Young people in the U.S. have won a major unsung victory: Starting in December, they will no longer be required to register or report their addresses for a possible military draft. But Congress has given the agency tasked with “readiness” for a draft a second chance to find a way to sign young men up for a future draft involuntarily and “automatically.”
To understand how this victory was won and how young people and their allies can fight the plan for “automatic” registration, we need to look at 45 years of forgotten history of draft registration and resistance during a time when there was no active draft.
In December 2025, Congress finally voted to end the requirement in effect since 1980 for male U.S. citizens and residents to register with the agency that would administer any military draft—the Selective Service System, or SSS—within 30 days of their 18th birthday and report to the SSS within 10 days of any change of address until their 26th birthday.
This is an extraordinary and largely unrecognized victory for pervasive noncompliance with the registration law. This spontaneous, silent resistance has been sustained by generations of young people for 45 years, during which there has been essentially no visible or organized anti-draft movement.
But Congress remains so unwilling to admit to failure in the face of popular resistance, and so intent on preserving the fiction of readiness to activate a draft, that it included a provision in this year’s annual “defense” bill, at the urging of the SSS, that gives the SSS a second chance. The agency is instructed to try to register potential draftees “automatically” by using information from other federal agencies.
The SSS has already drafted regulations for “automatic” registration that are currently under review by the White House. The change in the law will take effect in December 2026 unless Congress takes action before then to repeal the Military Selective Service Act.
“Automatic” registration will be a fiasco. Mining data collected by other federal agencies for other purposes won’t produce a list of young men and their mailing addresses that’s any more accurate or complete than self-registration. But it will enable continued planning for endless, unlimited wars without the need to consider whether enough Americans will be willing to fight them, and will create a database that can be weaponized against vulnerable young people.
Because only men are subject to the draft, the SSS must track gender, and because the agency interprets “male” to mean “as assigned at birth” for the purposes of the draft, it may seek to obtain information on the sex assigned at birth of all young people. And since U.S. residents are subject to being drafted regardless of citizenship, the SSS will have a mandate to try to compile a list of the names and addresses of all male immigrants ages 18-25, including undocumented immigrants. Those lists will likely be available to ICE, DOGE and other agencies.
Why, though, is the SSS getting a do-over from Congress despite such abject failure? And if there’s been such widespread resistance to draft registration, why haven’t we heard about it?
The power of silent resistance
The dynamics of draft resistance and anti-draft activism since 1980 follow a pattern that was articulated perhaps most clearly by the late James C. Scott. Scott was a political scientist and ethnographer who backed into anarchism through his fieldwork on the forms of subaltern resistance to authority and oppression. Scott situated his work within the “subaltern studies” movement, which seeks to center and uplift the voices, actions and interests of those who make up the underclasses in structures of domination and subordination.
Throughout his work on the forms of resistance, Scott took it for granted—as have many others—that resistance is a phenomenon defined by actions, not by ideology or organizational affiliation. As Joan Baez described it while introducing her band at Woodstock, “We … are members of the Resistance, which simply means that you have to turn your [draft] card in, or put ketchup on it and eat it, or burn it or flush it or whatever you want. … So, that’s what it takes to be in the Resistance.”
Acts of resistance are sometimes open, organized and accompanied by protest—but not always. One of Scott’s key points is that too narrow a focus on elite organizations and open defiance can blind us to the underlying phenomenon of quiet resistance, its subaltern character, and its power.
“Quiet, unassuming, quotidian insubordination, because it flies below the archival radar, waves no banners, has no officeholders, writes no manifestos, and has no permanent organizations, escapes notice,” Scott notes in “Two Cheers for Anarchism”. “[But] more regimes have been brought, piecemeal, to their knees by … the silent, dogged resistance … of millions of ordinary people, than by revolutionary vanguards or rioting mobs.”
Scott describes as typical a symbiosis between a small, visible, vocal, organized, largely elite “movement” and a vast, mostly silent, largely subaltern phenomenon of mass resistance. And he defends the meaning and significance of “self-serving” acts of resistance, such as desertion from the military or draft “evasion,” that may have no explicitly political intent.
How this played out with draft registration is a case study in the effectiveness of quiet, passive direct action, and of the need for organized solidarity and allyship to realize the full potential of that otherwise invisible undercurrent of insubordination.
The response to draft registration
When President Carter proposed resuming draft registration in 1980, the response was an immediate wave of public protest. There were rallies on campuses across the country within days, and tens of thousands of people took part in marches against the draft in Washington, D.C. and San Francisco just two months later—a remarkably rapid mobilization in the pre-Internet era.
For understandable reasons, only a few thousand young people publicly announced that they wouldn’t register. (I was among them.)
The erroneous impressions this gave were that 1) opposition to the draft could be equated with protest or complaint, and 2) most of those who opposed the draft would, despite their objections, comply with the law.
The reality, though, is that most of those who didn’t want to be drafted stayed home. They didn’t protest or publicly confess to a crime, but neither did they sign up for the draft. Most remained uncommitted, taking a wait-and-see attitude toward whether they would register.
There were many exceptions, but the broad pattern was what Scott has described as typical: Those with the least financial or social capital to lose were generally those least likely to register. Those with more privilege were more likely to decide that they could afford to take the risk of publicly refusing. The press looked for visible anti-draft protest—and found it, initially, in the early 1980s—among the most privileged potential draftees at elite colleges. But few observers looked for, noticed, or recognized the significance of the passive resistance of much larger numbers of marginalized youth.
Registration began in July 1980. At the start of the school year that September, The Boston Globe—in the first independent attempt to collect compliance statistics—reported that perhaps a million men, a quarter of the initial cohort, hadn’t registered. By June 1982, even the SSS admitted that at least half a million potential draftees had failed to register.
