Return to American Tradition - Draft Resistance
Excerpt from the Diary of a Military Brat
Content warning: Discussion of US imperialism, the military industrial complex, conscription, military recruitment preying on youth, veteran suicide, and other horrors of empire
Dear Readers,
Last Friday, like every year, the US House of Representatives passed a bill that would write a check for the empire’s military industrial complex via H.R.8070, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). As has become the norm, the far-right snakes in the House added last-minute provisions to roll back diversity protections and restrict military members and their families from accessing life-saving healthcare like abortion and gender-affirming care. But of course, there’s seemingly little pause on either side of the aisle or surprise from anyone on the absurd bill for our country’s “defense.”
$895.3 billion.
But that’s old news. Even the Department of “Defense” failing their audits for the sixth year in a row is per the course. So what if the largest military in the world cannot account for billions of taxpayers’ money? They say they’re “getting better and better at it”, and it’s the trying that counts, right?
Right now, the most remarkable provision in the NDAA is where it will automatically register all males ages 18-26 in the Selective Service System aka the draft! Thankfully, it is such an inclusive piece of policy that you even have to be a citizen of the United States. Oh, no, we are an inclusive war machine - meaning “every other male person residing in the United States shall be automatically registered” and oh, yeah, trans women of course are required included!
Some will point out that everyone assigned male at birth is already required to sign up anyway, and automatic registration does not mean anyone is getting shipped to basic training immediately. Others will say that the Selective Service System is just to take “stock” of available able-bodied young people - whose prefrontal cortexes aren’t fully developed yet - just in case.
Because you’re reading my newsletter, I’ll tell you what I have to say: fuck the Selective Service System, fuck any drafts anywhere, fuck the US military, fuck the Pentagon, and fuck the rich and their political gofers who brutalize our bodies every day in this capitalist hellscape and want to make canon fodder of our young people.
The most concerning piece of the NDAA is what it tells us, what we already know: they want another world war. They want to put working people back in our place. They want to brutalize other countries and steal even more of their resources. They want the post-war baby boom to provide more workers to make more profit and keep us on this vicious cycle of war and profit.
War, labor, prison - it is all about harvesting our bodies for their profit.
I was a military dependent, born in US imperialism’s cradle in the Panama Canal at the former US Army Gorgas Hospital just a few years before the Panama Canal and Ancón Hill were returned to the people of Panama. My first steps were in military housing. When my father returned home in his tall black Army boots, it was a game to help untie the long laces - one that helped me learn to tie my shoes as a kid. My siblings and I played in retired tanks. Sometimes, we were late to school because of crossing military humvees and tanks. At the military base elementary school, all my classmates were military dependents and we pledged allegiance to a scrap of fabric hanging at the front of the classroom every morning. (It was considered a special honor if your class was chosen to recite the pledge over the school-wide intercom.)
When I started school off base, I was thrown off a routine when we didn’t have a mandatory morning hail to the republic. But the military was always close at hand. At the rural public high school I attended, recruiters lingered in the hallways and rang up students’ phones with promises of college education. After 9/11, Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act also ensured that all public schools allow military recruiters free access to our children and their private information or lose federal funding.
In my experience, math and science were of course uninterrupted but the only core class with room for critical thinking was the recruiter’s podium. From 11th grade to graduation, English class was dedicated to recruiters’ PowerPoint presentations. Instead of reading or writing, we got to listen to how much money the military would pay if we got a military-sponsored science degree and made weapons. At lunch, recruiters would set up a pull-up bar and challenge teenage athletes to mini contests to show off their strength. A friend of mine with a high ACT score was harassed with phone calls, emails, and mailers from recruiters despite never having spoken to a recruitment officer.
During the last summer of our childhood, between junior and senior years, some classmates were already in basic training. They returned to us in the fall with shaved heads and hardened faces. They were 17 years old.
Until people who oppose these wars get involved in the education system where the seeds are being planted, they will forever be marginalized in their efforts to mobilize opposition against those wars.
