i've thought for a while that a draft is one of the small number of things that might actually precipitate a rapid system collapse, especially if women are drafted. i can't imagine a circumstance under which such a policy would actually be implemented though, given how badly the last one went.
Potentially yes.
Like you said, given how badly the last one went, it's unlikely that a general draft will be enacted in anything but a situation where both the general public was in favor of it, and the system was already under threat without the manpower a draft could provide.
The American military is now set up to function without the draft, preferring to impress the recently ex military folks via stop-loss and deploy the reserves, which only bothers those who did technically speaking literally sign up for that shit, and also provides trained soldiers rather than untrained and unwilling civilians.
The American war machine is now set up to wage war without the draft, which puts a substantially lower threshold on the amount of public support a war/military action requires.
Since any deployment will only inconvenience/kill the increasingly socially separate sphere of current soldiers, reservists, and vets, many of the general public will see literally no signs of the war in their personal lives, or only see that one guy at work get put on leave when he's called up. They won't really notice the war, so they won't really care about it.
If a member of the general public does care either way, they likely won't consider the lives of American soldiers as relivent to their caring unless they're vets themselves; they'll see those lives as pawns to be spent with no real consideration of them being real human beings with families who love them if they're hawks, or as monsters eager to murder Brown civilians who's deaths should be celebrated with no real consideration of them as human beings with families who love them if they're doves.
