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The draft reappears for debate

By Richard Whittle
The Dallas Morning News

AP In 1969, capsules containing days of the year were selected from a bowl in the first draft lottery in 27 years. The draft was abolished in 1973. Seven years later, registration became mandatory in case a new draft was deemed necessary.

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"I'm telling you, the draft is coming because we don't have the people anymore," Johnson said.

A war beyond Iraq or an attack on the scale of Sept. 11, 2001, is inevitable, he reasons, and the government will have to draft millions of men and women for the military and for homeland security, too.

The continuing fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan has strained the Army's force structure, the service admits, but most experts agree that reviving conscription isn't in the cards — especially during an election year.

Nonetheless, Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., has offered legislation to draft male and female high-school graduates ages 18 to 26 for the military or for civilian-service jobs. He argues that more Americans should share the burden of the war on terrorism and that the rural and inner-city poor, African Americans and Hispanics are bearing too much of it.

	Charles Rangel

The more conservative Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., who wants to boost the size of the Army, also says it's time to debate a draft.

But two other politicians — President Bush and presumed Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry — are against the idea.

"I don't know anyone in the executive branch of the government who believes that it would be appropriate or necessary to reinstitute the draft," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld recently told a conference of newspaper editors. As a young congressman from Illinois in the 1960s, he introduced the first bill to abolish the draft and establish an all-volunteer military.

Military leaders, after 31 years of experience, are happy with an all-volunteer force that they say provides them better-qualified and better-motivated troops.

	Chuck Hagel

"The senior military, retired and active, have seen the value of the high standards of the volunteer force, the low attrition rate from the training base and the high re-enlistment rate," said retired Lt. Gen. Ted Stroup, former deputy chief of staff of the Army for personnel and vice president of the Association of the United States Army. "We have a higher-quality Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps than we ever had before."

Rangel's bill, meanwhile, has gathered only 13 co-sponsors among the other 534 members of Congress.

Little polling has been done on the issue of late, but a FOX News/Opinion Dynamics survey of 900 registered voters in April found that 41 percent supported and 52 percent opposed a draft — even if "it becomes clear that more soldiers are needed in the war against terrorism."

That was down from 76 percent for and 18 percent against when the organization first asked the question in October 2001, a few weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks. The margin of error in each poll was plus or minus 3 percentage points.

About 130,000 U.S. troops are in Iraq. Roughly 40 percent are Army Reserve or Army National Guard soldiers, and the demand for troops has forced the Pentagon to call up some Guard and Reserve members two or three times since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Moreover, although the plan was to reduce the number of troops in Iraq to 110,000 by May, major battles with Sunni insurgents in Fallujah and Shiite militiamen in southern Iraq have led the Pentagon to extend the yearlong deployment of about 20,000 soldiers by three months.

But Rumsfeld and other military leaders say a simple shortage of numbers doesn't explain the repeat call-ups and deployment extensions. They were necessary because Iraq, Afghanistan and homeland-security missions require specialists who are in short supply, such as military police, truck drivers, linguists and special-operations troops.

The total available force — active duty, reserves and National Guard — numbers more than 2.4 million, and "at present, we're only accessing a very small portion" of that number, Rumsfeld noted.

The Army, the Army Reserve and the Army National Guard have embarked on a major reorganization to ease the deployment tempo. Rumsfeld also has used emergency authority to boost the size of the Army to about 510,000 from 482,000 — an increase of nearly 30,000.

Various members of Congress and some military men argue that the Army should be increased by 40,000 to 50,000 troops. But a draft would flood the Army with far more people than it needs, they say.

"If it were a gender-free draft of anyone 18 years old, you're talking about 4 million people," said sociologist David Segal, director of the University of Maryland's Center for Research on Military Organization. "Currently we bring into the military about 200,000 people a year. Going up to 4 million is a big step."

The United States never has drafted women. The only country that has is Israel, Segal said. But even restricting the draft to men would add 2 million to the Army and create massive problems, former Army personnel chief Stroup said.

"You'd have to expand the training base, which would mean more barracks, more training areas," he said.

Veteran soldiers also would have to be converted to instructors to train the draftees. The whole process would cost a lot of money.

Talk of a draft — fear, in some quarters — has been stoked in part by opponents of the war in Iraq. During the Vietnam War, opposition to the draft was a major source of anti-war sentiment.

Independent presidential candidate and Iraq war foe Ralph Nader has put a "Message to America's Students" on his Web site warning that: "The Pentagon is quietly recruiting new members to fill local draft boards, as the machinery for drafting a new generation of Americans is being quietly put into place."

That assertion, circulated on the Internet for months, has led the Selective Service to post a notice on its Web site as well.

"Notwithstanding recent stories in the news media and on the Internet, Selective Service is not getting ready to conduct a draft for the U.S. Armed Forces — either with a special skills or regular draft," the agency insists.

The Selective Service is required by law to be ready to institute a draft if Congress votes one and the president signs it into law, the agency noted, but "both the president and the secretary of defense have stated on more than one occasion that there is no need for a draft for the war on terrorism or any likely contingency, such as Iraq."

Draft advocate Rangel opposed the war in Iraq, and many see his legislation as an attempt to fuel the anti-war movement.

"I don't think Charlie Rangel introduced his legislation to man the war in Iraq," Segal said. "I think it's anti-war legislation. You start telling our 18-year-old population, about 2 million people, that you're doing to draft them, you're going to see one whopper of an anti-war movement."

Rangel argued in a Time magazine essay in December that the all-volunteer military's use of bonuses and other financial incentives to recruit and retain troops had led to a disproportionate number of poor people serving.

Money "will not make the military any more attractive to upper-middle-class young people," wrote Rangel, who served in the Army from 1948-52. "Increasingly we will be a nation in which the poor fight our wars while the affluent stay home."

His legislation was meant to "correct the disparity among those who serve," he added.

Northwestern University sociologist Charles Moskos, who studies the military and advocates a new draft for homeland security as well as the military, said Rangel partly supports conscription because "he says he would have been a bum without military service."

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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