Conscientious Objector Group: Phone 'Ringing Off Hook' As Huge Mobilization Underway

The calls started coming in fast. The Center on Conscience & War, an 80-year-old nonprofit that has guided American service members through every major conflict since World War II, says its phones have been overwhelmed with inquiries from troops seeking a way out of the war on Iran — a conflict that, by the group's account, has triggered a mobilization far larger than what the public has been told.

Mike Prysner, who became the Center's executive director on March 1, posted on X that a great many more units have been activated for deployment than official channels have acknowledged. Prysner knows something about the rhythm of these moments. He enlisted in the Army shortly before September 11, 2001, and was part of the ground invasion of Iraq in 2003. What he's hearing now, he says, feels like those final weeks before that catastrophic campaign began.

The Center received a call from a service member already under deployment orders who described widespread opposition within their unit to the Iran war. The caller cited two incidents in particular as sources of deep moral distress among the troops: the killing of roughly 150 schoolgirls in the Iranian city of Minab during the opening phase of the conflict, and the sinking of an Iranian naval vessel by a US submarine in international waters some 2,000 miles from the war theater. The ship had been departing a largely ceremonial naval event in India involving 18 countries. According to the account, American forces left surviving Iranian sailors to drown — a potential violation of the Geneva Convention. At least 87 people died.

Those two events have become focal points for dissent within the ranks, and they complicate the task of anyone trying to invoke the formal conscientious objector process. Under US military policy, CO status requires a sincere objection to participation in war in any form, grounded in religious training or belief. That standard doesn't easily accommodate a service member who is willing to defend the country but who views this particular war as a moral and strategic overreach — one waged, in the view of many callers, primarily to advance Israeli regional objectives rather than American security interests.

The Center has been pointing troops toward other exits. In one post, the group noted that service members in their first year of any branch can pursue a discharge by reporting a failure to adapt, and that the evidentiary bar for that process is low. It's a narrower door, but it's open.

Adding another layer to the unrest, Prysner relayed an account from the mother of a deployed service member whose unit commander had attempted to build enthusiasm for the mission by framing it in apocalyptic religious terms — suggesting the war would bring about the second coming of Jesus Christ. That account is not isolated. The Military Religious Freedom Foundation reported earlier this week that it had already received more than 100 complaints from troops across 40 units, all describing commanders who were offering theological justifications for the conflict. One commander allegedly told troops that President Trump had been anointed by Jesus to ignite a signal fire in Iran and trigger Armageddon.

Prysner came to his current role after years as a filmmaker and activist. Following his discharge, he collaborated with journalist Abby Martin on the Empire Files documentary series, which has covered conflicts from Gaza to Latin America. His background gives him a particular vantage point on what it looks like when an institution prepares to send people into a war that many of those people don't believe in.

The volume of calls the Center is fielding suggests that whatever the official posture of the military, something is moving beneath the surface. The question now is whether that dissent stays private — expressed in phone calls to a nonprofit — or whether it finds some other form as the deployment orders continue to go out.