My 18-year-old son mailed a letter to our church in February. It’s a quaint act from a bygone time, writing a letter. So much so, I had to show him where to place the return address.

The letter is short and to the point. It says he has a “firm, fixed and sincere objection to participation in war in any form or the bearing of arms.” That’s the Pentagon’s definition of conscientious objection. The letter also notes his openness to alternative service.

He wrote the letter because the ­Selective Service System has no means to indicate CO status when registering for the draft, which takes probably 30 seconds online.

One can also use the paper form from the post office and write opposition in the margins to create a paper trail. It can’t hurt but doesn’t really help.

Soon, that method of protest may not be an option. By this time next year, draft registration is supposed to happen automatically based on a new law’s unfunded mandate. But until that new process takes complicity out of young men’s hands, my son had to register.

So he wrote a letter. A few weeks later, the U.S. and Israel launched strikes Feb. 28 against Iran.

The right time for any CO to get started on documentation is yesterday.

With a postmark certifying its date, the letter arrived at church, where it will slumber in a filing cabinet. I look forward to the far-off day it’s rediscovered, a long-forgotten time capsule of prudent caution.

Most Anabaptist denominations and conferences have online resources to help. Rosedale Network (formerly Conservative Mennonite Conference) has especially straightforward details and a form that can easily be filled out online.

Our little letter took me back 20 years to my work in military counseling during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I thought of how challenging it was to assist and support COs attempting the brave journey out of the U.S. military — and how much better it is if you never join.

For Mennonite young men of previous generations, the prospect of facing a draft board meant learning to articulate their beliefs about killing other humans for their country. Since the draft ended in 1972, peace churches have rested easy.

Perhaps too easy. Today, Anabaptist voluntary service programs draw a tiny fraction of their draft-era numbers. If there was a golden age of Anabaptist alternative service, it tracked with World War II, Korea and Vietnam. But were young people in those days really more service-minded than today’s youth? Without an obligation to do alternative service, how many would have volunteered or stayed connected to churches?

I applaud every church that gets proactive about talking to our teenagers about what it means to believe in peace when it’s not popular or painless.

This can include conversation with youth groups from people who faced draft boards and those who refused to register to avoid complicity with militarism after President Jimmy Carter resumed draft registration in 1980.

Thankfully, the draft remains as unpopular today as it was in the 1960s. It’s unpopular with the military, too. Unwilling soldiers are a burden.

One of the COs I worked with got lucky and was labeled a “cancer” by a commanding officer who fast-tracked him out with an honorable discharge before he could “infect” the rest of his Army unit.

A 2004 Department of Defense memo indicated the department opposes a draft because conscription is inefficient and a poor use of funds. It wastes training on people with relatively short terms of service who don’t want to be there, and comes with burdensome congressional oversight.

Might conscription be, counterintuitively, a tool for peace? Richard Nixon campaigned in 1968 on a promise to end the draft, believing that without conscription to keep antiwar sentiment running hot, the peace movement would fade.

Nixon wasn’t the only politician who noticed conscription made war unpopular. The late Rep. Charles Rangel, a Democrat from New York, went a step further, believing a draft would deter war. Rangel, a veteran, introduced legislation at least six times between 2003 and 2015 to institute universal military or civilian service for men and women ages 18-25. It failed 402-2 the only time it came to a House of Representatives vote. Rangel said in the New York Times: “If those calling for war knew that their children were likely to be required to serve — and to be placed in harm’s way — there would be more caution and a greater willingness to work with the international community in dealing with Iraq.”

Mike Mullen, former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in 2015 the military should shrink so that more Americans would have to say “yes” — via a draft — when the country went to war.

“That would mean that half a million people who weren’t planning to do this would have to be involved in some way,” he said in The Atlantic. “They would have to be inconvenienced. . . . It’s become just too easy to go to war.”

In an era of polarization, a military draft is one of the few things everyone can agree to hate.

Tax dollars, not draftees, sustain today’s wars. It could be said paying others to fight your nation’s battles has some precedence in Anabaptist COs paying others to take their places during the Revolutionary War and Civil War.

Weapons are expensive, and so is an “all-volunteer” fighting force. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars enticed enlistees with bonuses of tens of thousands of dollars and free college. Yes, they volunteered, but many impoverished young men and women felt then and now they have few choices other than military service.

Though less costly than yearslong boots-on-the-ground quagmires, quick raids by special forces and distant air strikes must be paid for. The first week of the Iran war cost $11 billion. The Pentagon has asked Congress for $200 billion to fund the war. The president who campaigned on avoiding wars has called for a $1.5 trillion defense budget for 2027, an increase of more than 50%. He suggested tariffs would pay for it.

We wrote our letter not because a draft is likely, but because militarism persists.

Tim Huber is associate editor of Anabaptist World.