The Highwire with Del Bigtree - IS A DRAFT ON THE HORIZON?

Episode Date: June 30, 2024

Is the military draft coming back? Will women be required to register for selective service? With a world war with Russia seeming to be more likely as the days pass, we break down the latest controversial proposals by America to increase readiness.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

Making headlines this week, a lot of people are concerned that the military draft is coming back. Why are they thinking this? Well, there's a lot of moving parts of the story, so let's dig right into it. In the United States here, we have the selective service system. So all males 18 to 26 are supposed to enroll in this when they turn 18. And from that pool, if there's a war, the Department of Defense can choose from that pool to induct these people into war, into the military, basically. So what happened over this last week was the National Defense Authorization Act. This is a yearly act. It gets re-opt.

Everyone, all the people put basically the legislators, the lawmakers, put their kind of wish lists into here what they want. You know, we've seen the Patriot Act come from this. We've seen some really interesting things come from the National Defense Authorization Act in the past. But one of the things that we saw was an automatic induction into the selective service system. This is the headline here. Congress moves to make selective service. automatic. So it wasn't really automatic before. It goes into this in the article here, it goes into this. It says, while it is a felony not to register currently, there is still a shred of

voluntary left, automatically registering young men for what is essentially a drafty list rips the last veil away. And though there is no act of conscription for war today, this would make it a lot easier for Uncle Sam to start it. So USA Today went into this and talks about what happens because like it said, it is a felony not to not to register if you're 18. Honestly, did you register? I don't remember ever registering. I mean, is that something? Was there a box? I checked. Wasn't paying attention? You know, were we all like, you know, up for felonies and didn't know it? I'm sort of confused that that was a responsibility. If we are for felonies, the track record is pretty good here because this investigation by USA Today, it says this. It says still, only 20 men have been criminally charged with refusing a register for the draft since President Jimmy Carter reinstated it. in 1980 in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Only 14 were convicted. The last indictment in 1986 was dismissed before it went to trial. So now the system relies large

and nonvoluntary compliance of patchwork of state laws and the risk of losing federal benefits. So if you go to the Selective Service website, it basically is like a poster. It's like an ad saying, hey, don't forget to fill this out, everybody. So there's now two versions of this National Defense Authorization Act going. One is passed through the house. Now, that's This is the one they're talking about. And if you look at this bill right now, as it's written, it says this, except as otherwise provided in this title, every male citizen of the United States and every other male person residing in the United States between the ages of 18 and 26 shall be automatically registered

under this act by the director of the Selective Service System. Now, the Senate armed services. Wait, hold on a second. Go back to that. This is, I know we've sort of looked through this a little bit. What does it mean by every male citizen in the United States and every other male person? and residing in the United States? Is that,

does that mean we have the potential? We keep talking about all these military-aged men that are coming in illegally? Is it possible that they get enrolled into fighting in armed forces? The language does seem to leave it open. And September 30th is the end of this fiscal year for this bill passed. So up until that time, we're going to see some, I think,

some hotly debated and contested points on this going, back and forth before it really becomes law. The president signs it. You know, it's disturbing about that. Like, I mean, just, and I know I'm off course. We've talked about what we thought we were going to talk about, but that really jumps out at me, Jeffrey, because when we look at the concern that we have of authoritarian governments,

when we went through what we did with the COVID pandemic, you always look at these other nations that were way ahead of us on authoritarianism, right? We have this brilliant constitution that's been standing in the way, though it got really stepped on. The question is, does a military ever turn on its own people? And many times we've seen the military step down and not take the orders to attack their own people. But what if your military is filled with people that are not? Citizens here did not grow up in this country.

Have no affinity to our country. If your military is made up of those people, seems like they would do just about anything they're asked. It's something that I think I want to look into more. So let's definitely look into that because that just seems very problematic. Yeah, we're seeing actually some foreshadowing that in Seattle, the DACA immigrants are allowed to apply for law enforcement positions. That's one city. That's making headlines as well. Wow, yeah. Let's jump back to this really quick.

The Senate Armed Services Committee has its own version. So now there's the House version and the Senate Armed Services Committee. So these are two versions. These are like wish lists. Now it did pass the Senate Armed Services Committee by a vote of 22 to 3, I believe it was. But what's interesting in there is you look through that document, doesn't say anything about automatic registration, but it does say this. It amends the Military Select Service Act to require the registration of women for selective service. Now, this has been a contested subject since 1980 when women were not allowed or basically not not allowed to be in the selective service system.

In 2019, a district judge ruled that the women should be allowed. This was a lower court ruling. Court ruling renews debate on women in the draft. but then in 2021, the Supreme Court wrote an opinion on it. It basically kicked the matter. This is AP. It kicked the matter back to lawmakers. So the high court won't review men-only draft registration law. So it basically said the Supreme Court said it's going to be up to Congress.

They're going to have to figure this out. We're not going to get involved. There's still deliberation going in on this. So end of fiscal year, September 30th, 2024, this is when it's all going to go down. So there's going to be some back and forth. They're going to try to mesh these points together. I mean, is it possible we can come out with an automatic selective service system for men and women? Absolutely. And this is why people are kind of concerned about this. But why is this happening?

