Challenge 2025, a conservative coalition’s proposal for a future U.S. Republican presidency, recommends instituting a navy draft for all public college seniors, requiring them to serve within the armed forces for no less than two years.
In late September 2024, a rumor circulated on social media about Project 2025, a conservative coalition’s proposal for a future U.S. Republican presidency, supposedly instituting a navy draft for public college seniors.
In line with the rumor — which unfold throughout platforms like X (previously Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok — Challenge 2025 not solely recommends the draft but additionally requires the scholars to serve within the armed forces for no less than two years. Per the posts, the alleged draft wouldn’t apply to non-public college college students.
An X publish read (archived), for instance:
ARE YOU PAYING ATTENTION, YET?!
Challenge 2025: opens up ‘the draft’ to all public college seniors for a 2 12 months dedication…
Personal college children are exempted.
Gee, I ponder why?!
PASS. IT. ON.
A number of Fb posts additionally made the declare, and at the least one TikTok video referenced it, with somebody asserting: “In case you go to public college, while you flip 18 you’re robotically enlisted within the navy. However if you’re in personal Christian college you get to decide out.”
The declare, nonetheless, is fake. Challenge 2025, which is a wide-sweeping effort by The Heritage Basis that facilities on a roughly 1,000-page document, doesn’t suggest instituting a navy draft for all public college seniors, nor does it require a two-year navy dedication from these college students.
A search of Challenge 2025’s doc for phrases comparable to “2 12 months(s)” or “two 12 months(s)” yielded no outcomes to help the declare. The doc mentions a navy draft as soon as (on web page 109), although that reference shouldn’t be concerning a proposed future draft. Quite, that passage references the previous — when former U.S. President Richard Nixon signed laws to finish the draft — studying: “The Military not displays nationwide demographics to the diploma that it did earlier than 1974, when the draft was eradicated.”
Ellen Keenan, senior communications supervisor at The Heritage Basis, wrote through e mail the declare “is fully false and ridiculous.” The e-mail continued: “We don’t name for the reinstatement of the draft wherever in Challenge 2025.”
The false rumor seemingly stemmed from a different proposal inside the doc about navy recruitment, not conscription. That passage proposes necessities for all college students in federally funded public excessive faculties to take the Armed Providers Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB), the navy’s entrance examination. The advice reads: “Enhance navy recruiters’ entry to secondary faculties and require completion of the Armed Providers Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) — the navy entrance examination — by all college students in faculties that obtain federal funding.”
Challenge 2025 leaders are hoping to implement their proposals as early as November 2024, if voters select Republican Donald Trump over Democrat Kamala Harris within the upcoming presidential election. Trump has tried to distance himself from the initiative, and the extent to which his marketing campaign and Challenge 2025 leaders are working collectively is unclear.
