During the Vietnam War, nearly 500,000 men in the U.S. applied for conscientious objector exemptions to avoid the draft. But since the country moved to an all-volunteer military force in 1973, those applications have dropped significantly.
Mike Prysner, an Iraq War veteran, is the executive director of the nonprofit Center on Conscience and War. He said in a typical year, the center sees about 50 conscientious objector applications from active-duty military personnel. But that number has sharply increased since the U.S. and Israel launched the war in Iran in February.
“ Since this war started,” Prysner said, “we fielded hundreds of calls from active-duty military who do not want to participate and are strongly opposed to the war.”
Prysner said he’s getting calls from all military ranks saying they don’t want to be part of killing people in Iran for “no reason.”
“ The No. 1 thing cited by our callers and our clients as a breaking point for them was the U.S. bombing of the Minab [Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school],” Prysner said, “and that being the moment where they realize, ‘I’m not going to take part in the killing of children in the country.’”
Up until the Vietnam War, the military only granted conscientious objector exemptions for religious reasons. But in 1970, the Supreme Court’s decision in Welsh v. United States expanded conscientious objector status to include any strong moral or ethical beliefs.
Now, Pysner said, conscientious objector exemptions exist for people who join the military, then have a profound change of heart about the nature of war.
“ Everyone that we talk to are people who join the military thinking one thing, and then through their own experiences or through witnessing actions of the U.S. military abroad, they go through a deep and profound moral crisis, which leads them to realize they can’t actually do their job if they’re deployed overseas,” Prysner said.
The war in Iran — like wars in the past — is prompting a high volume of those moral crises, Prysner said.
“ Oftentimes, people in the military, they don’t really have to think or ask the deep questions to themselves: What are they capable of doing? What are they willing to do? What kind of person do they want to be?,” Prysner said. “For most people, myself included, when they’re faced with an actual war and actually having to do the thing, that’s when you really go through that deep exploration of yourself.”
As soon as a service member applies for a conscientious objector exemption, policy states they should be immediately relocated to a non-combat role. Prysner said that each command is obligated to accommodate service members’ beliefs. That policy has allowed several of his clients to stay in the U.S. after submitting applications right before they were scheduled to be deployed.
Prysner estimates a roughly 99% success rate in clients’ applications being approved, citing the prior executive director of the Center for Conscience and War.
“ The thing that they’re looking for is sincerity. I mean, that’s the main thing that the investigation is,” Prysner said. “Our clients are sincere people. They deeply believe that they do not want to take part in killing, and that’s the burden of proof in these investigations.”
Prysner said there has been a “1,000% increase” in new conscientious-objector clients, surpassing the number of applications during years of the worst U.S. casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan and the torture of prisoners committed by the U.S. military in Abu Ghraib.
Prysner attributes some of that increase to young service members who grew up amid the war on terror.
“ They grew up with the lessons of those wars, wars that were disastrous,” Prysner said, “that they found were based on lies, the Iraq War in particular, wars where the U.S., you could argue, very much lost those conflicts and left the countries in far worse shape than when we went there.”
Additionally, Prysner said many clients cite Israel’s bombardment of Gaza since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Southern Israel as a reason for a shift in consciousness.
“There was a layer of separation between themselves in the U.S. military and the conduct of the Israeli military,” Prysner said. “Well, now here we are fighting a war with Israel, doing the kinds of things that Israel became notorious for throughout the Gaza war.”
On Wednesday, President Trump announced a two-week ceasefire between the U.S., Israel and Iran after threatening that a “whole civilization will die” on social media Tuesday. While Prysner said the ceasefire deal is encouraging, he advises Americans in and out of the military not to get their hopes up.
“The Trump administration has used the guise of negotiations before to launch a war,” he said.
Trump’s conduct in the U.S. — like deploying National Guard troops to suppress protests against deadly force used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents — has also prompted a number of service members to seek conscientious objector service exemptions.
At the end of 2025, Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) and five other Democratic lawmakers posted a video to social media urging members of the U.S. military to defy “illegal orders.”
“ That was a very important measure that showed service members that they had credible people in their own government that were questioning the conduct, the use of force by the Trump administration to such a degree,” Prysner said.
Still, the clients Prysner works with at the center represent a small fraction of active-duty military personnel. Most, he said, do not know conscientious objector exemptions are an option. When he served in Iraq for 12 months following the U.S.’s 2003 invasion, he said he underwent his own crisis of conscience, but didn’t know what he could do about it.
“ I know that there are thousands of service members that have these feelings,” he said. “They hear this voice inside them, that tiny little voice, telling them what’s right and wrong, but they don’t know what it is. They don’t know what to call it, and they don’t know that rights exist to help them listen to that voice and do what it’s telling them.”
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Ashley Locke produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Michael Scotto. Grace Griffin produced it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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