Rick Jahnkow
You will find military recruiters wherever the children are - or at least, the ones from families without money or places with limited opportunities. Public schools in rural and urban areas are a recruitment hotbed. When malls were still big and the go-to spot for teenagers, military recruitment had offices tucked between the food court and stores. The US Department of “Defense” sees the highest yield of “quality” candidates when unemployment is high.
“During periods of high unemployment, when civilian sector jobs are harder to find, more youth are willing to consider military service, and it is easier to recruit high-quality young men and women. In the early 1990s, when youth unemployment was relatively high (14.2 percent in 1992, for example), 74 percent of new recruits were high quality. When unemployment is low, on the other hand, the competition for workers—particularly high-quality workers—intensifies.”
- Recruiting an All-Volunteer Force: The Need for Sustained Investment in Recruiting Resources by Barbara A. Bicksler and Lisa G. Nolan
Now when our problem isn’t so much unemployment but the fact that two jobs aren’t making ends meet for most people living paycheck to paycheck in the United States, the imperial military has only itself to blame for its 40-year low recruitment numbers. Something about war crimes just does not appeal to young people as it used to, and we see how veterans are essentially thrown away once their bodies are no longer useful to the war machine.
Military recruitment is expensive.
Last year, the Army debuted a $117 million marketing campaign solely for recruitment. For FY2025, the Air Force is investing $1.6 billion to recruit and retain Airmen. In FY2024, the Navy requested $38.5 billion to recruit 5,000 more sailors, increase pay, and focus on “quality of life” areas…like suicide prevention and sexual assault according to the US Naval Institute.
Yes, the article from the US Naval Institute says that. That should tell you enough about military life. If asked, I could tell you stories about too-young military wives or women enlisted in the military like Vanessa Guillén.
It costs on average $15,000 per person just to recruit them. Then it costs another $18-20,000 for individual basic training, not including salary or equipment. To essentially farm more “qualified” applicants, the military piloted a “Future Soldier Preparatory Course” that would fill the gaps defunded public education left, provide physical training, and showcase the military’s “unparalleled ability to unlock a person’s true potential” to further US imperialism. As of December 2023, the course had 14,000 graduates; 95% went on to basic training and became soldiers.
Ultimately, conscription would save a great deal of taxpayer money - but not nearly as much as an end to its constant war and ever-present militarization. In its 247 years, the United States has been involved in 108 military conflicts. Additionally, the US is currently involved in 15 “shadow wars” - Ukraine and Israel sending us the biggest bills lately - and operates at least 750 military bases across 80 countries. This is not even taking into account equipment, pay, meals, housing, and everything else tucked away in the Defense Department’s monstrous budget.
The US military prides itself on fulfilling basic human needs of shelter, healthcare, education, and food where social programs or community support could. As a child, I once heard a drill sergeant talk about how basic training was the first time some military recruits had regular meals. A military servicemember anonymously shared her misgivings about supporting the military but given America’s hellish medical system, she said, “If I have to sell my soul to the devil to get my children healthcare, that’s what I have to do.”
Healthcare costs were why my father re-enlisted. He completed 20 years in the Army so he and my mother would have health insurance - including dental and vision - for the rest of their lives. Through the military, they also accessed a USAA home loan to buy a house and obtained three degrees between the two of them.
Readers, I ask you: How much choice is there in joining the military for many recruits when there is limited access to job security, food, housing, or education? Limitations manufactured by the state.
Now the US imperial military is seeing its recruitment at a historic low, taking an overdue nosedive in the past four years due to limited access to youth during COVID-19 school closures, low unemployment rates, mass disabling of youth from multiple Covid exposures, and frankly, less veterans interested in encouraging anyone to join.
"Reconnecting with our youth and breaking down unnecessary barriers to serve in our Air Force and Space Force is our priority over the next several years,” said Air Force Brig. Gen. Christopher R. Amrhein, commander of the Air Force Recruiting Service.
eIn April 2020, Aaron Bushnell posted on Reddit, “HELP – Can’t get stimulus or unemployment benefits, about to run out of money.” One month later, he was in basic training by way of the military’s arguably most effective recruitment tool - an economic draft.