Well, perhaps one of the reasons is this headline in 2022 New York Times, New York, with few able and few willing, U.S. military can't find recruits. This was at a time when they were basically kicking people out, service men and women for not getting the vaccine, the COVID vaccine. So they're at all-time record lows for recruitment. So this is a huge issue for the military. There's several issues, Jeffrey, that I have with this issue. First of all, you and I both believe wholeheartedly in this country, in standing for our sovereignty and protecting it no matter what I will, you know, I would absolutely put myself in harm's way if it meant protecting this nation for the future of my children.

So am I against the draft? My problem is all the wars that I've seen in my lifetime never seem to have done anything to protect my nation. They seem to be for sort of corporate and special interests. And that bothers me. And none of it seems to have landed in making the world a safer place. But what's really disturbing here when I think fewer able, that that concept, you know, when we think of a draft and we think of people going in the military, when we talk about what we do, 60% of our country now has a neurological or autoimmune disease their entire life. They are chronically ill.

That makes them, most of them, I think, ineligible to even be in the military. So can you imagine? Look at what we've done to ourselves. In the 1980s, back when we're talking about Jimmy Carter Day is when you might have drafted. Only 12.8% of our population had chronic illness. Now, and this is the last, in 2011, 54%, we, you know, there's a lot of signs showing that it's at least 60%. So when you think about how many of the people are raising their kids that are watching

this show that are feeding your kids, right, exercise, and certainly not injecting them with vaccines and destroying their immune systems and, you know, getting into all the autoimmune problems and the myocarditis and the parocharditis that is going to take all these other now all of a sudden, that pool ends up being my kids. And that bothers me. That really bothers me. And it's why it makes, I think, this issue very important for the people watching our show right now. An extremely valid point. And also the ideas, like you mentioned, you touched on there, the idea of running off to war is not really a popular one.

And we look at this chart here. This is the Selective Service Systems chart since, basically, over a century since World War I. And you can see here the conscription bringing these people into the military. World War I, you're looking at almost 250 million people. World War II, you have almost 350 million men. And then you see Korea, Vietnam, obviously smaller wars, but especially when it hits Vietnam, this was a widely unpopular war, especially as it dragged on politically and socially. And 1969 was the first really drafts. We're talking over 50 years ago for the Vietnam War. And how was it done? Well, that evening, all the males in the United States who knew what was going on were probably huddled around. their TVs 18 through 25, I believe it was at that time, with apprehension, and they watch this.

Take a look. The Draft Lottery, a live report on tonight's picking of the birth dates for the draft. Here at Selective Service headquarters in Washington is CBS News correspondent Roger Mudd. Good evening. It was 29 years ago that the first and most famous lottery number 158 was drawn as the United States entered. World War II. Tonight, for the first time in 27 years, the United States has again started a draft lottery. And the famous first pick tonight is September 14th, the first birthday that now is designated 001, which means for 19-year-olds born on September 14th, that beginning in January, local draft boards will induct those men born on September 14th, barring deferments, the next birthday in order, April 24th,

and so on down the line this evening. Fairly ominous lottery there. It's not like a winning lottery, you know. Amazing. And so the draftee whose birthdays were called may find themselves in the Vietnam War Zone at their first tour, basically less than six months after their basic training.

So they go right into that. And just a quick history lesson here, I'll take a moment for the Vietnam War. We have the famous whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. He was a RAN Corporation whistleblower. He leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971 to the New York Times. And what those showed, we actually have the copy of the first installment. They ran several installments and issues of this.

But it traced the decades of U.S. involvement before the war in Vietnam, basically trying to topple the regime there, the communist regime. And even the Gulf of Tonkin incident that history told us was the reason we entered the war, turned out because of these Pentagon papers and other, others turned out to be a false pretext. So as you said earlier, basically a lot of these wars, they're really not what they were told to be up front when people were drafted for this. So it's really important. We have this alternative media, this independent media telling a story as well, because we're entering into a time again where we're seeing these drums of war. And we're not just

seeing this in America. This is what makes the story so interesting because it's not just, you know, we don't have enough recruits in America. So we're going to make this automatic registration to the Selective Service. This is happening everywhere. And there's a big, there's a big war happening, Ukraine, Russia, and this is headlines in Europe. UK and other NATO allies urge to consider conscription as Ukraine warrants third year. Germany takes one of the largest steps. A first step towards conscription. Germany proposes new selective military service. So they're saying this, everyone has to be in military service now. And then we're having some more movement on this space in July 9th, starting July 9th, Washington, D.C., we're going to have a NATO summit.

And in that NATO summit, the U.S. and key allies, according to AAP News, are debating what commitment to give on Ukraine joining NATO at this upcoming summit. So I'm sorry, that was CNN. So remember, NATO with Ukraine joining NATO, that is the red line in the sand for Russia. Obviously, nothing's been committed to it, but they keep kind of beating around that bush very hard. And it's not helping when the NATO chiefs are touting this. chief tout's nuclear move to counter Russia-China threat. So they're putting their nuclear arms on

standby. So we're in really, really interesting times right now. And this military draft has a lot of people paying attention, the potential for it.