Draft registration demands resistance
Reflections on Resisting Draft Registration
Some time around my eighteenth birthday, I received a letter in the mail
from the Selective Service System
informing me of my legal obligation to register for a possible future
draft. It was the fall of 2005, in the middle of the U.S.-led
occupation of Iraq that followed the 2003 invasion. I had come to
view the invasion and occupation as a war of aggression, sold to a
fearful public through lies and waged in the interest not of national
defense but of empire, or a system of military-political-economic
domination. To me, Selective Service registration was a part of this
system, and it represented a bureaucratic normalization of war and
militarism. I took one look at the letter and resolved not to comply.
The Selective Service System
is the federal agency tasked with collecting and maintaining
information on those who may at some point be subject to a draft, or
military conscription. Under U.S. law, if you’re male
(as assigned at birth) and a U.S. citizen or immigrant non-citizen,
you are legally required to
register with the Selective Service System
within 30 days of your eighteenth birthday.
Of course, the government hasn’t actually had a draft in place since the 1970s, during the Vietnam
War. And not since the 1980s, after Jimmy Carter reestablished
registration in his last year in office, has it prosecuted
anyone for not registering — a move that proved
widely unpopular.
After decades of non-enforcement and inefficiency,
even government officials who were once in charge of administering
draft registration have admitted that it has failed its stated
purpose. In the words of former Selective Service director Bernard
Rostker, registration is “less than useless.”
And yet the requirement to register remains law. Its actual value to the
government is as a recruitment tool, a sort of introduction to the
military brand that might entice actual enlistment. Having
abandoned the threat of prosecution
as an enforcement mechanism, the government instead enforces
registration through a series of backdoor channels that allow it to
circumvent due process and punish non-compliance automatically — in
effect, extrajudicially, and to a degree of severity that depends on
various arbitrary factors.
Thanks to a series of laws known as the Solomon Amendments (after the
congressman who authored them), in 1982 Selective Service registration became
a condition of eligibility for federal student loans, such that young
men applying for federal financial aid must certify on their FAFSA
forms that they have registered. In December 2020, Congress at long
last passed legislation that eliminates this condition
and while the new rule has until 2023 to take effect it is now
on course to do so by the end of 2021.
Despite this welcome change, other consequences
for failing to register remain in place, including ineligibility for
most federal employment and a patchwork of state-level penalties.
Many states require registration
as a condition of eligibility for state-level higher education
benefits, state jobs, and, perhaps most onerous of all, a driver’s
license. Others go so far as to automatically register any man
between the ages of 18 and 25 when he applies for a driver’s
license, learner’s permit, or non-driver identification.
The cowardice of the government’s strategy is breathtaking.
Rather than risk negative publicity by
actually charging non-compliers with a federal crime and according
them the rights of the accused, it threatens young men with the
prospect of not getting a college degree, since virtually no one can
afford college without loans and federal loans are the most
attractive. And not having a college degree means not being qualified
for most jobs. Then, it allows the states to have an administrative
field day with federal law, such that it applies differently to each
young man depending on where he happens to live. And in case being
economically denied access to higher education doesn’t do the
trick, you can be denied access to even more basic, everyday
necessities. If you think getting anywhere in this country without a
college degree is hard, try getting anywhere without a driver’s
license.
Contesting a parking ticket? You get your day in court. Contesting participation
in war? You become a second-class citizen by fiat.
Registration is an extortion racket and a deep affront to individual rights, and I
support those who have resisted it for these reasons
alone. But these weren’t my reasons, at least not the main ones. I
refused to register because of the bigger picture of which I believe
draft registration is a part.
The Selective Service System was was created in 1917 as part of the
Selective Service Act, which Woodrow Wilson signed into law following
the U.S. declaration of war against Germany. In other words, it
originated as an indispensable part of U.S. involvement in a war
bloodier and stupider than anything the world had ever witnessed,
helping the government send those who resisted to prison and those
who didn’t off to Flanders to be killed, maimed, or permanently shell-shocked in
a conflict as pointless as it was unimaginably destructive.
In 2005, my immediate frame of reference was a conflict that came after
more than a hundred years of American overseas empire, of which World
War I marked not the beginning but only a major juncture. I was a
young person at the time of another pointless war — pointless
under the terms of its official rationale, if not its real one. And a
war that was, if not exactly unimaginable
in the scope of its destructiveness, offering plenty to beggar the
imagination nonetheless.
It cannot be stressed enough that the 2003 invasion of Iraq and its
aftermath constitute not merely a war carried out on wildly false
pretenses, fueled by fear and racism, and resulting in a civilian
death toll in the hundreds of thousands, but the wholesale
destruction of an entire society. Iraq’s
institutions, its ancient culture, its fragile ethno-religious
balance, and the very aspirations to democracy that the U.S. presence
was supposed to promote were, like the human lives they once
sustained, obliterated. Their obliteration was structural and
deliberate, part of a scorched-earth campaign not to vanquish terror
or despotism but to achieve what ten years of famine-inducing
sanctions and the 1991 Gulf War before that could not: the
realization of a corporate state in Iraq, in which war is both a
means and an end in itself.
Over massive opposition from the Iraqi people, following the invasion the
Coalition Provisional Authority promptly set about privatizing almost
every economic resource the country possessed — by decree. Handing
out the spoils to one politically-connected American corporation
after another, to other such firms it handed out U.S. taxpayer money
to manage this project of imperial plunder mendaciously termed
“reconstruction.” When the project eventually provoked an
insurgency against coalition forces, mixed in with a sectarian civil
war fueled by the fact that competing Sunni and Shi’a militias
offered more to freshly jobless, destitute people than their foreign
occupiers did, the insurgency itself simply became the next
profitable private sector of the occupation, as everything from
combat to torture was outsourced to military contractors operating in
an unaccountable shadowland of U.S. and international law.
Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, the centerpiece of the Bush
administration’s push for war, were never found, nor was any evidence of a link
between Saddam and 9/11, while, to the protracted conflict that
engulfed Iraq, the lives of nearly a million Iraqis and nearly
five-thousand U.S. service personnel were lost.
The additional details of this catastrophe are too numerous to recount.
Like all U.S. conflicts, it was but one chapter in a long, sordid
story of U.S. involvement in the region; the same is true of U.S.
operations in Afghanistan since 2001. Empire is a sprawling,
proliferative web — in time as well as space — of interests, alliances, and actors. It
perpetuates itself by continuing to create both enemies and
dependents, in the form of both governments and real, flesh-and-blood
human beings, whose acts of desperate violence and need for
protection alike U.S. policymakers cynically manipulate to entrench
U.S. domination, whether over the course of years or of generations.
The dependents include Americans. However we feel about war, our
collective wealth and prosperity are tethered to the hugely
profitable defense, security, and surveillance sectors, to the
state-capitalized military-industrial complex that the Iraq War did
nothing short of revolutionize by blasting away the boundaries
between war planners and corporate elites.
But dependence on empire is psychological as well as economic, and it
persists even after wars have ended — indeed,
even after war, as a national way of life, has lost its appeal.
Never much ones for recent history, Americans seem by and large to have
forgotten about the Iraq War. An egregious abdication of the
responsibility to think bookends the entire event, as cultural
amnesia now allows politicians, media figures, and ordinary citizens
to escape accountability for having supported the invasion, or to act
like they never supported it at all. At best, we’ve
reached a sort of lazy consensus that the whole thing was a bad idea
and redirected our limited attention for this stuff to the situation
in Afghanistan, now going down as an American defeat on par with
Vietnam. The war criminals have all walked, some of them even
managing to slyly rehabilitate themselves when they joined in the
pearl-clutching over a new, rival breed of monster, Donald Trump.
Since the Bush years, politics and culture have changed dramatically. Back
then, to be a flag-waving nationalist meant you supported the idea
that the U.S. can and should police the world, an idea that of course
has its liberal-progressive iteration. Now you can be a flag-waving
nationalist and, if you even think about that idea at all, hate it
every bit as much as you hate immigrants, people of color, women,
Jews, anyone to your left, whomever. (You can even blame them for it
too.) That’s because endless war has been, above all else, a disappointment
to anyone who hasn’t made money from it, and a disappointment that
would eventually have to be accounted for politically. A
disappointment that, for many, got rolled in with other aggravations
until it all eventually emerged as hate. Enter The Donald.
The sense of wounded national pride, conscious or otherwise, that results
when empires run up against limits has real consequences. After the
bellicose thrill of 9/11 had worn off, the ensuing succession of
national nervous breakdowns finally culminated in a president whose
no-filter denunciations of endless war and foreign entanglement were
hugely popular with the same crowd that used to love those things.
His commitment to non-intervention proving selective, opportunistic,
and corrupt, in the end Trump would not so much give peace a chance
as give it a bad name. More disturbingly, as he seized the mantle of
non-intervention with one hand, he seized the double barrel of
presidential lying and presidential violence with the other — and
aimed it stateside.
Trump, the boorish isolationist, flipped the script and turned the forces of
jingoist aggression inward, mobilizing them both within and outside
the state against domestic targets instead of foreign ones. Rather
than smash collective resistance on the streets of Baghdad, he tried
to smash it on the streets of America’s
cities, ordering brutal crackdowns by the National Guard and federal
law enforcement on protestors marching en masse
for racial justice. And rather than interfere, to any notable extent,
with another country’s democratic processes — as so many past
presidents have—he interfered with our own. Instead of hiring
lawless Blackwater mercenaries to wreck another country, Trump,
confronted with unfavorable elections results, rallied the volunteer
force of right-wing lunatics he’d spent four years building to
stage an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
Trump preferred unleashing militarized force at home to invading faraway
lands. Yet underlying his behavior and that of Bush and Cheney are
different forms of the same basic abuse of power: marshaling lethal
force on a mass scale in the service of self-interested political
ends, with falsehoods as the greatest weapon of all.
And yet I am still more likely to go to prison than any of these men.
This is what I mean by “the bigger picture,” the broader state of affairs I sought to protest
by refusing to register. Insofar as draft registration has any
purpose, it is to supply manpower for American empire, and the
evidence is in: empire causes the destruction of human life and human
flourishing all over the world and the degradation of politics at
home, whether the president’s orders are to raze another country to
the ground or to turn the guns on fellow Americans.
Draft registration, therefore, demands resisting.
Ineligible for student loans from the government, I had to look elsewhere. I was
lucky enough to discover the
Fund for Education and Training (FEAT),
which supplies educational loans at the same rate as the government
to those who, like me, refused on principle to register for the
draft. I later volunteered for FEAT’s parent organization, the
Center on Conscience & War (CCW),
and I now serve on its board. In addition to opposing conscription
and recruitment, CCW’s primary mission is to defend and extend the
rights of
military conscientious objectors,
those who are currently serving but have come to believe that
participation in war in any form is wrong. These brave men and women
in uniform constitute the front line of war resistance, and if the
wave of CO applications from those serving in the National Guard
units deployed to put down Black Lives Matter protests says anything,
it’s that, whatever form militarism takes, there will always be
those in the military with the courage to not go along with it.
I’m proud to be a fellow traveler of conscientious objectors, though I
would not qualify as a conscientious objector myself. I do not, to
use the Department of Defense’s definition, hold “a firm, fixed,
and sincere objection to participation in war
in any form or the bearing of arms,
by reason of religious
training and/or belief”
that would, if I could adequately demonstrate this objection to the
government, exempt me from combatant and/or non-combatant military
service in the event of a draft, disqualify me from enlisting, or,
were I already serving, qualify me for discharge. (Nor is there any
option to apply for CO status at the time of registration.)
Conscientious objection is a long and living tradition of opposition to war, full
of unbelievably brave individuals
who have often paid a high price for acting on their beliefs in the
form of abuse, imprisonment, torture, and death. But it isn’t the
only such tradition (nor are conscientious objectors the only war
resisters to have been the targets of state violence). It’s one
legitimate position among many
from which to oppose war and conscription. No one should feel like
they have to be a potential CO in order to resist the draft. Such a
mentality needlessly limits the ranks of resisters and plays right
into the hands of militarism.
War planners would prefer potential registrants approach the situation by
asking themselves, “Can I imagine a war in which I could
justifiably participate? If so, I should sign up.” But if you’ve
seen the rap sheet of U.S. wars to date, you can almost certainly
imagine any number of future criminal scenarios in which you’d want
no part—scenarios that, given this record, are indeed all too
realistic. One should instead invert the moral calculus and ask, “Can
I imagine a war in which I couldn’t justifiably
participate? If so, I should refuse
to sign up.” Let the burden of justification fall on those who
support war, not on those who would oppose it.
There is a chilling effect on draft resistance when conscientious objection
is the standard would-be draft resisters impose on themselves. In the
face of such damning and overwhelming evidence against the system of
which draft registration is a part, the standard should be much, much
lower. The officially sanctioned category of those who object to war
in any form belongs to the much larger, rougher category of those who
say “fuck this stupid war, and the next one.” We can all resist
together, whether we object from a place of conscience or simply from
a place of disgust.
On the question of whether war and killing can ever be justified, I
remain agnostic. I feel similarly, for that matter, on the question
of whether draft registration, in the abstract, has any merit as a
strategy of legitimate national self-defense. (After all, there are
other countries with onerous service requirements that haven’t
disgraced themselves with militarism as the U.S. has.) As important
as these questions are, they weren’t relevant to my decision not to
register. What was relevant was American militarism as
it actually exists.
That, and not the theoretical existence or non-existence of just war,
is what I felt to be at issue.
If you’re 18, find America’s wars at all objectionable, and can
avoid or deal with the consequences of not registering,
you should not register.
If you can’t deal with the consequences, or if you’ve already
registered, you can still resist by not reporting address changes to
the Selective Service, which you’re legally required to do between
the ages of 18 and 25 but for which there is virtually no
enforcement. And in the event of an actual draft, every military-age
man, regardless of prior registration status, can expect to be
targeted and will therefore face a choice of whether or not to resist
if he is ordered to report for induction into the military.
We can all also oppose
the current push to expand draft registration to women,
countering the facile refrain of “gender equality” with the
argument that no one, of any gender,
deserves to be subjected to the coercive, Constitutionally dubious
apparatus of draft registration in order to get a federal student
loan or a driver’s license, or in order to prove that they are just
as capable as people of another gender of sharing in the burdens of
citizenship. And we can support
proposed legislation
to repeal draft registration
and abolish the Selective Service System altogether.
As a tactic for constraining the government’s ability to wage war,
resisting draft registration, and even resisting an actual draft, has
its limits. Even without the advertisement for enlistment that
registration provides, the government is able to wage unjust wars
just fine with an all-volunteer-force, which is effectively what
we’ve had since Vietnam. But it’s also able to wage unjust wars
because of public ignorance. When people don’t know about the
horrific suffering their government’s wars have inflicted, or who
made money from those wars, or that the despot their government just
deposed used to be its puppet, or how to tell when their government
is lying through its teeth, or that a given war even happened at all, then
war happens again.
Certainly many people have never even heard of the Selective Service System.
They need, and deserve, to know that it’s a part of the war
machine. Non-compliance with draft registration merits a higher
profile as part of a broader movement on which the survival of
American democracy and the planet alike depend, a movement to oppose
new wars, de-militarize our society and economy, and dismantle
empire—American and otherwise—by building global political and
economic alternatives that free people from its grip, wherever they
stand in relation to it. War, militarism, and empire demand resisting
in ways big and small.
[Ethan Foote is a musician and composer based in Washington, D.C. In 2005, as an act of protest against war and empire he chose not to register with the Selective Service System. His decision led him to discover the Center on Conscience & War (CCW), on whose board he now serves, helping to extend and defend the rights of conscientious objectors and other opponents of conscription and war. In 2019, he testified before the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service as one of the uninvited witnesses who were allowed only 2 minutes each during the “public comment” period at the end of the hearing. An earlier version of this article was published on Waging Nonviolence in partnership with the International Peace Research Association (IPRA); this updated version is published here by kind permission of the author. Copyright 2021 by Ethan Foote, CC BY 4.0.]
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