>>96881
The Roman republic had universal conscription of all males upon their sixteenth birthdays. This was called the "dilectus." Two thousand years before that, whenever the King (this was before they created the title "Pharaoh") told his ministers, "we need more warm bodies for the army," a local minor official would show up in an outlying villages with a handful of troops from the regular military, strip them of every male old enough to hold a spear (with a sharp bit of bronze at the business end if they were feeling generous, flint otherwise) and a wicker shield, and frog-march them all off, repeat until the King says "okay I think we've got enough guys to wage war against the Caananites, you can stop now guise, lol."
The practice goes back to the Bronze Age, and it is well attested. Also, if we're talking about US history specifically, the US used the draft quite successfully from the Civil War through Korea.
I don't like the prospect either, but please don't represent it as something that's somehow inherently unworkable and doomed to fail, because that's not what history tells us.