Public docket

The missing documents

Published 25 July 2026. A record of what the public file on American draft mobilization does not contain, why each absence matters to work that can be checked, and the Freedom of Information Act requests written to close it. Requests are published before they are filed, and their status is kept current on this page.

For roughly three decades the most-quoted number about American draft mobilization was 193 days: the interval, set by the Department of Defense in 1994, within which Selective Service would have to deliver the first inductees. It is a planning factor, it is stated in plain language in the agency's own budget requests, and it can be checked against the rest of the record. We have written at length about what it decomposes into.

It is no longer in the budget requests. In its place is a reference to a document the public has never seen.

1. A planning figure leaves the budget record

Selective Service publishes a congressional budget justification each year. Our archive holds every one from FY2010 to FY2027. Searching their machine text for the delivery figure — "193", "M+193", "day 193", "193 days", together with the companion milestones "210" and "222/223" and the phrase "days after activation" — produces the following. The counts are raw occurrences, published as found.

Nine consecutive justifications state the figure; the seven since state nothing in its place until FY2027, which names a schedule instead. The wording carried through the middle years is stable enough to quote from either end. FY2012: "SSS will remain prepared to provide manpower as close to possible to 193 days after activation (M+193)." FY2020: "SSS will remain prepared to provide manpower to DoD as close as possible to 193 days after activation."^[1]

The FY2027 request, under Strategic Objective 1.1 — "Expand Mobilization Training and Readiness Exercises" — lists three bullets: "Execute a progressive exercise program (tabletop full-scale), validating SSS Mission Essential Functions"; "Maintain the Integrated Master Mobilization Schedule (IMMS)"; "Address corrective actions."^[2] That is the whole of what the public record says about the IMMS. There is no published version, no summary, and no other reference to it in any document in our archive.

The agency's annual reports to Congress track the same shape from a different angle. The delivery figure appears in them from the FY1997 report onward, with occasional gaps, and the last substantive appearance is in the CY2022 report: "SSS is required to provide the first inductees to DoD within 193 days of Congress authorizing a draft."^[3] The CY2023 report's only occurrence of the digits is an advertising click count; CY2024 and CY2025 contain none.

2. Four gaps, and what each one is blocking

We publish a simulator, a parameter ledger and a set of historical backtests. Each of the following gaps sits underneath a specific thing that work cannot currently source. That is the test we apply before adding anything to the docket: not "would this be interesting" but "which published number is resting on an assumption because this document is closed".

(a) The Integrated Master Mobilization Schedule

The IMMS is, on the face of the FY2027 budget request, the agency's current master schedule for mobilization — the artifact that has taken the place of the published 193-day milestone set.^[2] Every milestone on our plan-of-record crosscheck is drawn from the April 2009 Readiness Plan and Agency Response Plan, released under FOIA — a seventeen-year-old document.^[4] We are comparing model output against a timetable that may or may not still be the agency's timetable, and we have no way to tell from outside. The IMMS would settle whether the day-183 notice mailing, the day-193 first induction and the day-223 medical milestone are still the plan, and would put dates on anything that has replaced them.

(b) Enclosures 1–4 of the January 2026 after-action report, and the withheld observations

Selective Service ran a Response Planning exercise on itself on 15 and 27–29 January 2026. The draft after-action report states, in its bottom line up front: "The Response Planning exercise resulted in an estimate of approximately 660 days for the Selective Service System to return to full operations from our existing state of readiness. Forty-four individual actions were identified that the System can complete while in Active Standby status to reduce the projected response time by up to one year."^[5]

The same page lists six enclosures. Four of them are the arithmetic: "Support Services Sequence of Actions and Timing", "Information Technology Sequence of Actions and Timing", "Operations Sequence of Actions and Timing", and "Agency Sequence of Actions and Timing".^[5] None was released. The 44 actions are never enumerated anywhere in the released set; only the count and the aggregate claim survive. Pages 3 to 6 of the report — nine or more rows of "Specific Observations and Improvement Recommendations" — are blacked out in full under exemption (b)(5), leaving only the originating and responsible offices visible.^[5][6]

The consequence for us is precise. The 660-day figure is the largest number on our ladder of documented answers, and it is the one that cannot be audited: no one outside the agency can see how it was built, which sequence dominates it, or what the 44 actions are that would allegedly remove a year from it. The 295-day floor we publish is our own subtraction on the report's two stated figures, and we label it as such because there is nothing else to do with it.

(c) Claims and appeals planning factors

Selective Service planning documents describe the classification and appeals machinery in exhaustive procedural detail — forms, routing, the 10- and 15-day windows, local boards, district appeal boards, the national appeal board — and nowhere state how many people are expected to use it. There is no published claim-filing rate, no appeal rate, no per-board caseload, no adjudication time, no conscientious-objector claim rate. Area Office staffing is sized from registrant counts, not from expected claim volume.^[7] The 2020 national commission's document set contains none of it either; its published timeline allocates a fixed 50-day window to appeals and assumes the window suffices.^[8]

This is the gap that costs us the most. When we replayed the actual Vietnam-era draft through the engine, the single largest binding constraint in the whole run was the appeal-board queue — 20% of stage-days binding, 6.5 million person-days of unmet demand — and the parameter that produces it, classification_appeal_cases_per_board_day, is graded ASSUMPTION in our ledger.^[9][10] The most consequential quantity in that backtest is a number nobody has published. Vietnam-era board caseloads can bound it historically; a modern planning factor, if one exists, would replace the assumption outright.

