Doubling down on their recent war-game exercises and report on the (un)readiness of the U.S. to activate a military draft, Taren Sylvester and Katherine Kuzminski of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) have a new article in War on the Rocks, “Preparing for the Possibility of a Draft Without Panic,” laying out why they think the U.S. needs to prepare for a draft in order to be able to win an all-out war with China over Taiwan.
CNAS and War on the Rocks like to describe themselves as “realists”. But their arguments for stepped-up planning and preparation for a draft are strikingly unrealistic, in at least four respects.
First, Sylvester and Kuzminski – like the Selective Service System and the Department of Justice – entirely ignore whether, much less how or at what cost, a draft could be enforced.
The practical difficulty of enforcing a draft in the face of widespread evasion and resistance was the Achilles heel of the last U.S. draft, and has to be central to any realistic plan for a future draft.
Hellbound and Down 