“I’m sticking it [Air Force] out to the end of my contract as I didn’t realize what a huge mistake it was until I was more than halfway through,” Aaron posted online, “and I only have a year left at this point. However, it is a regret I will carry for the rest of my life.” This was in June 2023.
As an Airman, Aaron witnessed how instrumental the Air Force is in intelligence and targeting to Israel’s genocide against Palestinians. In November 2023, he described leaving the US military as a “moral necessity of getting out.
In January 2024, while enrolled in computer science courses, Aaron told a friend he intended to find a job that made enough money to sustain himself while organizing and continuing participation in mutual aid work. On Sunday, February 2, 2024, Aaron live-streamed himself in front of the Israel Embassy in Washington, DC. In his Airman uniform, he said:
“I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”
His last words were “Free Palestine!” As he burned, police pointed a gun at him while others rushed to get a fire extinguisher. While military members are banned from participating in political protest, Aaron died committing the most extreme form of protest one can.
Aaron is by no means the only United States military member who has felt complicit in the military’s violence, powerless to change anything and stuck waiting until the end of a four- or six-year contract. There are thousands of military members similarly distraught, having thoughts of taking extreme actions to escape something that feels inescapable.
Levi Pierpoint, a friend of Aaron and conscientious objector
Aaron was not the first person to self-immolate in protest of war or the genocide in Gaza (December 2023, her name intentionally withheld by US authorities) nor was he the first US soldier to die by suicide. In the 2023 National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report, suicide was the second-leading cause of death for veterans under 45 years old. Over 30,177 veterans of the post-9/11 wars have died by suicide.
But this is not another essay condescendingly lecturing about a mental health crisis. I share these statistics to emphasize that this - along with our climate crisis, global food crisis, water crisis, housing crisis, maternal health crisis, literacy crisis - is deliberate. It is a consequence of choices by a small group of greedy people deprived of their humanity. It is intentional; it is by design. It is a system meant to benefit 1% at the expense of us.
An automatic registration in the Selective Service System is one piece of a large, complex machine. A draft is a means to a continuous end, a preparation for world war - for money. Should our people be drafted and forced into combat which brutalizes our fellow humanity, it would mean for more mass disabling, more veteran suicides, and likely more extreme life-ending acts of protest.
Aaron’s protest and consequent death rendered international attention and response. Key among them are from fellow US soldiers. On March 4th, an anonymous group of active-duty servicemembers released an open letter condemning the United States’ ceaseless support of Israel’s crimes.
To stop a monster, we have to stop feeding it.
We do this by divesting. We do this organizing. We do this by protecting our children from predatory military recruitment and indoctrination. We do this by taking care of each other.
Here are a few resources:
For active-duty servicemembers, the Center on Conscience and War has a wealth of information about becoming a conscientious objector. They also provide resources for young people who refuse to register for the Selective Service System.
Veterans who seek community among other veterans who speak out against war, militarism, and US imperialism can find it with About Face.
As a veteran of any military body, you can join or start a chapter of Veterans for Peace. They currently have active chapters in Vietnam, Ireland, Ryukyu Okinawa, and Japan.
Keep our young people away from military recruiters and bar militarism from our communities!
The Center on Conscience and War does outreach to religious communities and offers workshops.
Request a veteran speaker for your classroom and youth center to speak honestly about the US military with young people.
Truth in Recruitment provides resources for educators on counter-recruitment.
Opt-out of your high school students from being shared with military recruiters with this form.
If you or someone you know is being harassed by a military recruiter, contact the Military Recruiter Abuse Hotline.
Educate yourself and your community!
About Face offers a free online course - DecolonizeU: Militarism on Turtle Island - which explores the historic and ongoing relationship between Indigenous resistance and militarization in North America.
Learn more about draft resistance and host a screening of the documentary The Boys Said No! Draft Resistance and the Vietnam War.
Hear directly from veterans and servicemembers at the Veteran Art Movement’s podcast series, Eighty-One Echo.
