At this point, it is extremely unlikely that the United States will return to a general draft any time soon. This is politically untenable. (This may be unfortunate: there's a decent argument that drafts make people less likely to support war when they know their kids may be called up.) In any event, I'd estimate around a 1% chance of a draft in the next decade, moving to 5% in the next 20 years, in which case you will almost certainly be well above draft age before it is activated. Speaking more generally, these don't seem like major issues to worry about, aren't connected that much to rationality, and are things involving legal issues which can be better served by asking a lawyer rather than a general internet forum.
I agree with much of this, but I would say that 1-5 % is a large chance, relative to how much I would get negative utils from such an experience.
Legal advice is a big component of my question, but there's another component that is best served by asking about tradeoffs between different behaviors, like donating. Maybe that doesn't overlap strongly enough with rationality to make it relatable to the extent that true optimal philanthropy posts would be, but it's still something and I feel it's fine at least for the discussion area.. certainly not a topic for a main post or anything.
Suppose that you believe larger scale wars than current US military campaigns are looming in the next decade or two (this may be highly improbable, but let's condition on it for the moment). If you thought further that a military draft or other forms of conscription might be used, and you wanted to avoid military service if that situation arose, what steps should you take now to give yourself a high likelihood of being declared a conscientious objector?
I don't have numbers to back any of this up, but I am in the process of compiling them. My general thought is to break down the problem like so: Pr(serious injury or death | conscription) * Pr(conscription | my conscientious objector behavior & geopolitical conditions ripe for war) * Pr(geopolitical conditions ripe for war), assuming some conscientious objector behavior (or mixture distribution over several behaviors).
If I feel that Pr(serious injury or death | conscription) and Pr(geopolitical conditions ripe for war) are sufficiently high, then I might be motivated to pay some costs in order to drive Pr(conscription | my conscientious objector behavior) very low.
There's a funny bit in the American version of the show The Office where the manager, Michael, is concerned about his large credit card debt. The accountant, Oscar, mentions that declaring bankruptcy is an option, and so Michael walks out into the main office area and yells, "I DECLARE BANKRUPTCY!"
In a similar vein, I don't think that draft boards will accept the "excuse" that a given person has "merely" frequently expressed pacifist views. So if someone wants to robustly signal that she or he is a conscientious objector, what to do? In my ~30 minutes of searching, I've found a few organizations that, on first glance, look worthy of further investigation and perhaps regular donations.
Here are the few I've focused on most:
Center on Conscience and War
Coffee Strong
War-Resister's International
The problems I'm thinking about along these lines include:
I'm curious if others have thought about this. Good literature references are welcome. My plan is to compile statistics that let me make reasonable estimates of the different conditional probabilities.
Addendum
Several people seem very concerned with the signal faker aspect of this question. I don't understand the preoccupation with this and feel tired of trying to justify the question to people who only care about the signal faker aspect. So I'll just add this copy of one of my comments from below. Hopefully this gives some additional perspective, though I don't expect it to change anyone's mind. I still stand by the post as-is: it's asking about a conditional question based on sincere belief. Even if the answer would be of interest to fakers too, that alone doesn't make that explanation more likely and even if that explanation was more likely it doesn't make the question unworthy of thoughtful answers.
Here's the promised comment:
Stated another way: