It wasn't easy to defeat Johnson and Nixon in Vietnam. Peaceful protest alone did NOT do it. Direct action strikes against just the draft included raids on draft boards, plus hundreds of draft boards incinerated or blown up.

Also note that the Whitehall Induction Center was levelled by a bombing by one Jane Alpert Collective member while the others were at Woodstock, using about 1/4 of their stockpile of explosives. Zero casualties but so many records destroyed Selective Service publicly admitted they might never recover.

Every time draft records were destroyed, this made all induction orders to anyone registered with that board unenforcible in court. This was the "order of call" defense, meaning Selective Service had to prove they were supposed to be next in line or they could not get a conviction.

Thus the destruction of draft boards was militarily effective direct action. Then there were those the military feared the most: those who baited the draft boards into calling them, then used that induction to sow dissent and mutiny inside the armed forces. In this scenario the government was effectively arming their enemies and providing then transportation to the front line!

Never again has the US dared to use conscription, not even in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. This in fact drove the transition to high-tech weapons as "force multipliers" for a smaller military.

Reagan tried to bring the draft back for his bloody war in El Salvador but was defeated. I personally was part of that resistance effort. In 1983 at age 18 I publicly refused to register for the draft and dared Selective Service to "come out and fight." They never did. Earlier yet, on Oct 18 1982 I was part of a crew that transformed an NVCD action at Selective Service headquarters with mass burning of draft registration forms. This was all over the evening news, to the great consternation of those peddling a return to conscription.

Then in 1988 Reagan staged US troops in Honduras for an attack on Nicaragua. We forced him to cancel that attack. We were out in the streets almost every day until he tapped out. I still remember chain burning US flags and draft registration forms that first day in front of the White House. Again that was all over the news.

The press BTW now ignores almost all dissent unless it escalates to rioting or a flat-out Uprising like in 2020. They have learned from the defeats of their class in the past.