(d) Per-station examination capacity, and the end of the disqualification series

Military Entrance Processing Stations are where a draft's throughput would actually be decided, and two things about them are closed. First, capacity: the United States Military Entrance Processing Command told the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services, in June 2024, that applicants normally reach a station within 48 to 72 hours of scheduling, with one exception — "in cases where a MEPS has exceeded its Maximum Daily Capacity Allocation (where the MEPS floor count for medical exams and contract actions exceeds the number of employees capable of completing that workload in a single day)", something that happens "roughly 15-20 times per year across all MEPS".^[11] The allocation exists, is enforced, and its breach rate is published. The value is not. Neither are per-station applicant volumes. Our per-station figure is national volume divided by 65 stations and 250 working days, and it is graded accordingly.^[12]

Second, medical disqualification. The Accession Medical Standards Analysis and Research Activity published an annual report on applicant disqualification every year from 1997 to FY2022. There is no FY2023 report, and the reason is stated in a one-page notice AMSARA issued on 8 June 2023: in the FY2021 and FY2022 applicant data extracted from USMEPCOM's USMIRS 1.1 database, "approximately 5% of applicants had disqualification codes, which is significantly lower than historical disqualification rates (~15%), making comparisons invalid and reporting inaccurate."^[13] A FY2024 special report confirms the problem was still unresolved. The authoritative federal series on who is medically disqualified therefore ends with the FY2016–2020 applicant cohort. Every medical parameter describing screening as it works today is estimated from data collected before 2021, and will remain so until the underlying code capture is fixed.^[12]

3. The docket

Each request below is written out in full in the project's foia/ directory, with the specific document titles, date ranges and originating offices that make a request cheap for an agency to process. Requester details and fee-category elections are completed at filing.

Nothing in this docket has been filed. Every row reads "Prepared — not yet filed" because that is the true state of all seven. This table will be updated as requests are filed, acknowledged, tracked, answered, appealed or refused, with the date of each change and the tracking number the agency assigns; released records will be published here alongside the request that produced them, and denials will be published in full.

Request 07 exists because of a document already released. A FOIA production of Selective Service email shows an Army War College correspondent transmitting "visuals from the nine runs" of a conscription model to Selective Service staff in May 2025, with a Selective Service exercise specialist later forwarding "html output from the AWC model — these were the runs that we used to begin the exercise." Every number in the exchange, including a passage describing a daily growth in the examination-station queue, is withheld under exemption (b)(5) by Selective Service. The Army War College holds the same records under its own authority.^[14]

4. How these requests are written, and why

Selective Service's FOIA regulations at 32 C.F.R. part 1662 take requests through an online portal, by email to FOIA@sss.gov, or by mail to "SSS, ATTN: Freedom of Information Act Officer, 1501 Wilson Boulevard, Suite 700, Arlington, VA 22209."^[15] The regulations also record something worth keeping in view: the Chief FOIA Officer "will not process a request … to the extent it asks for records that are currently publicly available."

So each request names documents whose existence and exact titles are established on the face of a record the agency has already released, gives the date range and the originating directorate where the corpus supports it, and asks for nothing already published. The Enclosures are named as the after-action report names them. The AWC files are named as the email names them. Precision is not a courtesy here; it is the difference between a search that takes an hour and one that gets closed as unreasonably burdensome.

Where we have not been able to establish an agency's correct FOIA office address from a document on file, the letters carry a FOIA_OFFICE_ADDRESS_TBD placeholder rather than a guess. Where a record may be exempt, we say so in the request and ask for segregable portions.

Sources

Each item names the archived file the material was read from, so any figure above can be traced back to its document.

