From Draft NOtices, July‐September 2026
— Edward Hasbrouck
In December 2026, the Selective Service System (SSS) will start trying to register male U.S. citizens and residents between their 18th and 26th birthdays “automatically” for a possible future military draft.
“Automatic” draft registration is a response by the SSS to the success of quiet but widespread noncompliance that made the registration law unenforceable. Less than 40% of the men who turned 18 in 2023 registered by the end of that year. Having failed to get young people to register themselves, the SSS got Congress to give the agency a second chance to try to use other existing federal databases to compile a list of potential draftees’ names, birthdays, and addresses.
This automated process won’t produce a complete or accurate list, but it will allow the SSS to continue pretending that it’s ready to start mailing out orders to report for involuntary military “induction” whenever Congress calls for a draft. The details of “automatic” draft registration will be spelled out in regulations that as of the end of June 2026 were waiting for White House review before being made public.
The change in the law that takes effect in December 2026 will replace the current requirement for potential draftees to register themselves and report address changes to the SSS with a requirement for them to provide information if the SSS requests it. This is most likely to happen if other federal databases have incomplete or contradictory information, such as missing postal addresses or different addresses in other agencies’ records.
How the SSS will send letters asking people for their addresses, if it doesn’t know their addresses, is just one of the problems with this ill-considered scheme. And if the SSS were really able to construct a list of potential draftees “automatically” without their cooperation, it wouldn’t need the authority to require individuals to answer questions about where to find them in the event of a draft.
Many states already require draft-age men to agree to be registered with the SSS in order to get a driver’s license. In those states, an 18th-birthday notice from the SSS will come as no big surprise. But in other states including California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Oregon, and Pennsylvania, driver’s licenses are linked to registration with the SSS. In 2026, as the SSS tries to fill in the gaps in its current registration list, a couple of million men ages 18-25 who were formerly unregistered will be surprised by letters from the SSS notifying them that they have been registered and/or demanding information needed to complete the process. Most of those letters will go to people in those states without laws linking driver’s licenses to SSS registration, or to men without driver’s licenses.
What can you do if you get a letter like this?
Just because you’re registered “automatically” doesn’t mean you can’t (safely) avoid being drafted or that you have to respond to a letter from the SSS.
The big change is that automated registration will shift your first opportunity to opt out (or to indicate, by opting out, that you don’t want to be drafted) from your 18th birthday to whenever you get a registration questionnaire or, if that doesn’t happen, to when you get an order to report for military “induction.” This means that -- unless we speak out now -- the unwillingness of young people to submit to a draft won’t become visible until later in the process, perhaps not until after a draft is activated.
The government will have the same difficulty enforcing orders from the SSS to answer questions or report for induction that it has had in the past in getting men to register themselves.
Knowledge and “willfulness” are elements required to prove any violation of the Military Selective Service Act. That’s why the Department of Justice abandoned enforcement of the registration law in the 1980s after only 20 nonregistrants were indicted. The only nonregistrants considered for prosecution then were those whose public statements, signatures on certified letters, and statements to FBI agents could be used to prove that their continued refusal to register was “knowing and willful.”
For decades, the SSS has been sending out a hundred thousand or more letters a year, based on lists from commercial data brokers, threatening recipients with prosecution unless they register with the SSS. But letters from the SSS that you don’t have to sign for are unenforceable junk mail. Nobody has been prosecuted, or could be prosecuted, for quietly ignoring these empty threats. The same will be true of questionnaires or letters demanding information the SSS needs to complete “automatic” registration.
The first advice of any criminal defense lawyer is to say nothing and sign nothing without first talking to a lawyer. Don’t talk to the SSS, the FBI, or the Department of Justice. Without your signature on a certified letter or your confession that you received an order from the SSS, it will be almost impossible to prove to a jury that you violated that order “knowingly and willfully,” as the law requires.
Email or text messages purporting to be from the SSS, especially if they ask for personal information, are presumptively scams. Don’t open or respond to messages like this. Delete them unread.
News reports about the switch to “automatic” draft registration have been confused, misleading, scary, and disempowering. It’s important to let young people know that this change is happening because they have successfully wielded the power of direct action by opting out of draft registration.
Draft resisters have prevented activation of a draft and helped protect us all -- including those pushed into the military by the poverty draft -- against the larger, longer wars that a draft would enable. This is their victory, and we should amplify their voices and thank them for their service even as we help them act on their opposition to the draft and work with them to expose the inevitable failure of the attempt to register them “automatically.” As older allies, we have much to learn and much to do.
Edward Hasbrouck maintains the Resisters.info website and newsletter. He was imprisoned in 1983‐1984 for publicly refusing to register for the draft.
This article is from Draft NOtices, the newsletter of the Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (https://www.comdsd.org/).
