Do we need to revive the draft?

WASHINGTON — The war in Iraq marks the first time in modern history that the United States has fought an extended conflict with an all-volunteer military.

The strain of fighting nearly four years in a two-front war has put unprecedented stress on the Army and the Marine Corps — which have borne the brunt of the fighting — and has raised serious questions about whether an all-volunteer force can be maintained over the long term.

Even if U.S. troops were to pull out of Iraq tomorrow, the United States faces a war of unknown duration against al-Qaida in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Other threats include Iran and North Korea.

The Iraq Study Group warned in its report last month that the war in Iraq has put the country in a bind.

"An extraordinary amount of sacrifice has been asked of our men and women in uniform, and of their families," the group wrote. "The American military has little reserve force to call on if it needs ground forces to respond to other crises around the world."

"Collision course"

"I think America is on a collision course with itself because America has worldwide obligations," said Frank Schaeffer, co-author of "AWOL: The Unexcused Absence of America's Upper Classes From Military Service — and How It Hurts Our Country."

"All it's going to take is one more conflict or one more world crisis," Schaeffer said, "and we would be very soon facing the fact that no matter what our position on these issues is, we're going to be facing a simple choice of act or don't act. And if we do, then we're going to have to have alternatives."

At least one lawmaker has proposed a radical alternative. Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., wants to reinstate the draft.

His proposal would require all U.S. residents ages 18 to 42 to perform two years of national service, either in the military or as civilians working in ports, hospitals or some other public-service role. The only people exempted would be high-school students up to age 20, conscientious objectors and those who are too unhealthy to serve.

Rangel, an Army veteran who won a Bronze Star in the Korean War, opposes the Iraq war and has put forth a draft bill every year since 2002. Critics accuse him of political grandstanding.

Some fellow lawmakers find his basic argument compelling. If the war in Iraq is the national-security threat that the Bush administration says it is, shouldn't all Americans be asked to shoulder their part of the burden to defend the country?

Bush said he'd considered a draft but rejected it. "I think the volunteer army is working, and we've got to keep it strong," he told PBS news anchor Jim Lehrer in an interview Jan. 16.

The North and the South conscripted forces during the Civil War. There was a draft during World War I and again in World War II. The last draft lasted from 1948 to 1973, when Congress eliminated conscription as the Vietnam War drew to a close.

Many military officers, lawmakers and analysts oppose bringing back conscription, saying it would ruin the professionalism and quality that the all-volunteer force has built up over the past 34 years.

"The nature of decentralized tactics today demands a level of professional experience and competence far above what it was 30 and 40 years ago," said Rep. Geoff Davis, R-Ky., a former Army officer and West Point graduate who serves on the House Armed Services Committee.

Davis said a return to mandatory service would add unnecessary costs to national defense and would "reduce the productivity of military organizations in general."

"Think about the burden on the unit of somebody who's not motivated or highly disciplined or isn't concerned about the motivation of their peer group; they're going to be a less effective individual," he said.

Davis said he thought that the Army could easily recruit to the level that the Bush administration wanted "with the right kind of expansion plan."

Paying up

The Army had 732,000 active-duty soldiers during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. The Army now has about 512,000 active-duty soldiers.

Rep. Jim Marshall, D-Ga., who also serves on the Armed Services Committee, said he generally liked the idea "of a year or two of service for all young Americans. But I don't think we need a draft right now."

"I do think that an all-volunteer service is preferable, and military commanders think the same thing," said Marshall, who served as an Army Ranger in Vietnam.

"The question is if the country is willing to pay for it," he said.

The Bush administration recognizes that there's a problem and has promised to add 92,000 service members to the Army and the Marine Corps over the next five years.

But that means Army recruiters will have to sign up another 7,000 men and women every year, when they're already struggling and standards have been dropped to meet the current quotas.

Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army's chief of staff, has suggested that part of the answer is increasing the financial incentives to enlist. The Army already offers as much as $40,000 to recruits, however, and personnel costs are taking a larger chunk of the defense budget every year.

The Defense Department's latest annual survey of social representation in the military, published last May, doesn't include the economic backgrounds of its recruits. But the study, which relies on 2004 data, acknowledges that "prevailing economic conditions may come into play" when a person decides to enlist.

Income levels

Outside studies are mixed. The National Priorities Project, a nonpartisan group in Northampton, Mass., says its data analysis from the past two years shows that the number of Army recruits from wealthy neighborhoods — which it defined as those with average household incomes of $60,000 or more — are underrepresented compared with civilian society. The overwhelming majority of recruits come from households with incomes in the $30,000 to $59,000 range, the group found.

The conservative Heritage Foundation, a Washington research center, found just the opposite. According to its survey last year, 18- to 24-year-old recruits from homes with incomes ranging from $52,000 to $200,000 a year were overrepresented in the ranks.

Heritage, which looked at data from 2003 to 2005, found that these youths make up nearly 23 percent of military recruits, while only 20 percent of all 18- to 24-year-olds in America come from that income bracket.

"It is true that the sons of the very wealthy do not necessarily serve," said Bernard D. Rostker, the author of "I Want You: The Evolution of the All-Volunteer Force" and a senior fellow at the Rand Corp., a research center. "But the quality of the force is much above the average, as measured by high-school graduation rates, as measured by intelligence tests. ... It is not a force of poor people. It is a force that represents a broad cross-section of America."

In the meantime, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has outlined plans to call up the National Guard and Reserves more frequently. But the more the military relies on its citizen-soldiers to fight the war, the less attractive the Reserves become to those who don't want full-time military careers.

Taxed backups

There are concerns that overusing the Guard and Reserves could strain those forces as badly as the active-duty ranks.

"This is clearly not a risk-free set of solutions," said Christine Wormuth, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a national-security research center, and a former Pentagon official who has written extensively about the National Guard and Reserves.

The Pentagon estimates that it would cost about $4 billion more a year to reinstate the draft. New facilities would have to be built to train and house the large numbers of inductees who'd be brought into uniform each year.

The Census Bureau estimates that there are 30 million people ages 18 to 25 in the United States.

About 4 million men and women reach military age each year, but the military needs only a small fraction of that number. That's a fact that those who argue for a return to the draft tend to overlook, said Bernard D. Rostker, the author of "I Want You: The Evolution of the All-Volunteer Force."

Going deeper

"The fundamental question — which dogged us in the '60s and would dog us again if we return to conscription — is who serves when not all serve?" asked Rostker, who has studied military-personnel issues for more than three decades and served as a top Pentagon official in the Clinton administration.

"I don't think it's necessary that every eligible young man and woman serve," Schaeffer said. "But the idea that 300 million Americans send the same 140,000 people again and again and again into combat is absolutely immoral. We're an enormous and wealthy country, but essentially we've taken a small group of people and we expect them to do everything."

Draft proponents say that those whom the military doesn't need could work in homeland security guarding airports, seaports and borders or could work in understaffed hospitals or schools.

The Gates Commission, which President Nixon created in 1969 to look at ways of ending compulsory service, considered a "standby draft" to be an integral part of an all-volunteer force, Rostker said.

At least one commissioner was convinced that while an all-volunteer military might be possible to maintain during peacetime, the draft would have to be reinstated during a major conflict, Rostker said.

So far, the war in Iraq has defied those expectations.

"We're three years into a war right now, and the all-volunteer force is doing remarkably well," Rostker said.

But whether that's sustainable over the long term in the war on terrorism is an open question.