< Previous page

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 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, who wrote an opinion piece last month that ripped Rangel's proposal to revive the draft, said he thought that the Army could easily recruit to the level that the Bush administration wanted "with the right kind of expansion plan."

The Bush administration recognizes that there is 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 an additional 7,000 men and women every year when they already are struggling and standards have been dropped to meet the current quotas.

Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army's chief of staff, has suggested that part of the answer is increasing the 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.

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.

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 E. 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.

Managing a draft

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 would 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 is 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."

"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?" said Rostker, who has studied military personnel issues for more than three decades and served as a top Pentagon official in the Clinton administration.

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.

< Previous page

Get $150+ in coupons in every Sunday N&O. Click here for convenient home delivery.