SSS war-gamed a skills-first draft for a Taiwan war
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- Selective Service System war-gamed a January 2026 mobilization exercise in which the first wave of draftees would be those with "special skills," FOIA documents obtained by the source show, contradicting SSS promotional materials that promise a random lottery.
- The priority-skills list in the exercise runs from welders, electricians, heavy equipment operators, longshoremen, and steel workers/pipefitters to cyber security specialists, robotics operators, fiber optic technicians, air traffic controllers, and linguists; a retired Army officer told the source the set signals "expansion of the Navy, both manning ships and shore support, plus airfield operations."
- The exercise scenario assumed a Chinese blockade of Taiwan, a U.S. attempt to break it, escalation to U.S. air attacks on Chinese territory, retaliatory kinetic strikes on U.S. bases in Alaska and Hawaii, and only then activation of a draft — a path resembling a separate scenario recently published in the same outlet.
- The National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service (NCMNPS) voted down a special-skills draft in closed-door meetings, with one member calling it "less politically feasible" than a universal draft and another saying it would not be "fair and equitable," and Congress has never authorized or debated a broader skills draft beyond the existing Health Care Personnel Delivery System.
- The FY2022 NDAA required the Department of Defense to run a draft exercise by the end of FY2023, which still hasn't been conducted, but SSS ran its own exercise in preparation, and the source notes there has been no audit of the SSS registration database since 1982.
- Proposed "automatic" registration regulations have been stuck at the White House for more than three months ahead of a December 18, 2026 deadline to complete notice-and-comment, and the source reports SSS has issued no statements or journalist responses for more than six months.
Why it matters: SSS is actively planning a skills-first conscription for a hypothetical China-Taiwan war that Congress never authorized and its own advisory commission voted down as unfair, with a December 18, 2026 deadline looming for stalled 'automatic' registration rules. The agency's public 'random lottery' stance masks contingency plans that would target specific civilian occupations rather than random young men.
