Military Draft? Official Denials Leave Skeptics
WASHINGTON, July 1 - The Pentagon says no. The Selective
Service System says no. And Congressional leaders say
absolutely not.
Yet talk of reinstating the military draft persists around
the country, driven by the Internet, high-profile moves by
the military to shore up its forces and fears that all
those solid reassurances about no need for conscription
could quickly melt away if world events took a turn for the
worse.
"The mood of, if not the country but a significant
plurality of the country, is highly skeptical," said the
founder of StopTheDraft.com, Barry Zellen, who has seen
traffic to his site jump in recent months. "If the world
spun madly out of control, where would they get the boots
on the ground?"
Congressional aides say their offices receive a steady
stream of telephone calls and e-mail messages inquiring
about the status of the draft. Lawmakers themselves are
regularly asked if Congress is preparing to re-establish
the system, abolished by President Richard M. Nixon 31
years ago.
"Everyone says, `We've got young children, and we don't
want them in the draft,' " said Bill Ghent, a spokesman for
Senator Thomas R. Carper, Democrat of Delaware.
At the offices of the Selective Service System, which in
1980 resumed registering men at age 18 in the event the
draft was ever resurrected, inquiries arrive daily along
with a barrage of requests from news organizations for
interviews about the idea of restoring mandatory military
service.
"People think it is some big government conspiracy," said
Harald Stavenas, a spokesman for the House Armed Services
Committee, which gets its share of draft questions as well.
But top lawmakers, joined by Pentagon leaders and
administration officials, say that there are definitely no
plans to resume the draft and that the military is much
better off relying on a substantially motivated volunteer
force rather than on conscripts.
"The idea of bringing back the draft, I think the chances
are slim and none - and slim left town," one member of the
House committee, Representative Ken Calvert, Republican of
California, said this week after returning from Iraq.
"People can relax about that issue."
The senior Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee,
Carl Levin of Michigan, agreed.
"I don't think we're going to need to reinstitute the
draft," Mr. Levin said. "The combination of recruiting and
retention is doing fairly well."
The roots of the anxiety about the draft can be traced to
several developments, among them recent steps taken by the
Defense Department to bolster forces stretched by service
in Iraq and Afghanistan. Earlier this year the Pentagon
issued an order requiring some soldiers to remain in
uniform beyond their expected dates for leaving the
service. This week the military announced that it would
recall to the barracks 5,600 former active-duty soldiers
with certain skills who have time remaining as reservists.
And Congress is moving to expand the size of the Army and
the Marines.
Lawrence J. Korb, an assistant secretary of defense in the
Reagan administration, says unease about the prospect of a
draft surfaces frequently in his travels around the
country. He says unwillingness to accept official
reassurances is attributable to public cynicism about the
Bush administration's case for war in Iraq.
"I think it is skepticism that we have been misled so many
times about this war: weapons of mass destruction, ties to
Al Qaeda, a cakewalk," said Mr. Korb, now at the liberal
Center for American Progress. "People are clearly worried
and figure, `They are just waiting until the election is
over to spring the bad news on us.' "
He and others said this could appear to those people to be
nothing less than logical progression, after the military's
resorting to an extension of tours of duty and the recall
of former active-duty soldiers.
"I think what is behind the current public discussion is
the sense the Defense Department is using coercion to
maintain the service of those who might otherwise get out,"
said James Burk, a sociology professor at Texas A&M
University who studies the intersection of military and
public policy issues. "That kind of coercion has a
resonance of what the draft is all about."
Neither Mr. Korb nor Professor Burk believes that
compulsory service will be reinstituted without
mobilization of a scale far beyond anything now needed. But
neither do they believe that the buzz will subside.
"It will simmer on the back burner and in the chat rooms,"
Professor Burk said.
The issue has also been addressed on opinion pages of
newspapers around the country. A column in The Seattle
Post-Intelligencer called a draft a "poison pill" too
unrealistic for the president to consider. Another, in The
Chicago Tribune, said that with a military whose members
are all volunteers, "we lose our sense of shared sacrifice
as a nation."
Indeed, many editorials and op-ed articles focus on the
idea that a draft would distribute the burden of war across
racial and economic divides. In The Washington Post this
week, Noel Koch, who as a Nixon speechwriter wrote a
legislative message on the draft's end, said nonetheless
that the draft had "shattered class distinctions" in the
military, mixing high school dropouts with college
graduates, rich with poor.
Seeking to blunt public speculation, the Web site of the
Selective Service System carries a long notice saying in
part that "both the president and 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."
"Additionally," the notice says, "the Congress has not
acted on any proposed legislation to reinstate the draft."
"The bottom line," said Dan Amon, a spokesman for the
Selective Service System, "is it would take an act of
Congress because we could not turn it on ourselves. And
there is no mood or sentiment in Congress whatsoever for
the draft."
Polls show there is little public sentiment for it either,
no small consideration in the Congressional thinking. In a
recent New York Times/CBS News poll, 70 percent of those
surveyed were against reinstating the draft, and the
opposition was shared almost equally among Democrats,
Republicans and independents.
The speculation was initially spurred last year when the
Selective Service System began trying to fill vacancies on
local draft boards. That was accompanied by reports that
the agency had received an extra $28 million in its budget.
But Mr. Amon said the draft board recruitment effort had
been undertaken because of the expiration of the 20-year
terms of members appointed after President Jimmy Carter
re-established registration in 1980. And the $28 million
was the agency's regular budget, cut to $26 million by
Congress, he said.
E-mail messages circulating about a draft also point to
legislation pending in both houses of Congress that would
require either military or some other national service. But
those measures, written by Representative Charles B. Rangel
of New York and Senator Ernest F. Hollings of South
Carolina, both Democrats, are much more a political
statement than potential law, since they have no Republican
support and no chance of passage this year.
Mr. Rangel acknowledges that his initial goal in
introducing his measure was to stir opposition to the war
in Iraq, his point being that privileged Americans -
including politicians - would be far less eager to commit
troops if their own sons and daughters had to fight
alongside those who join the military to get ahead.
He said the inequality in the burden of warfare was being
borne out by the "cruel" Pentagon decision to call back
former active-duty soldiers. And he said Americans were
right to remain vigilant about the possibility of a draft,
given the Iraq conflict.
"If we are really saying we are going to stay there for as
long as it takes and we don't have international people
sharing the sacrifice," Mr. Rangel said, "sooner or later
Americans have to say, `They are now talking about us.' "
Many of his colleagues reject that view, saying there are
plenty of Americans willing to join the military on their
own.
"You have drafts when you can't get the requisite numbers,"
said the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee,
Representative Duncan Hunter, Republican of California.
"There is not now indications that you can't get the
requisite numbers. But we watch those numbers every month."
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