The National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth (NNOMY)

• military draft
• Sophie Hurwitz
• Silicon Valley
• Palantir
• Alex Karp
• The Technological Republic
• Mother Jones

 (And also the Axis Powers.)

español  -

April 20, 2026 / Sophie Hurwitz / Mother Jones MoJo Wire - On Sunday afternoon, Palantir, the defense-tech company that sells software to clients like ICE, the US military, and the Israeli military, decided to give us all a piece of their mind. The company’s official X account published a list of excerpts from co-founder Alex Karp’s 2025 book The Technological Republic.

The book frames Silicon Valley’s move into military technology as the righteous repayment of a “moral debt” owed to the country that built the tech billionaire class. “The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.”

If you read past the post and dig into the book itself, you’ll find that this sentence continues: “the engineering elite must also, Karp said, participate in “the articulation of a national project—what is this country, what are our values, and for what do we stand.”

That is to say: Men like Karp should decide what this country is.

• Counter-recruitment
• Pentagon
• militarization of youth
• Army STEM Experience

  Part of NNOMY’s “Grooming Youth for Military Enlistment” Series

  español - 

April 06, 2026 / NNOMY Staff / The National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth - Each spring, workplaces across the United States participate in “Bring Your Child to Work Day,” a tradition meant to give young people a glimpse into the adult world of employment. In most offices, the day is lighthearted and educational, offering children a chance to see how their parents spend their time and to imagine their own futures. But at the Pentagon, this event has evolved into something far more consequential. According to the Pentagon’s own reporting, more than 8,300 children were welcomed into the building for a day filled with demonstrations of military technology, immersive simulations, and carefully curated messages about pride, service, and national security. What appears on the surface to be a harmless family event reveals itself, on closer inspection, as a sophisticated exercise in youth militarization and soft recruitment.

The emotional framing of the day is central to its purpose. Pentagon officials repeatedly told children that their parents’ work is special, essential, and something they should be deeply proud of. The message is clear: the military is not simply a workplace, but a moral identity. When a child is told that the Pentagon exists to “make your life better” and “ensure that you live in a country that’s free,” the institution becomes synonymous with safety, goodness, and loyalty. This is not civic education; it is emotional conditioning. It binds family identity to military identity long before a young person has the capacity to evaluate the political and ethical dimensions of war. The event’s tone is not neutral or informational. It is celebratory, reverent, and designed to cultivate admiration.

The activities offered throughout the day reinforce this emotional groundwork. Children were invited to try on augmented‑reality combat helmets, peer through night‑vision goggles, manipulate thermal imaging systems, operate explosive‑ordnance disposal robots, and handle drones. These are not neutral STEM tools. They are instruments of war, presented without context or consequence. The Pentagon’s own write‑up notes that children were more excited to wear the gear than to ask questions, a predictable outcome when weapons technology is framed as entertainment. This is how desensitization works: the tools of violence become toys, and the line between curiosity and militarism begins to blur. The event transforms the machinery of war into a source of wonder, fascination, and play.

• NNOMY
• War Refusal
• Youth Resisting War
• endless war
• Call to Action

  español - 

March 30, 2026 / NNOMY staff / The National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth (NNOMY) - A mind stops accepting endless war when young people begin to see themselves not as spectators to global violence, but as builders of something better. This shift rarely begins in policy debates or news cycles. It begins in neighborhoods, school hallways, community centers, and the informal networks where youth learn what is possible. For many, the first awakening comes from realizing that the stories they’ve been handed about war—its inevitability, its heroism, its supposed necessity—are not natural laws but narratives designed to shape their choices.

Young people encounter militarized messages earlier and more intensely than most adults realize. Recruiters appear in classrooms, cafeterias, and career fairs. Movies and games frame conflict as adventure. Political rhetoric paints the world as a series of threats. These messages work not because they are persuasive, but because they are constant. They create a sense that war is simply the backdrop of modern life. Youth organizing disrupts that backdrop. It gives young people a place to question the script and to see themselves as protagonists in a different story.

Community spaces play a crucial role in this transformation. A youth council meeting in a library basement, a creative content team filming a short video on a borrowed camera, a peer educator training held after school—these are the places where the idea of endless war begins to lose its grip. In these rooms, young people talk openly about the pressures they face, the futures they want, and the systems that try to shape their decisions. They learn that militarism is not just about armies; it is about the way society teaches them to see danger everywhere, to equate safety with force, and to believe that violence is the only path to respect or opportunity.

• JROTC
• military recruiting tools & methods
• Military Recruitment v. Right of Privacy
• Opt Out
• militarization of youth
• High school counter-recruitment
• S.1530 - SERVE Act

The Landscape of Counter-recruitment in U.S. High Schools is About to Change

  español -

March 16, 2026 / NNOMY Staff / National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth - The Serve Act arrives at a moment when the U.S. military faces one of the most significant recruitment shortfalls in decades, and federal policymakers have responded not by rethinking the underlying causes of youth disinterest in military service, but by intensifying access to young people’s personal information and expanding the military’s presence in schools. The bill represents a strategic pivot: rather than relying on traditional recruitment pipelines, it seeks to normalize military contact with students as early as possible, to frame enlistment as a civic expectation, and to reduce the ability of families and communities to shield young people from aggressive recruitment tactics. For the counter‑recruitment movement, this legislation is not simply another policy challenge but a structural escalation that demands coordinated, long‑term resistance.

