supporters contend”, according to one report on the House-Senate conference. That’s not true. Being able to deliver an induction notice by provable means requires a current postal address to which to send a certified letter. This isn’t necessarily contained in any current Federal database.

U.S. citizens — other than those under court supervision after being convicted of crimes, and men 18-26 required to report changes of address to the SSS — aren’t normally required to report to any government agency when they change their address. The address in a Social Security record may be the address where a person lived when they were first assigned a Social Security number. The address in IRS or other Federal records may be a parent’s address or another nominal legal residence where they aren’t normally present to sign for an induction notice or other mail.

Whether an individual is subject to the U.S. draft depends on, among other factors, their sex as assigned at birth. This is recorded, if at all, in state or foreign birth records, and not necessarily in any Federal record. State records, even if the SSS can obtain them, may now indicate a self-selected gender marker or a non-binary or non-gendered ‘X’ gender marker.

The automatic registration provision grants the SSS unprecedented authority to require any other Federal agency to provide the SSS with any information “that the Director [of the SSS] determines necessary to identify or register a person subject to registration.” But it imposes no such obligation on state governments. States that don’t want the SSS used as a conveyor belt to DOGE may respond to “automatic” draft registration by ending their sharing of data with the SSS.

Who can be drafted also depends on citizenship, immigration, and visa status. To figure out who to register “automatically”, the SSS will have to construct a database of all males ages 18-26 present in the U.S., including non-U.S. citizens, documented or undocumented, and their immigration and visa status, and keep this list constantly up to date. A comprehensive list of undocumented young adult U.S. residents, with accurate addresses for provable delivery of induction orders, won’t be easy to construct.

But even an error-filled and incomplete version of such a list would be highly vulnerable to abuse by other Federal agencies that could obtain it from the SSS.

The “automatic” registration process will be intrusive and error-prone. The burden of information collection and the potential for weaponization of the list will be greatest for already vulnerable transgender, non-binary, and immigrant youth. These are the people who the SSS is likely to misgender, misregister, and/or need to interrogate individually to fill in gaps in current Federal data.

Potential draftees will be required to provide personal information on demand of the SSS — a telling provision which wouldn’t be needed if they could actually be identified and located “automatically.” Since it’s impossible to tell which messages are actually from the SSS, identity thieves and other scammers will undoubtedly step up their use of fraudulent messages purporting to be from the SSS as a way to trick recipients into providing personal information or visiting phishing sites.

Keeping the draft on a hair-trigger isn’t a fait accompli. The final version of the NDAA has to be approved by the Senate and signed into law (likely this week). Then Congress has the next year, before the “automatic” registration program is scheduled to start, to recognize that a draft based on any list of potential conscripts would be widely resisted and unenforceable, repeal the Military Selective Service Act, and remove the draft from the U.S. policy arsenal.