America’s Failed Grand Strategy Guarantees the Draft’s Return

According to the most recent National Security Strategy, made public at the end of 2022, America’s official policy is “there is nothing beyond our capacity.” Such a statement is ridiculous, especially in light of America’s obvious overextension in the face of multiple simultaneous global crises. 

America’s efforts to wage a proxy war in Ukraine are meeting with slow but grinding failure that has depleted our stockpiles and given Russia plenty of experience defeating numerous American weapon systems, ranging from Abrams tanks to Excalibur precision artillery rounds. Our seemingly limitless backing of Israel and its flailing about in the Middle East has further depleted our military stocks and required the repositioning of numerous naval assets. Because of this repositioning, not a single American carrier remains on station in East Asia, despite endless crowing about the need to contain China and wage holy democratic war for Taiwan if needed. 

We are in over our heads without even being in an honest-to-goodness shooting war. Yet the foreign policy establishment seems only interested in expanding American commitments and entanglements hither, thither, and yon. 

America’s military power is constrained not only by a shortage of equipment, but by a shortage of men. American recruitment has been abysmal, with massive shortfalls for successive years, which seems unlikely to improve anytime soon, especially given the widespread phenomenon of military families deciding to leave the profession. 

American global ambitions are not becoming any more humble in the face of these facts. Rather than returning to America’s traditional Monroe Doctrine and a focus on hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, the powers that be will probably attempt to continue our forward deployed primacist grand strategy until it all comes tumbling down from one catastrophe or another. 

One perfect example is the Navy’s plan to expand the battleforce fleet to 381 vessels, up from around 295 currently. Yet the Navy is also currently discussing plans to mothball 17 support ships because there are not enough sailors to crew them. If we can’t man the navy now at its current size, how will we do so with nearly 100 more ships?

In the midst of the War on Terror, numerous military planners became convinced of the idea of “hybrid warfare”, meaning that the wars of the future, even between states, would be similar to the counter-insurgency operations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Obviously, the Ukraine war has demonstrated that the potential for full on modern industrialized warfare that requires the mobilization of vast portions of society to wage is a very real possibility. 

The carnage in Ukraine has been too immense for our own leadership to ignore, and as a result we see more and more proposals and discussions emerging trying to come to grips with the radical reorientation in not just military posture, but all of American society, that would be needed to continue America’s failing efforts to run the world. 

The Ukraine war has demonstrated beyond all doubt that no amount of technology can replace the need for actual flesh-and-blood humans manning the front lines. Russia learned this the hard way when its initial invasion bogged down into an industrial war of attrition and it suffered devastating setbacks in late 2022 in Kharkiv and Zaporizhia Oblasts when their undermanned lines were quickly overwhelmed by rapid Ukrainian assaults. Having learned its lesson, it called up 300,000 reserves and undertook a massive recruitment campaign. 

Yet, America is already facing a dramatic recruitment shortfall and is in no way prepared to replace the massive losses that would be expected in a conflict similar to that in Ukraine. An essay in the U.S. Army War College journal published in the fall of 2023 acknowledges that such a conflict would result in 50,000 casualties—roughly the amount of casualties sustained in all 20 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan—in a mere two weeks. The authors estimated that the US would suffer 3,600 casualties per day, requiring 800 replacements per day. 

The authors point out that the Individual Ready Reserve, which is composed of former service personnel who do not actively train and drill but may be called back into active service in the event they are needed, currently stands at roughly 76,000 troops (down from over 700,000 in 1973), all of whom would be needed within a month or so of the start of a conflict. 

It is not surprising, then, that the authors state that there may be a need to reinstate conscription, stating, “Large-scale combat operations troop requirements may well require a reconceptualization of the 1970s and 1980s volunteer force and a move toward partial conscription.” (It is notable that last fall when I reported on this proposal one of the coauthors denied to the AP that the essay called for a return of the draft despite it unambiguously doing so, indicating that the foreign policy establishment is fully aware that such a move will be immensely unpopular.)

In June of 2024, the Center for a New American Security issued a report titled “Back to the Drafting Board: U.S. Draft Mobilization Capability for Modern Operational Requirements.” The authors make several policy proposals to overhaul the draft system to ensure it can operate efficiently and smoothly if implemented. Among the many suggestions is the implementation of what amounts to a national database including health information, skills, and education of the entire population so that the draft could more precisely select people with required skills in the event of conscription. 

Such a database would not only be worrisome due to privacy concerns and the like, but it would also give the government the ability, and therefore the temptation, to implement conscription for not just the military, but to implement war-time industrial central planning or any other scheme that someone might come up with, such as a “war” on climate change. The DoD has already begun to issue reports detailing the vast manpower shortages of skilled industrial workers in the military-industrial base, and they would no doubt salivate about being able to flip through the national manpower catalog to simply force people to man the production lines. 

Such rumblings are not limited to academic musings. The 2024 NDAA contains provisions related to the draft in both the House and Senate versions. Both would make registration for the draft automatic, with the Senate version going even further to require women to register for selective service as well.

The authors of the CNAS report and other advocates for reforming the selective service system stress that they desire merely to ensure that the system works properly in the event it is needed in a dire emergency. There is some merit to this idea. The Russian call-up of reserves went about as well as a trainwreck and demonstrated that a great deal of rust had built up on the system since it was last used in the Second World War. This provided a wake-up call that resulted in a great deal of modernization and streamlining.

Nevertheless, while such modernization may make sense in theory, in the reality of America’s current context, modernizing or outright resuming selective service will do nothing but hand a hammer to people who already view every problem as a nail. The United States is not located in Eurasia and has no need to fear becoming embroiled in an industrial war of attrition unless it is by choice. We face no threats that would require mobilization, other than those we create by going abroad in search of monsters to destroy. 

Despite the mounting evidence of U.S. overextension and vulnerability around the globe, it is worth reiterating that official government policy holds that “nothing is beyond our capacity”. Modernizing or even implementing the draft will not force the blob to confront the harsh reality that resources, especially manpower, are scarce.

We face a looming military disaster and potential wars on multiple fronts as regional powers seek to settle scores in the face of American weakness. Everything is not in our capacity, but resuming the draft will be all but inevitable if the foreign policy establishment has any hope of trying to hold together our rapidly crumbling global position.