A YouTuber with a million followers, Ryan McBeth, devotes his latest video and Substack column today to a denunciation of an article I wrote last month for Responsible Statecraft, “Why is the Selective Service war gaming a ‘special skills’ draft?”
Mr. McBeth also attacks the Quincy Institute (the nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank that publishes Responsible Statecraft) and an Instagrammer I don’t know but who posted a short video calling attention to my article.
I’d never heard of Mr. McBeth before he contacted me this week, but it’s apparent from his videos and articles that he has no expertise about the Selective Service System (SSS), its history since 1980, or its current plans, and didn’t do his homework before posting his latest video or an equally errror-filled one a few months ago about automatic draft registration and the possibility of a military draft.
To his credit, Mr. McBeth contacted me before he posted his new video, shared a draft of the script, and included some of my comments in his video and article — none of which was he required to do. He even made some changes to his script in response to my comments, although at the same time he introduced some entirely new factual errors in the final published version of the video.
In his new video, Mr. McBeth claims that “there is no provision” for any type of special-skills draft, but that’s just wrong. In the past, the SSS operated both a general “cannon fodder” draft of young men and a “Doctor Draft” with different criteria and age limits. Since the 1980s, the SSS has been required by law to maintain readiness to activate either a general draft or a draft of “persons qualified for practice or employment in a health care occupation” (the Health Care Personnel Delivery System, HCPDS) — a form of special-skills draft.
The HCPDS contingency plans have some differences from the pre-1973 Doctor Draft (as the current contingency plans for a general draft differ from the pre-1973 operation of the general draft), but the HCPDS is quite explicitly an updated plan based on the prior experience of the Doctor Draft. The SSS has said explicitly (and, I think, truthfully) that its plans for a broader special-skills draft grew out of the HCPDS, which in turn grew out of the Doctor Draft. The issue isn’t whether the SSS is planning for and prioritizing a special-skills draft, but whether it would include draftees with skills in other fields in addition to health care.
Mr. McBeth also claims that that people who, though lack of awareness, didn’t register with the SSS, are being denied student loans and government jobs.
In fact, the requirement to register with the SSS to get student loans was rescinded by Congress in 2020. This change was identified explicitly by the SSS — again I think accurately, although the war in Ukraine was another factor — as one of the reasons for the sharp drop in registration since that change in the law and the FAFSA student aid form took effect. This decline in compliance was, in turn, the major reason that staff of the SSS, fearing that the failed registration program, the SSS, and their jobs might be abolished, came up with the proposal to Congress to give the SSS a second chance to try to register young men “automatically”.
As for government jobs, failure to register is only a bar to Federal employment if it is (provably) knowing and willful. By the explicit terms of the law, someone who unwittingly failed to register can’t be denied a Federal job. In practice, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which makes decisions about eligibility for Federal employment, reported in 2024 that in 99% of cases in which employment is initially denied for failure to register with the SSS, but the applicant appeals the denial to OPM, OPM overrules the initial denial and finds the applicant eligible — presumably, in most if not all cases, because of the absence of any evidence of knowledge and willfulness.
Unwitting failure to register with the SSS is not a bar to Federal student aid or Federal employment.
These factual errors are typical of the myths and misinformation spread by commentators who haven’t been paying attention to anything the SSS has done in the last fifty years. There’s an irony in this factual carelessness, in that Mr. McBeth presents himself as an expert on “disinformation”. But what’s more interesting than the fact that ignorant people make mistaken claims are Mr. McBeth’s motives for attacking me.
Mr. McBeth’s fundamental complaint against me and against the Instagrammer who amplified some of my research findings is that Mr. McBeth wants to shape the discussion about the related issues of U.S. policy toward China and the possibility of a draft, in a way that is different from the way he thinks that my reporting is likely to lead it. Again ironic, since his complaint is against exactly the sort of effort to shape debate and frame public discourse that he’s trying to engage in himself.
Mr. McBeth thinks that my work to expose the details of ongoing planning and preparation for a draft and their role in enabling more belligerent policies, even when activation of a draft is unlikely, might be used by Chinese or other foreign government information warriors to promote fear of a draft, which fear might, in Mr. McBeth’s words, “weaken our resolve to defend our allies”.
I hate to break the news to Mr. McBeth, but Americans don’t need me to tell them to oppose or fear activation of a draft. I’ve never tried — or needed — to persuade anyone not to want to be drafted. My goal has been to make potential draftees — including young people, health care workers, and people with other special skills — aware of safe ways that they can act on their desire not to be drafted, whatever the reasons they already have for opposing a draft, and to empower and facilitate (“aid and abet”, the government might say) those actions.
The goal of my work against the draft is to end planning and preparation for a draft, which (among other outcomes) would remove the possibility of fear of a draft being used to persuade people not to support actions that are premised on the assumption that a draft is available as a “fallback”.
Mr. McBeth and those who share his views can’t have it both ways:
Hellbound and Down 