Doubling down on their recent war-game exercises and report on the (un)readiness of the U.S. to activate a military draft, Taren Sylvester and Katherine Kuzminski of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) have a new article in War on the Rocks, “Preparing for the Possibility of a Draft Without Panic,” laying out why they think the U.S. needs to prepare for a draft in order to be able to win an all-out war with China over Taiwan.
CNAS and War on the Rocks like to describe themselves as “realists”. But their arguments for stepped-up planning and preparation for a draft are strikingly unrealistic, in at least four respects.
First, Sylvester and Kuzminski – like the Selective Service System and the Department of Justice – entirely ignore whether, much less how or at what cost, a draft could be enforced.
The practical difficulty of enforcing a draft in the face of widespread evasion and resistance was the Achilles heel of the last U.S. draft, and has to be central to any realistic plan for a future draft.
You can’t just wave a magic cheerleader’s baton and get every would-be draftee, male or female, to march down to the induction office to ship out for Taiwan, Ukraine, Palestine, or points unknown. Like it or not, many young people won’t go voluntarily. If they would, a draft wouldn’t be needed.
As I said in my testimony to the National Commisison on Military, National, and Public Service (NCMNPS) in 2019, “Any proposal [for military or civilian national service] that includes a compulsory element is a naïve fantasy unless it includes a credible enforcement plan and budget… 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?”
Struggling to enforce draft registration and call-up orders, Ukraine has resorted to roving press gangs snatching suspected draft dodgers off the streets. Are similar enforcement tactics a realistic option in the U.S.? If not, what enforcement mechanisms are the realists contemplating? Neither the CNAS nor the NCMNPS reports say a word about enforcement of draft registration or induction orders.
Second, CNAS wrongly conflates an attack on Taiwan with an existentential threat to the U.S.
This discredited domino theory was made explicit in the scenario they used for their mobilization exercise: “The teams were first presented with a potential crisis scenario in which the PRC conducted a large-scale invasion of Taiwan… The teams were then provided with a breaking update: the PRC had effectively invaded Taiwan, and Congress and the president had enacted the draft… After the exercise, participants were provided with a scenario update: having observed that the United States was mobilizing in defense of Taiwan, the PRC attacks a location in southern California between San Diego and Los Angeles.”
China might indeed, as this scenario suggests, see U.S. military mobilization as threatening. But that’s a reason to retard U.S. mobilization, not to accelerate it. The scenario most feared by many people in Taiwan is that U.S. sabre-rattling might derail the chnaces for diplomacy and provoke a Chinese attack. Even if China is provoked, there’s no realistic reason to think that China – or, lest another spectre be raised, Russia – has any interest, ability, or likelihood to invade the U.S. A desire to be prepared to defend the U.S. is not a reason to prepare to send U.S. troops overseas, or to maintain readiness to conscript them if they don’t volunteer to do so.
CNAS may support increased U.S. military engagement in Taiwan to advance what they see as U.S. interests. But it’s disingenuous to pretend that this has anything to do with defending the U.S. homeland.
Third, despite the genuinely existential risk of triggering nuclear war, CNAS and other advocates for heightened readiness for massive U.S. military mobilization, including preparedness for a draft, entirely ignore the nuclear implications of mobilization.
Their stated assumption is that, “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.”
Foreign leaders aren’t fools. They can see that any attempt to activate a draft in the U.S., even if would-be draftees are registered “automatically”, would be widely resisted, unworkable, and unenforceable, even if proponents of a draft are reluctant to recognize that reality.
Given that the U.S. has, and is unlikely to have, any credible capacity either to mobilize a conscript army to fight a foreign war or to prevail in a war with China over Taiwan, it’s unrealistic to expect gearing up for a draft to have any deterrent effect.
Fourth, the CNAS theorists fantasize that if only we had a draft available as a “fallback”, the US could “defeat a Chinese attack on Taiwan.”
U.S. special forces are already deployed on the Kinmen Islands, just a few miles off the coast of mainland China in the Taiwan Strait.
But given the realities of supply lines and numbers, with or without a draft, a U.S.-China war over Taiwan – 5,000 miles from the U.S. mainland, with a population of more than 20 million people – would be another unwinnable quagmire for the U.S., like those in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan, not a winnable war or another easy invasion and conquest of a small nearby island like Grenada. It’s not realistic to think that waves of U.S. conscripts would be able to push Chinese invaders off Taiwan.
Any attempt to make an all-out war with China in Asia or the Western Pacific thinkable, to imagine that such a war would be winnable or that China could be defeated without nuclear omnicide, or to use a draft to prop up that thinking, isn’t military or strategic realism. It’s delusional – and dangerous.
If a total war with China or another great power would require more troops than the U.S. has available, and a draft isn’t a realistic option, the realistic course is to plan and prepare for only those wars that people would volunteer to fight. If that requires changes in unrealistically ambitious U.S. war plans, it’s time to start making those changes in strategic thinking and military policy, not making futile efforts to resuscitate the paper tiger of the failed Selective Service System and its sham preparedness for conscription.
From this more genuinely realistic perspective, enactment of the Selective Service Repeal Act (S. 4881) would be not just a step away from the draft as a fallback source of more troops than would volunteer, but a step back from the nuclear and conventional total-war brink toward de-escalation and diplomacy.
Edward Hasbrouck maintains the Resisters.info website and publishes the “Resistance News” newsletter. He was imprisoned in 1983-1984 for organizing resistance to draft registration.