At its core, the SERVE Act reframes military recruitment as a national security imperative that supersedes local control, parental authority, and student privacy. It strengthens federal pressure on school districts by tying compliance to funding streams and by redefining “equal access” to mean not merely allowing recruiters into schools but actively facilitating their outreach. This shift is subtle in language but sweeping in effect. Administrators who previously exercised discretion over recruiter visits now face heightened scrutiny, and districts that once limited military presence to career fairs or scheduled appointments may feel compelled to permit more frequent, less regulated interactions. The result is an environment in which military recruiters gain unprecedented legitimacy and visibility, while educators and counselors who attempt to maintain balance or protect student autonomy risk being portrayed as obstructing federal policy.

One of the most consequential aspects of the SERVE Act is its expansion of access to student directory information. Although federal law has long required schools to share certain categories of student data with military recruiters unless families opt out, the SERVE Act broadens the scope of what can be collected and increases the mechanisms through which it can be obtained. This includes provisions that encourage or require schools to streamline data‑sharing processes, reduce barriers to recruiter access, and integrate military outreach into digital platforms used by students. In practice, this means that young people who have never expressed interest in the military may find themselves contacted repeatedly, both in person and through digital channels, without having knowingly consented to such engagement. For communities already concerned about surveillance, data exploitation, and the erosion of privacy rights, the SERVE Act deepens existing vulnerabilities.

• Draft Registration
• Selective Service System
• military draft
• Statements
• Antiwar.com
• “Automatic” registration
• S.4881
• H.R.2509

  español -

March 12, 2026 / Edward Hasbrouck / Antiwar.com - The organizations listed below oppose the recent change in federal law, buried in the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, that will result in the Selective Service System (SSS) trying to “automatically” identify, locate, and register men ages 18 through 25 for a future draft.

“Automatic” registration won’t produce an accurate or complete list of potential draftees. But it will increase the likelihood of war and violate the privacy of U.S. citizens and residents. Once implemented, an automatic registration system will deny young men, including conscientious objectors, the opportunity to indicate their opposition to being drafted by opting out of registration.

This change in law was proposed by the SSS because the previous method of relying on men to register themselves with the SSS has, over time, resulted in tens of millions of young men failing to register or report changes of address. The failing record of the self-registration system was underscored when the SSS reported that in 2023 only 39.9 percent of men complied when they reached the mandatory registration age of 18.

While there currently is no active military draft, the SSS is tasked with maintaining the mechanism for one if it is authorized by Congress. Given threats and actions by the Trump administration to intervene militarily in an increasing number of places around the world, it is concerning that, at this time, steps are now being taken to grow the number of people who could be facing the threat of a future draft.

Furthermore, even before a draft is activated, the mere presence of a system to carry it out and enroll men to be involuntarily inducted can encourage politicians and military planners to feel overconfident in planning and carrying out larger and longer wars without having to worry about whether enough people would be willing to fight them. Thus, having a system for a draft in place reduces a critical guard rail for such decisions.

The new “automatic” registration law will give the SSS unprecedented authority, starting in December 2026, to acquire and aggregate information from any other federal database that might help identify or locate potential draftees. However, whether an individual is required to register depends on factors like their sex as assigned at birth and their immigration and visa status, information that could very well be absent from other federal data sources used by the SSS. Relying on such a wide breadth of federal data sources could, thus, make the SSS database inaccurate and vulnerable to misuse and weaponization, especially against transgender, nonbinary, and immigrant youth.

This potential for weaponization has been starkly demonstrated by recent efforts to grant the Department of State and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services access to the SSS database of registered individuals. The stated purpose for requesting this is to evaluate the eligibility of individuals for U.S. citizenship, but it could also be used to identify immigrants for potential deportation. If implemented, the personal information and privacy of all U.S. citizens and residents would be at risk.

The change to “automatic” registration was enacted with no hearings, no debate, and no budget review. There’s no reason to think that a list constructed from other databases compiled for entirely unrelated purposes will be any more fit for the purpose of provably delivering induction notices than the current “selfregistration” list.

In light of these facts, including the failure of the self-registration system, we are calling for Congress to end SSS registration and totally repeal the Military Selective Service Act, for which bi-partisan legislation has been introduced multiple times in the last few years (e.g., S.4881 in 2024 and H.R.2509 in 2022).

Lawmakers should act quickly on this issue before federal records are misused and the rights of young men are infringed in an ill-considered attempt to bolster the capacity of the U.S. for endless, unlimited wars.

Source: As U.S. Military Threats and Actions Escalate, Coalition Calls for Ending Preparations for a Military Draft - Antiwar.com Blog

 Statement signers (as of 3/12/26):

• AFSC
• Before Enlisting
• Iran
• Statements
• Military Families Speak Out
• Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft
• NNOMY steering committee
• Project on Youth and Non-Military Opportunities
• The War Resisters League

    español -

March 10, 2026 / NNOMY Steering Committee / The National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth (NNOMY) - The National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth (NNOMY) affirms its unequivocal opposition to the current war of the U.S. Trump Administration against the Republic of Iran. We hold that this conflict is illegal under international law and fails to meet the moral and ethical criteria established in just war theory, including just cause, legitimate authority, proportionality, and the exhaustion of non‑violent alternatives.

As an organization committed to protecting young people from the harms of militarism, we reject the notion that this war serves a lawful or justifiable purpose. Instead, it deepens cycles of violence, diverts essential resources from human needs, and exposes youth—both domestically and abroad—to preventable trauma and exploitation.

NNOMY calls for an immediate end to hostilities, renewed investment in diplomacy, and a national re-commitment to peaceful conflict resolution. We urge communities, educators, and policymakers to stand with us in resisting the normalization of war and the militarization of our society.

NNOMY Steering Committee: