Interactive simulation
How would a draft actually work?
Not politically — mechanically. If Congress and the President authorised inductions tomorrow, the Selective Service System would have to find people, notify them, get them examined, adjudicate their claims and deliver them. Every one of those steps has a queue, a capacity and a failure mode. This is a working simulation of that pipeline. Move the controls and watch where it breaks.
There is no draft. Registration is not conscription, no induction authority exists, and the Department of Defense has repeatedly told Congress it has no plans requiring conscription. This page models a hypothetical so that the hypothetical can be argued about with numbers instead of vibes. Where you would personally stand →
Table view of this chart
| Day | Inducted (mean) | p5–p95 | Requested |
|---|
The two clocks
"How long until the first inductee" has two answers and they are not the same question. Pipeline latency is how long an individual takes to move from a call to a body at a reception station — that is what the simulation above measures. Organisation standup is how long the agency needs to become capable of doing it at all, and that is arithmetic over the agency's own published and released figures, not a simulation output. Blending them is the single most common error in reporting on this subject.
Full derivation, decomposition and document citations: 193 vs 285 vs 660 — the two clocks →
What each control actually did to the model
Nothing here is a black box. Each control is a named transform on a named scenario field or parameter id, and the assumptions inside the transform are written out.
Two consequences of those transforms that are worth knowing before you read a difference as a finding. First, a notice-deliverability fraction cannot exceed 1, so the 1991 and 2003–2020 compliance regimes produce identical deliverability — they differ only in the size of the usable registrant pool, which does not bind until demand is very large. Second, the examination-capacity control has a deliberate discontinuity at its top stop: 800% is the Department of Defense's own 18,000-a-day planning assumption, not a measured capacity. Comparing the 100% and 800% positions is the single most informative thing you can do on this page — and the same comparison, run against the government's published timetable rather than a slider, moves the 100,000-inductee milestone by 81 days. That result, quantified →
How much of this is actually sourced
Read this before you quote any number above
How the numbers on this page were produced
site/tools/precompute.pygenerates one scenario YAML per grid cell into a site-local temporary directory.- For each cell it shells out to the simulation engine itself
—
python -m mobsim.run <scenario>— which runs a daily-timestep discrete-event model of all six mobilisation functions over many Monte Carlo replications. - It reads the engine's own CSV outputs back, checks that every cell ran against
the same parameter ledger by comparing SHA-256 hashes, and writes
site/data/grid.json. - This page loads that file and draws it. The sliders select a precomputed cell; they never interpolate between cells and never invent a value.
Cohort members are conserved exactly: the engine reports the maximum number of people created or destroyed across every replication of every cell, and it is —. Anything else would be a bug in the model, not a finding about the world.