According to multiple GI rights organizations, service members are inquiring about seeking conscientious objector status in unprecedented numbers.
In spite of widespread public disapproval of the Iran war since the moment it began, we’ve seen surprisingly few displays of antiwar sentiment in the streets. Within the military, though, a quiet but staunch opposition to the war has been mounting. According to multiple GI rights organizations, service members are inquiring about their right to conscientious objector status—enabling them to leave the military honorably ahead of their contract’s end—in numbers those groups have never seen before. The Center on Conscience and War, which assists people seeking CO classification, has seen a dramatic influx of inquiries related to conscientious objection in recent months. Mike Prysner, the executive director of the Center on Conscience and War, which assists people seeking CO classification, told me in May that they had over 100 enlisted objector-hopefuls on their new client list since March, when typically a whole year would see roughly 50. In Lenore Yarger’s 25 years answering calls for Quaker House, through the GI Rights Hotline, a non-profit network offering military-related information and resources, this March and April were also entirely unprecedented. Their call volume doubled, with most service members dialing in about conscientious objection.
CCW reports that CO applicants span the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines, and all components—active duty, reserve, and guard. “I don’t think we’ve ever seen anything quite like this ever,” Bill Galvin, outgoing counseling director of the CCW, told me in June. “All of a sudden we were getting multiple calls every day.” Galvin retired this summer after 26 years—since before the war on terror. Kelly Dougherty, counseling director of the Center on Conscience and War, has advised dozens of service members in recent months who are considering applying for CO status. “I’d say pro-war sentiment is a lot lower among people in the military than it was during the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan,” Dougherty told me in June, “because they’re just confused about why they’re even being asked to make the sacrifices that they’re being asked to make.”
By and large, those reaching out to these organizations cite the February 28 bombing of the girls’ school in Minab as the moment their wartime opposition crystallized. For most of the dozens of objectors turning to Prysner’s organization, that action was an indefensible moment of no return. Those reaching out appear more plagued by moral quandaries than by fear for their safety. “I haven’t talked to any service member who said that they are scared of dying in a war that they don’t believe in,” Prysner said on Democracy Now in April. “They’re scared of killing in a war that they don’t believe in.”
The low morale right now is particularly stark among medical providers in the military, many of whom view their roles as healers as diametrically opposed to warfare they can’t justify. There has always been a latent tension inherent to practicing health in a military context, but for a number of medical professionals, the current war has made that tension impossible to live with. I spoke to one just-discharged and two commissioned physicians who sought or were seeking conscientious objector status from the Air Force, Army, and Navy, all three of whom requested anonymity for fear of retaliation. All three entered their fields with the aim of helping people, and sometime in the past couple years began to feel that their participation in the armed forces was no longer compatible with that mission. “The most important thing for the military is to ensure that they can get people back out to fight and be lethal,” said one person I spoke to who I’ll call Max, who got an honorable discharge in March 2026. “That cannot align with my being a physician.”
Another CO applicant, whom I’ll call Lydia, trained in primary care before falling in love with psychiatry. Helping her patients work through their struggles and toward a greater sense of stability felt like a calling. Lydia deployed multiple times, most recently treating patients involved in Operation Epic Fury, U.S. Central Command’s Iran offensive. When Lydia was treating patients who were not engaged in active warfare, it was easier for her to feel at peace. Her work during her deployments led to more doubt: it became hard to conceive of even something so personal as psychiatric treatment as distinct from the military machine.
That dissonance came to a head earlier this year, while Lydia was deployed. One of her patients, she told me, worked in ammunitions management, conducting oversight of the weaponry used for bombings and airstrikes aboard a vessel. After working together over several sessions, the patient told Lydia, “‘Ma’am, I don’t know if I could have done this without you. I can actually do my job now.’” It was a compliment gone awry. Lydia immediately thought about how vital this patient’s role was to the “civilian deaths and destruction” taking place. “It occurred to me that, well, the better I am at my job, the more people might die,” she told me. Lydia canceled the rest of her day’s appointments. She cried in her office and turned to her journal to reflect. “What motivation do I have to work now, and to do the job that I really love doing?” she wondered. Her plan had always been to leave the military as soon as her medical school bills were paid, in 2027, but lasting even one more year had begun to seem impossible.
Lydia soon learned that enlisted members of the military can apply for conscientious objector status. For weeks, she had confided in her family and even some fellow deployed friends about her qualms. She thought about how different it had felt treating veterans and civilians while she was in medical school — helping people get healthy, full stop, instead of helping people get healthy in order to kill. That day, she realized, “I’m directly contributing to this war effort with my service, and I couldn’t justify it anymore.” Lydia filed her CO application shortly after that, in April. “I might not get out any earlier than I normally would have. This process could take another year,” she said. “Still, I want to be able to be on the record saying I did my best to fight against this as much as possible.”
Brett grew up during the war on terror, and for him, just like for the family members, Boy Scout leaders, and religious mentors who raised him, military values were a North Star. Serving “was always seen as a high calling, as a way to demonstrate patriotism, to give back to the country that gives us all the nice things we have,” Brett told me. When he applied to medical school, enlisting in the military—even with its contractual demands—barely felt like a sacrifice. It was a dual opportunity, a way to take up two forms of service at once.