1. Selective Service System, Congressional Budget Justifications, FY2010–FY2027, complete series. Occurrence counts in the table above are from a machine text search of the extracted text of each document; the FY2010 justification is a scanned image with no text layer and is reported as unsearchable rather than as zero. Quotations from the FY2012 and FY2020 justifications. corpus/sss_official/raw/CBJ_FY2010.pdf through corpus/sss_official/raw/CBJ_FY2027.pdf; extracted text in corpus/sss_official/text/. sss.gov/cj
2. Selective Service System, FY2027 Congressional Budget Justification, Strategic Objective 1.1: "Execute a progressive exercise program (tabletop full-scale), validating SSS Mission Essential Functions / Maintain the Integrated Master Mobilization Schedule (IMMS) / Address corrective actions." corpus/sss_official/raw/CBJ_FY2027.pdf; duplicate copy at corpus/autoreg_rule/raw/SSS_FY2027_CBJ.pdf
3. Selective Service System, Annual Reports to Congress, FY1997–CY2025. Delivery-figure occurrences by report year from the same machine search; last substantive appearance in the CY2022 report. Earliest appearances verified in the FY1997, FY1998 and FY1999 reports recovered from the Internet Archive. corpus/sss_official/raw/AR_2002.pdf through corpus/sss_official/raw/AR_2025.pdf; corpus/sss_official/raw/historical/
4. Selective Service System, Readiness Plan / Agency Response Plan, April 2009, Annex C Mobilization Timeline (first induction notices mailed not later than day 183; first inductees report no later than day 193; lottery on or before day 45), released in a FOIA compilation of six operational records. corpus/foia_explan/raw/GA_SSS-SixOperRecords_2008-2016.pdf. governmentattic.org
5. Selective Service System, Response Planning Exercise After Action Report (draft, redacted, 6 pp.), 2026. Bottom line up front and the six-item enclosure list at PDF p. 1; "The System currently does not have any planning COAs to guide a return to full operations" and the three courses of action at PDF p. 2; required decisions, including "What is the true pacing function for mobilization?", at PDF p. 3. corpus/foia_explan/raw/24-Draft_Response_Planning_AAR_Redacted.pdf. FOIA release archive
6. DraftClock corpus redaction accounting for the January 2026 exercise release set: the (b)(5) withholdings at AAR pp. 1, 2 and 3–6, and the blank timing columns in the three directorate notetaking guides whose completed versions are the unreleased enclosures. corpus/foia_explan/COVERAGE.md, corpus/foia_explan/explan_jan2026_extract.md
7. DraftClock corpus coverage note on the FOIA-released Selective Service planning documents, gap #2: "No ASP diversion rate, claim-filing rate, appeal rate, or MEPS disqualification rate… SSS plans capacity to process claims (via the Area Office TOA workload factor of 6,991 registrants/year-group) without ever modeling claim volume." corpus/foia_explan/COVERAGE.md
8. DraftClock corpus coverage note on the 2020 National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service document set, §4.3, "Classification and appeals throughput — entirely absent", including the fixed 50-day appeals window in the published timeline. corpus/ncmnps/COVERAGE.md
9. MOBSIM historical backtest suite, backtest 1 (Vietnam steady state CY1966–71), binding-constraint accounting: unconstrained 66.7% of stage-days, classification_appeal_queue 20.0% with 6.5 million person-days of unmet demand, notification_address_trace 8.5%, delivery_meps_queue 4.1%. validate/BACKTEST_REPORT.md
10. MOBSIM parameter ledger v1, entry classification_appeal_cases_per_board_day, reliability grade ASSUMPTION; sixteen further classification, claim and appeal entries carry the same grade. params/ledger_v1.json; browsable on the data page
11. United States Military Entrance Processing Command, response to Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services Request for Information No. 1, June 2024, p. 2 (the 48–72 hour business rule, the Maximum Daily Capacity Allocation exception, and the 15–20 occurrences per year across all stations; the document prints the annual occurrence rate as "0012%"). corpus/meps_medical/raw/gao/MEPCOM_RFI_DACOWITS_Jun2024.pdf
12. DraftClock corpus coverage note on Military Entrance Processing Station data: the per-station volume gap ("No public document gives applicants processed per MEPS… never publishes the allocation value itself"), the derivation and grading of our per-station figure, and the consequence of the AMSARA series ending with the FY2016–2020 cohort. corpus/meps_medical/COVERAGE.md
13. Accession Medical Standards Analysis and Research Activity, AMSARA FY 2023 Annual Report Unavailability Statement, 8 June 2023 (Walter Reed Army Institute of Research), quoted in full in part above; and the FY2024 Special Report confirming no traditional annual report since FY2022. corpus/meps_medical/raw/amsara/AMSARA_FY2023_unavailability_statement.pdf, corpus/meps_medical/raw/amsara/AMSARA_FY2024_Special_Report.pdf
14. Selective Service System, FOIA production SSS-2026-02-000001 through -000003: email traffic between an Army War College correspondent and Selective Service staff regarding conscription-model runs used to begin the January 2026 exercise, with attachments "SSS TTX runs.zip" and "Delivery Exercise Data 2may2025 notes.xlsx". Model inputs, outputs and the correspondent's observations are withheld under exemption (b)(5); names and contact details under (b)(6). corpus/foia_explan/raw/AWC.pdf
15. Selective Service System FOIA regulations, 32 C.F.R. part 1662, as revised (docket SSS-2024-0006): §1662.7 (online portal, FOIA@sss.gov, and the Arlington mailing address), §1662.6 (requirements of a request), §1662.8 (requests for records already publicly available are not processed), §1662.9 (Chief FOIA Officer's authority), §1662.16 (appeals to the Director of Selective Service). corpus/foia_explan/raw/SSS-2024-0006-FOIA-regulations.pdf

Corrections are welcome and will be published on this page with the date they were made. Contact: contact@draftclock.org. Related: the readiness-simulation procurement and the three documented answers to how fast America could draft.