The Trump administration’s recent announcement that it wouldn’t rule out reinstating a military draft, coupled with pending changes to the national registry database, shouldn’t be cause for panic just yet, a Houston professor says.
Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, a research fellow for the Middle East at Rice University’s Baker Institute and co-director of the Middle East Energy Roundtable, acknowledged that, under Trump’s unpredictable leadership, anything can happen, but a lot of hurdles must be cleared before young men will be called into combat against their wishes.
The U.S. military will begin in December automatically registering American men between the ages of 18 and 25 for a potential military draft, if such a measure is deemed necessary and approved by Congress.
Men within the designated age group are already required to register in a database maintained by the Selective Service System, but many don’t do it, perhaps because they’re not aware that they’re supposed to, says Ulrichsen, who moved to the United States from London when he was 33 years old.
The law also requires that male immigrants between 18 and 25 register with the SSS, even if they’re just in the country on a temporary visa. “It didn’t cover me but if it had, I wouldn’t have known about it,” Ulrichsen says.
Late last year the National Defense Authorization Act was approved, along with a $31.3 million budget, for automatic registration to begin in December 2026. That’s the only thing that has changed, Ulrichsen said, comparing it to Elon Musk’s effort with DOGE to improve efficiency with automated systems. The initiative began several months before Trump joined forces with Israel to attack Iran. Still, critics say the automated registry infringes on privacy and signals a shift toward militarization.
The professor says it’s reasonable for people to wonder if Trump is putting a plan in motion to send more troops into combat. The last time the U.S. government began drafting young men via lottery-style selection was in the early 1970s for the purpose of sending them to Vietnam.
A mechanism has been in place to identify eligible troops since the late former President Jimmy Carter reinstated the SSS database in 1980, Ulrichsen says.
And although it’s a felony to dodge the draft, men have been known to purposely fail physicals or flee to Canada to avoid going to war. Ulrichsen says he’s not sure whether there’s an increased interest among young men to serve right now, when Trump is so unpopular and the conflict in Iran has not been well-received.
“If they were excited about that or viewed it as a civic duty, they’d probably join the military,” Ulrichsen says. “There’s already that option. The [draft database and the war in Iran] are not connected, and the war in Iran is not popular and is not seen as a war of necessity. I wonder how many people would want to go fight in a war of choice against a country that perhaps many people don’t see as a direct threat to the U.S.”
But it didn’t help to quell the fears of mothers and their sons when Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt said last month that while a draft is not part of the plan at the moment, the President “wisely keeps his options on the table.”
It’s worth noting, Ulrichsen says, that the automatic draft registry becomes effective in December, after the midterm elections, when “there could be a very different political arrangement in Congress.”
“A lot of people in Congress will be looking ahead, post-Trump, in terms of positioning themselves for the 2028 elections, and Trump will be a political lame duck,” he said. “[A draft] would be hard to imagine, absent a genuine national emergency that is a direct threat to the U.S., which I don’t think the current war is. It would be a hard sell, even now, and even more so at the end of the year.”
The SSS website declares that it supports “the Department of War’s priority to maintain a formidable end-strength that provides America’s all-volunteer force with the overmatch necessary to deter, compete and win in the future.”
Trump routinely posts on his Truth Social site messages that indicate he’s willing to send “all U.S. ships, aircraft and military personnel with additional ammunition, weaponry and anything else that is appropriate and necessary for the lethal prosecution and destruction of an already substantially degraded Enemy” until an agreement is reached with Iran. And he’s already made some big moves, including the attack on Iran, without Congressional approval.
“We are very good at fighting, if we have to – far better than anyone else!!!” the President posted on Wednesday.
Ulrichsen and other political experts have said there’s no telling when the conflict in Iran will end. “It’s so unpredictable — he’s so unpredictable — it’s almost impossible to tell what’s going to happen tomorrow, let alone next week,” Ulrichsen says. “I think Trump wants to find a way out and I think that’s why he hasn’t ordered new air strikes on Iran.”
The professor visited the Middle East last year and says that after a ceasefire ended the “Twelve Day War” between Israel and Iran in June 2025, many people believed the conflict wasn’t over, that “the U.S. and Israel weren’t done with Iran.”
He added that it appears Trump hoped for regime change in Iran after having some success with capturing Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro in early January.
“He got away with it in Venezuela. It worked,” Ulrichsen says. “I think Trump likes to say he’s doing things that no other president would have done. I think they were playing out the possibilities that he could be historic and be the one to succeed when no one else tried. I think that emboldened him.”
But Ulrichsen says the Iran war appears to be causing problems for Trump as gas prices rise and limited access to the Strait of Hormuz, although ever-changing, could eventually affect food prices because fertilizer for farms and other supplies can’t be transported. Experts say that affordability and the economy are going to be major issues in the midterm elections.
“Normally, there’s predictability and you can analyze what you think is the decision-making process,” Ulrichsen says. “Now, you have to look at some of the underlying issues. It’s hard to guess what might happen.”
At least in the short term, the professor says the American people have more pressing concerns than an unlikely, but still possible, military draft. However, he adds, it’s worthwhile to keep an eye on the situation in Iran.
“I think there’s generally been a lack of awareness about the registry, that for many years there’s been a way of compiling lists of every male of military age,” he says. “What evokes attention, and maybe some fear, is that we don’t know what Trump is going to do next. As we saw in Vietnam, initial operations can go wrong and you pull in more resources to try to turn things around. Over time, you dig yourself into a much bigger hole. With someone like Trump, who is unpredictable and is potentially willing to escalate, that might bring the ‘if it’s needed’ to being needed.”