Brett became an active-duty military psychiatrist, an area of medicine that appealed to him because of the individualized, nuanced attention it affords to each patient and their experiences. Eleven years later, including four in the reserves during medical school and seven as an active duty psychiatrist, Brett’s values have shifted. Like Lydia, he has deployed, working with a wide range of military-affiliated patients, from basic trainees to high-ranking officers, Pentagon officials to retirees. As Brett accumulated experience, he came to recognize “the collected physical and psychological damage that military careers, that deployments, that serving in war zones can have on people.” Along the way, he began to feel helpless, like even his own competence could never be enough. “If I do treat somebody, they get to stay in the military and will likely be exposed to some of the same things that brought them to me in the first place,” he said. Brett’s tipping point came in February, when the U.S. struck Iran with what he described as immediate “significant, well-publicized civilian casualties,” including, he told me, deaths resulting from the bombing of the girls’ school. “I knew intellectually, and kind of academically, that civilian casualties, external fire, things like that happen, but then I started to look at all of the ways that it’s just never talked about,” Brett told me. “I was already kind of primed…[but the Minab school bombing] just lined up all the pieces into place,” Brett said. He dialed up CCW and filed his application. “Regardless of anybody’s initial kind of endorsement for war, reasons that they’re going to war, why they’re doing it, it turns out broken bodies, broken minds, the deaths of civilians,” he said.
For Max, like Brett, having the military pay for medical school—even if it meant several years of service—was a no-brainer. He’d grown up revering the armed service as the ultimate way to give back. Max is a family practice doctor whose choice to study medicine stemmed from a fascination with human performance and longevity medicine. Unlike most enlisted physicians, Max opted to complete his residency in the civilian world instead of within the military, and found himself treating vulnerable populations at a federally qualified health center. He worked with patients from the Marshall Islands who’d come to the U.S. to receive healthcare under a compensation agreement following U.S. nuclear arms testing in the 1940s and 50s. Suddenly exposed to horrors like the aftermath of radiological contamination wrought by the military, when Max began active-duty service he “found his mind and soul resisting from day one,” he said.
Max’s tipping point came in 2025, when he attended a gathering for progressive physicians. He’d been working in functional medicine, looking to solve underlying causes of symptoms and disease. Following his health advice, many of Max’s patients—young like him—were not getting any better. He was bewildered until the conference. Focused on nuclear disarmament, the gathering involved hibakusha, WWII atomic bomb survivors, and Marshallese people who spoke to how disinformation put out by the U.S government to justify nuclear testing had ravaged their home islands. Max realized some of his patients had traumas and afflictions that could be traced back to American military action. He read books that changed his worldview, like Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors, about physicians’ passive complicity in eugenics. It was a process of, as Max put it, being “radicalized by basic human decency.” “Things should feel good, right? I should feel like I’m helping,” Max remembered thinking early on in his service. “But that’s not true. And your soul knows that at a deep level, but you sort of ignore it.” Eventually, the reconciliation led him to seek CO status: “That resistance for me was honoring that I wasn’t well,” he said.
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The application to enlist in the military includes a set of questions intended to ensure that applicants have no barriers, including, say, their conscience, that will prevent them from serving. As a result, anyone seeking CO status has to document an evolution in conscience that makes them unable to carry out the duties they’d signed onto years before. The COs I spoke to all described a personal reckoning that unfolded over time, involving internal struggle and a crisis of conscience.
Lydia said she’d participated in some of the big meetings last spring during which her higher-ups planned strikes as part of Operation Epic Fury. “I’m seeing people excited to kill and using phrases like, ‘let’s spray them all, carpet bomb, kill kill kill.’” She described a latent confusion throughout the armed service, saying that their patients and fellow enlisted people by and large have no sense of why they’re fighting. Asked whether those she served with felt a sense of purpose or clarity about what’s being accomplished by the war, Lydia said, “wholeheartedly no, absolutely not.” She interpreted the heedless violence as linked to that lack of purpose: “you do kind of have to psych yourself up to do it,” Lydia said. “There’s a lot of fear and anxiety, and a lot of quick thinking in these planning meetings.”
In order to apply for CO status, enlisted people make their case by putting together a statement about the evolution of their conscience. They meet with a chaplain or other mental health professional, and an appointed investigating officer conducts a hearing during which the officer interrogates the applicant’s beliefs. The federal Selective Service System (the government agency that oversees draft and enlistment) had a webpage on conscientious objection (which appears to have been taken down earlier this year) stating that beliefs animating CO status could be religious, moral, or ethical, but not political. COs’ opposition must be to all war in principle—not just the one being carried out now. Prysner points out that it’s valid for one war to make you realize you couldn’t serve in any war.
It may be surprising that members of the military who enlisted after the war in Iraq or during the war on terror have found themselves at a moral crossroads during the Iran war. But in addition to the strong positive cultural association the military has for many Americans, military service confers powerful economic benefits that may entice enlistees to overlook moral objections.
