A $900 billion defense budget, automatic draft registration, and repealed war authorizations — how much military power should the government hold, over whom, and for how long?
Each issue breaks into the specific questions Congress actually fights over. Read each position, then head to the interactive version of this issue to mark which reflects your view and build a message to your representatives.
A $900.6 billion topline keeps growing even as basic domestic needs go underfunded, and pouring $25 billion into a bigger munitions arsenal is escalation dressed up as "reindustrialization." Real reform means tighter oversight of Pentagon cost overruns and waste, not simply larger annual toplines.
Modernizing the defense industrial base — expanding robotic automation in munitions manufacturing, streamlining sustainment data requirements, easing the path for nontraditional contractors — is overdue after years of a shrinking supplier base, and most of these efficiency reforms draw support across the spectrum even when the overall topline doesn't.
China's military buildup and a hollowed-out post-Cold-War industrial base require exactly this kind of investment. The FY26 NDAA's $25 billion munitions push and acquisition-reform provisions finally start correcting decades of underinvestment in the capacity to produce weapons at wartime scale.
Automatically registering young men for a draft they never signed up for, without extending the same requirement to women despite decades of women serving in every combat role, revives an outdated double standard the Supreme Court left open in 1981 rather than resolving it.
Automatic registration mostly closes an administrative gap — many young men currently fail to register and lose access to federal student aid and jobs as a result — but the sex-based registration question deserves its own debate, separate from this compliance fix.
Automatic registration is a sensible administrative modernization ensuring Selective Service rolls stay accurate in case a national emergency ever requires mobilization. It doesn't restart the draft itself, which still requires separate congressional action.
Repealing the 1991 and 2002 Iraq authorizations for use of military force is long overdue — presidents of both parties have stretched decades-old war authorizations to justify unrelated action for years — but real reform means Congress reclaiming the power to authorize future conflicts, not just cleaning up old statutes.
Repealing authorizations for wars that ended years ago is uncontroversial good governance. The harder, unresolved question is whether Congress will actually reclaim war-powers authority for future conflicts, or continue letting the executive branch rely on Article II claims and the still-active 2001 AUMF.
The repeals reflect a genuine commitment to "ending forever wars" and remove authorities that had outlived their original purpose, without weakening the president's core Article II commander-in-chief authority to respond to genuine emerging threats.
Eliminating DEI offices department-wide and permanently barring men from women's teams at military academies replaces evidence-based personnel practices with a political litmus test, risking recruitment and retention among exactly the groups the military most needs to reach in a tight labor market.
Promotions and command selection resting on demonstrated performance is hard to argue with in principle. The real dispute is whether existing DEI programs were undermining or supporting that standard — an empirical question that got resolved by statute rather than by evidence, and one future NDAA cycles will likely revisit.
Restoring a single merit-based standard for promotion, accession, and command selection — explicitly excluding race, ethnicity, and sex as factors — and eliminating DEI bureaucracy refocuses the military on lethality and warfighting readiness rather than programs that had become a political flashpoint.
Expanding counter-drone authority to "defeat" threats near public events raises real concerns about mistaken shootdowns and mission creep if military counter-UAS authority expands into ordinary domestic law enforcement without clear guardrails on when and where it can be used.
Centralizing counter-drone efforts under a single task force to coordinate strategy and validate systems is a sensible response to a fast-growing threat. The real test is whether the authorities stay scoped to major events and critical infrastructure rather than expanding into routine domestic policing.
Hostile and hobbyist drones near military installations and major public events are a serious, underappreciated threat, and expanded authority to detect and disable them is overdue given how far drone technology has outpaced the legal tools to counter it.
Locking specific troop-count floors into statute — 28,500 in South Korea, 76,000 in Europe — ties the hands of military planners who may want to right-size forces based on actual strategic needs, reflecting distrust of the administration's stated intentions more than sound force planning.
Requiring consultation and reporting before any drawdown, rather than banning drawdowns outright, is a reasonable check that preserves executive flexibility while ensuring allies and NATO aren't blindsided by a sudden posture change they'd have to react to on short notice.
The troop-floor requirements needlessly constrain the commander-in-chief's authority to modernize and rightsize U.S. force posture based on current requirements rather than outdated troop counts, at exactly the moment the administration is trying to prioritize the Indo-Pacific over Europe.