Faced with an unexpected crisis of noncompliance, the Department of Justice had little choice but to make examples of a few of those whose public statements could be used to prove in court that our refusal to register was “knowing and willful,” as the law required. One DOJ strategist expressed the hope that “an initial round of well-publicized prosecutions” might “yield sufficient registrations to maintain the credibility of the system”.
That didn’t happen. I was one of just 20 non-registrants who were prosecuted in the early 1980s (perhaps 1 percent of those who had publicly announced our refusal to register). Those of the 20 who didn’t register after being indicted were all convicted, and nine of us were eventually imprisoned. But these show trials called attention to the extent of the resistance and the inability of the government to enforce the law against those who stayed home, stayed quiet, and didn’t publicly confess to criminal intent.
These trials were highly publicized, as the government wanted to achieve maximum intimidation. But the legal issue that dominated press coverage for the next several years was whether the government could constitutionally prosecute only those who had publicized their refusal to register.
In 1985 the Supreme Court, in a poorly-reasoned decision over a dissent by Justice Thurgood Marshall, upheld this selective prosecution scheme. For the government, this was a legal victory but a practical loss. The silent majority of non-registrants got the message loud and clear that there was safety in silence as well as safety in numbers. The risk was in speaking out, not in skipping registration.
Decades of noncompliance
After this brief and counterproductive experiment, the DOJ abandoned any attempt to enforce the registration law against even the most flagrant violators. Nobody has been prosecuted since 1986, and nobody could be prosecuted without proof that their noncompliance is “knowing and willful.” The SSS sends a hundred thousand or more threatening letters every year to names and addresses obtained from data brokers and others sources. As decades passed, however, these empty threats were less and less effective.
In the aftermath of the test cases, fewer and fewer people either registered with the SSS or spoke publicly about their refusal. This was a rational response to the government’s pattern of selective prosecution. Organized opposition to the registration requirement also faded away. Why would activists prioritize organizing against a law that isn’t being enforced?
The public and most of those who could have been allies to the resistance wrongly interpreted the disappearance of public proclamations of resistance and visible anti-draft protests as indicating that the vast majority of potential draftees had been cowed into compliance.
This misimpression was heightened by measures to require registration with the SSS as a condition of eligibility for federal student loans (a requirement that was quietly repealed in 2020) and, in some states, driver’s licenses.
These laws were less effective than most people thought, especially because not all states have enacted laws like this. “California does not share driver’s license [information with the Selective Service System] — so, hey, move to California and you’re basically exempted from being drafted,” as a former director of the SSS testified in 2019.
Nevertheless, these laws helped prop up the myth of compliance as the norm, even while compliance continued to fall. By 2023, fewer than 40 percent of men turning 18 had registered by the end of the year, much less within 30 days of their 18th birthday. “Absolutely nobody” tells the SSS when they move, as the chair of the House Armed Services Committee noted at a hearing in 2021.
The failure of draft registration was obvious to anyone who scrutinized the program. Yet in the absence of a movement shouting, “The emperor has no clothes!”, it took another 40 years for Congress to seriously consider admitting failure. It was only a misguided push to expand draft registration to include women as well as men (prioritizing a false notion of “equality” in war over real equality in peace and freedom) that drew enough attention to the issue to prompt Congress to seriously consider action. The bipartisan Selective Service Repeal Act to abolish the SSS was introduced in 2019 and reintroduced in each session of Congress since.
In response to this existential threat to their own jobs, the staff of the SSS—not the Pentagon or anyone in Congress—came up with the idea of trying to “automatically” register potential draftees.
Congress approved the SSS proposal without any hearings or debate. Most Republicans and most Democrats in Congress want the draft available as a “fallback” when their party is in power, just as most of them want to keep nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal of threats. The availability of a draft enables planning for larger, longer wars, without having to consider whether enough people will be willing to fight them. This, of course, is why it would be so significant a constraint on “forever” wars to take the draft off the table as an option for any president.
Stopping “automatic” registration
Well-meaning but ageist older people often conceptualize anti-draft activism as protecting weak and vulnerable young people against being drafted. In reality, it’s the young people on whom the government depends to fight its wars who hold the power. They are wielding their power of noncooperation to protect us all against military adventurism. We should thank them for their service.
More concretely, if we want to be allies to young people in their struggle against conscription and war and for youth liberation, we should work to expose the dangers of “automatic” draft registration and its inevitable failure.
In the event of a draft, the government will have the same difficulty enforcing induction orders that it has had enforcing registration. But if young people are registered involuntarily, their unwillingness to fight old people’s wars won’t become visible until after the country is militarily over committed and a draft is activated. That’s a dangerous scenario, even if you support U.S. plans for wars and a draft.
“Automatic” draft registration is a bad idea, and it won’t work. But it’s not yet a done deal. We still have a chance to get Congress to repeal the draft law before the attempt at “automatic” registration begins in December. On May 14, Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Republican Sens. Ron Paul of Kentucky and Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming reintroduced the Selective Service Repeal Act.
A diverse coalition of anti-war, religious, feminist and civil liberties organizations has already announced its opposition to “automatic” registration and its support for the Selective Service Repeal Act. Much more educational outreach and organizing is needed to get this issue on the agenda and into the demands of antiwar organizations and activists.
Young people have done the heavy lifting. They have brought us to the brink of victory over the draft and the threat it poses to everyone around the world against whom draftees would be weaponized. Our task as older allies is to amplify their continued resistance, whether it takes public or quiet forms, and to pressure Congress to include the Selective Service Repeal Act in this year’s defense bill.
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