Every CO and most veterans I talked to cited financial benefits as a significant factor in their choice to enlist. Among the many material draws to enlist—including services that are otherwise difficult to access like health care, affordable education, and pensions—the military will also pay for medical school. Through the Health Professionals Scholarship Program, those aiming for careers in medicine can get tuition paid, with the stipulation that they go active duty afterwards, as payback, matching the length of training. Medical school typically lasts four years, and residency tacks on three to seven more. That means HPSP grads typically sign onto between 7 and 11 years of active-duty service post-medical school. All physicians I spoke with are applying to leave the military prior to fulfilling their contracts, meaning they have been or will be saddled with medical school student loan debt they hadn’t anticipated needing to pay.
While I spoke with physicians who are seeking CO status, Yarger told me GI Rights Hotline is fielding calls requesting information about conscientious objection from a diverse range of enlisted personnel. They don’t represent the whole armed forces, but they do span military branches, ranks, and roles. As for why they’re objecting now, most callers—like Lydia, Brett, and Max—had experienced steadily rising apprehensions about their service that recently reached a decisive point. Yarger said she started noting a slight increase in callers after Trump dispatched the National Guard to quash immigration enforcement protests in LA last year. During the recent dramatic rise in CO inquiry, service members often tell Yarger they can’t identify a clear threat spurring military action, including behind the extrajudicial bombings of supposed drug boats in Latin American waters (which have so far killed over 200 people). And “the Minab school bombing was significant,” Yarger said. The apprehension generally has to do with a sense that the military has lost its way, ethically speaking, and that that fatal recklessness stretches all the way up to the commander in chief. Some have asked, “Why are we fighting a war for somebody who won’t release all the Epstein files?” Yarger told me. “What was really frustrating was how high up the disillusionment went with how little power any of us had,” Lydia told me. One officer asked Lydia what could be done for morale. They already had scheduled trivia nights, karaoke, and processing nights with the chaplain. “The only thing I could think of,” Lydia told me, “was send the ship home.”
The COs I spoke to follow a lineage of doctors who found careers in medicine and war irreconcilable. In 1967, physician and Army Captain Howard Levy, a Vietnam-era draftee, was court-martialled after his groundbreaking refusal to teach medicine to Green Berets. Conscientious objection had been a wartime right for Quakers and members of other pacifist religions since the nation’s first draft in 1863, but it was contentious: enlisting in the military was associated with patriotism and pacifism with cowardice. The right to conscientious objection was secularized only in 1940, thanks to a collaboration of religious and secular anti-war advocates. That year, the Selective Service Act’s deferment proviso applied to anyone who “by reason of religious training or belief, is conscientiously opposed to the participation of war in any form.” 70,000 men applied for CO classification during WWII, and about half were approved. Today’s standards are similar, applying to anyone with “A firm, fixed, and sincere objection to participation in war in any form or the bearing of arms, by reason of religious training and/or belief.”
The military doesn’t release comprehensive data on CO applications. The U.S. Government Accountability Office published a one-off report in 2007 with data from 2002-2006, during which 425 servicemembers applied for CO status, and 224 were approved.
While morale among servicemembers slumps, anxiety has been stoked outside the military about a possible resurgence of a draft. The speculation has mostly been related to an act Trump signed relating to the Selective Service System that will become effective in December, automating draft registration. Because registration with the SSS—which exists as a database in case a draft is instated—is already mandatory for men aged 18 to 25, the change is really just a technicality. Still, Trump’s freewheeling military command means worry is proliferating. The CCW sometimes hears from non-enlisted people inquiring about their rights to object in case of a draft. Prysner said they regularly receive letters from members of religious traditions whose dogmas prevent military service—groups like Mennonites, Quakers, Brethren, and Hooverites. Their teenagers write to CCW as a sort of rite of passage, documenting their opposition as part of building a record of their conscience. Long-held beliefs can underpin the sincerity they need to show for CO classification. These days, Prysner says, CCW is also hearing from trans youth and their families.
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The COs I spoke to were all experiencing repercussions from their decision to object. They shared instances of retaliation by military command; tension with military family members; awkwardness with enlisted peers. All were saddled with medical school bills—one for over $250,000. Far enough along in the process, and physicians worried about the military hampering their ability to practice in the civilian world. Once cited Dr. Yolanda Huet-Vaughn, who, after refusing orders to serve in the First Gulf War, was jailed, accused of incompetence, and threatened by medical licensing boards. For the most part, the COs’ colleagues were supportive—especially fellow medical professionals, many of whom praised their bravery and said if it weren’t for health care and their kids’ school costs, they too would apply. Among doctors, “everybody has some kind of even mild cognitive dissonance between our job as healers and our job in the military,” said Brett.
Beleaguered by medical school debts, social rifts, lingering tensions with the military, and still-pending applications, every objector I spoke to was relieved to finally be acting in accordance with their firmly held beliefs. “It very much became a direct conflict between what I feel my ethical and moral obligations are as a physician,” Brett told me, “and what my role in the military system could be if I continued.”
Sophie Mann-ShafirSophie Mann-Shafir is a writer, journalist, and MFA candidate at the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program. She was a spring 2026 editorial intern at The Nation.