I made the decision to join the United States Armed Forces twice in my life.

First, in the early 1990s after school when I enlisted and trained as a U.S. Marine. Then, following the 9/11 attacks, I signed up for the Idaho National Guard and was later deployed to Afghanistan.

Those were my decisions, ones I made because I believed in service, and knew the military would be good for me.

But what if it wasn’t your choice to join the military? What if it wasn’t your son’s choice? What if, suddenly, your daughter was forced to join the military?

There are amendments to the annual National Defense Authorization Act (which finances our global empire at the cost of over a trillion dollars) that’ll not only make men’s insertion into selective service automatic, but compel women into the system as well.

Even though the United States has not had an active draft for over fifty years, the government still maintains a Selective Service System. Currently, boys from the ages of 18-25 are required to sign up in preparation to be pressed into uniform. The law is rarely enforced—a system of disincentives like baring financial aid to college convinces most young men to register—and the agency is so derelict that it doesn’t possess the resources to police mass compliance.

But the Pentagon and the Joe Biden White House want to revamp the system. They want the age raised to twenty-six, they want to remove initiative from citizens and make selective service automatic on your eighteenth birthday, and they want the system universalized to include girls as well as boys.

Why are they doing this? Isn’t it obvious? Joe Biden’s foreign policy is a disaster on every front, from permanent occupations in a chaotic Middle East to fighting proxy wars in Eastern Europe on the border of the country with the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. The president’s aggressive militarism is signing checks he expects American soldiers to cash.

But there’s not enough to fight these endless wars. So the War Party’s solution is to put your sons and daughters on the front lines of World War III.

You’ll have seen big arguments in the corporate press this week discussing pros and cons, and wondering whether this is the best course of action. They make the issue sound more complicated than it is.

So I’ll lean on the Gipper for a simple and direct nugget of wisdom.

During his 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan promised to abolish selective service registration. He says that it “rests on the assumption that your kids belong to the state.”

“That assumption isn’t a new one,” Reagan said. “The Nazis thought it was a great idea.”

Bring Our Troops Home is in full agreement with Ronald Reagan: selective service should be ended, not expanded.

And if the sentiment of my favorite president isn’t enough to suit you, let’s go back further to just after the American Revolution.

Daniel Webster, one of the finest statesmen America has ever produced, long before he was U.S. Secretary of State or even Massachusetts’ distinguished senator, was a freshman congressman from New Hampshire.

He made his bones as an opponent of the War of 1812; a war that had been formally declared by Congress (James Madison, father of the U.S. Constitution, was president so our government still cared about that sort of thing…) but Webster still believed the war was unwise and counterintuitive to America’s interests.

So when President Madison requested a draft to conscript men into the army, “God-like Daniel” pulled no punches:

“Where is it written in the Constitution, in what article or section is it contained that you may take children from their parents and parents from their children and compel them to fight the battles of any war which the folly or the wickedness of government may engage in? Under what concealment has this power lain hidden which now for the first time comes forth, with a tremendous and baleful aspect, to trample down and destroy the dearest rights of personal liberty? Who will show me any constitutional injunction which makes it the duty of the American people to surrender everything valuable in life, and even life itself, not when the safety of their country and its liberties may demand the sacrifice, but whenever the purposes of an ambitious and mischievous government may require it?“

Webster’s words contributed to the bill’s defeat on the grounds that conscription was unconstitutional.

Today’s attempted expansion of selective service is the canary in the coal mine. Joe Biden knows Americans don’t want to fight these undeclared wars or the future ones he has planned, so he wants the draft as a backup.

I believe that any war the American people are unwilling to die for is clearly a war our country shouldn’t fight.

That’s as direct as democracy can possibly be, if the government started a war and nobody showed up.

But instead, Joe Biden and his Pentagon flunkies want to force our children into the military and, in the words of Webster, “extract slavery from the substance of a free government.”

I made the decision to fight for my country. There are still people making that free choice, although more and more are telling me they won’t because they’re so disgusted with our broken foreign policy and obsession with making the military “woke.”

The American military ought to always be a voluntary act of service.