Americans, Shut Up about Getting Drafted

The worst argument for disengaging from the Russo-Ukrainian War

tl;dr is bringing back the draft would restrain US foreign policy, and selective service isn’t the same as the draft

Nobody’s Seriously Considering Drafting You

I’m generally a restrainer when it comes to US involvement in the Russo-Ukrainian War. I agree with people like John Mearsheimer who characterize decades of reckless US policy towards Russia as a provocation that culminated in Putin’s 2022 invasion. Nevertheless, I’m committed to being intellectually honest and therefore feel the need to briefly excise a disingenuous argument from my own side of the issue.

If you spend enough time online, you’ll inevitably encounter an extraordinarily specious argument for US disengagement from the Russo-Ukrainian War, namely the idea that it’ll result in Americans being conscripted into the armed forces and dying in Eastern Europe. The argument attempts to appeal to people’s rational self-interest and is typically presented with feigned indignation. For instance, Tucker Carlson said in an interview earlier this year:

I’ve got four draft age children. If you’re playing recklessly fast and loose with their lives, then I have a right to despise you, and I do. If you’re Nikki Haley, who’s running for president, or Ben Shapiro or half the people I see on television casually mentioning the possibility of nuclear war or sending Americans to fight in the Middle East or in any way involving us in a war that has nothing to do with prosperity and peace at home, then I have a right to call you out and be really, really offended.

This is pure theater to pander to contrarians and isn’t a serious argument about the merits or demerits of American policy vis-à-vis the Ukraine. Nobody is planning to resuscitate the draft and deploy barely trained conscripts in a high intensity war of attrition against another nuclear power. The US abolished the draft at the end of its intervention in Vietnam in 1973 and explicitly switched to an all-volunteer army. Policymakers have worked within the confines of this reality ever since, and the various US wars fought on the ground from then on have only been conducted with volunteers. When the National Security Council is discussing serious proposals, they aren’t even considering resurrecting an institution disestablished multiple generations ago that would require immense political capital to use and that would be difficult to even implement.

It would be far cheaper if America still had a draft army, but Uncle Sam has decided the political and military drawbacks outweigh the financial savings. A professionalized military is more lethal and takes far fewer casualties due to superior training; compare US losses in Vietnam (~58,000) to those in Iraq (~2,900) and Afghanistan (~2,500). Public opinion is bound to be far more ambivalent when volunteers are dying than when draftees are dying because the former choose of their own volition to take that risk and the proportion of them dying is relatively low, whereas the government coerces the latter into it, and they perish at higher rates. Hence, even though Gallup found that the percentage of people in favor of the War in Afghanistan fell below the percentage of people in favor of the Vietnam War, there wasn’t comparable political pressure from the public to withdraw from Afghanistan. America retained combat forces in Afghanistan for two decades but had to withdraw combat forces from South Vietnam after eight years because cardinal preferences dictate politics—too few people passionately opposed keeping professional servicemembers in Afghanistan for the government to feel compelled to withdraw. Thus, if you want to have a belligerent foreign policy with minimal electoral risk, reinstating conscription would be detrimental to your objectives.

Selective Service Isn’t a Draft

I already anticipate that there will be people clamoring on about the selective service system and insisting that its existence implies that the draft was never discontinued and could still be used next time America finds itself at war. This is a dubious argument at best, and there are several points to note as part of a rebuttal.

First, the selective service system in place today isn’t a draft. The selective service system exists so that if the draft were reimplemented, the US government could conscript its citizens. The US abolished the draft after the withdrawal from South Vietnam in 1973, but it didn’t end registration with selective service. When the US had a draft, men were required to serve during peacetime and were stationed outside of theaters of war, as is the case in countries with conscript armies today. Even though the US wasn’t actively fighting a war between the end of the Korean War in 1953 and the introduction of combat forces to Vietnam in 1965, men were still conscripted into the army and stationed at bases in both the homeland and overseas. It has been half a century since this practice ended in America, and there’s no indication that it’s on the verge of being revived. Although citizens technically register with the selective service system, they aren’t even drafted unlike in the years prior to 1973.

Moreover, countries that have a draft today such as Korea, Turkey, Poland, Vietnam, and Israel require citizens to set aside a period of their youth to serve in the armed forces so that they’ll be adequately trained to serve should the need arise. Korea hasn’t been to war in half a century, but virtually all of its male citizens have been through around two years of training and are officially reservists prepared to return to their role if required. This happened in both Russia and the Ukraine in 2022. Both countries’ male citizens had been trained or were being trained as conscripts when Putin launched the invasion.

If the US government wanted to deploy draftees in combat, it would have to restructure its army (and possibly the other services) as well as federal agencies, suddenly induct tens of thousands of physically and mentally unfit and undisciplined zoomers into basic training, and survive any electoral backlash engendered by the process and the ineluctable casualties that will follow from its use in a war. While at it, Congress might as well undo decades of legislation incentivizing people to volunteer, such as the post 9/11 GI bill, since there would no longer be much of a need to encourage people to sign up. Unlike countries with a draft, the US doesn’t train its citizens and would therefore be totally unprepared to use them in the event of a sudden war.

It’s also worth noting that even if the draft were reinstated, Tucker Carlson wouldn’t have to worry that all four of his kids would be at risk since even at the height of the Vietnam War, you couldn’t be drafted into combat if your sibling was already serving in the war. Therefore, draftees who had a brother in South Vietnam were instead stationed in West Germany or at a domestic base.

Some might still insist that there’s a risk of American civilians randomly being sent to die in the Donbass because, they argue, Washington would have no ability to effectively wage a war against a peer army like Russia without conscription since the number of volunteers would be insufficient. The flaw in this argument is that it ignores the elephant in the room: if Washington and Moscow have a full-scale war, being drafted should be at the bottom of your list of worries. A Russo-American war would run the risk of a strategic nuclear exchange, and this risk would be particularly acute if America were losing so badly that it felt its only conventional means of reversing its losses was mass mobilization. If there’s a decent probability of this situation playing out, the odds of America’s leaders—no matter how incompetent—choosing to roll the dice by entering a suicidal war is not high.

Beyond that, there have been absolutely no indications of the US government preparing to reinstate conscription since 2022, and there haven’t even been serious moves by Biden or Trump to intervene on the Ukraine’s behalf. When arguing against US involvement in a proxy war, it’s best to stick to arguments based on plausible risks rather than those grounded in alternative media hysteria.