Does the U.S. Need the Draft?

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The war, in other words, could well get bloodier. The Pentagon is rushing to train 200,000 Iraqi troops to take over combat duties by next August, but meanwhile the U.S. military is trapped in a nation-building marathon that the Army is ill prepared to carry out. Among some Americans, the prospect of an open-ended U.S. commitment in Iraq has heightened anxieties that manpower shortages may lead the Pentagon to reinstitute the draft. The heat of the presidential campaign has kept the rumors alive, which may prove costly to George W. Bush.

In a TIME poll taken before the second debate, 42% of those surveyed said they believe that if Bush is re-elected he will reinstitute the draft, while only 21% believe Kerry would. Pentagon officials, field commanders and both presidential candidates insist a draft is neither necessary nor desirable and that the U.S. can maintain its commitments with an all-volunteer Army. "We're not going to have a draft — period," Bush said in last Friday's debate. Yet speculation about the looming return of conscription has become so rampant that House Republicans last week tried to dispel the rumors by forcing a vote on a no-hope bill to reinstate the draft. (It lost, 402 to 2.) "We've got 295 million people in this country," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said before the vote. "We don't need a draft."

Maybe not, but there is plenty of evidence that the U.S. needs to find more troops. Deployed in more than 120 nations around the world, from Iraq to Mongolia, the nation's fighting forces are stretched, by all accounts, to the breaking point. Since 9/11, the number of active-duty and reservist troops deployed overseas has shot up from 203,000 to 500,000. All the Army's combat brigades have been dispatched into war zones over the past two years; some have already gone twice. The demands of war in Iraq and Afghanistan have forced the U.S. to keep some units on a constant combat footing, sharply reducing the recuperation and retraining period that military experts say is essential to maintain a first-rate Army.

There are signs that the strain of long deployments and the danger of serving in Iraq have diminished the appeal of military service. The Army National Guard reported that for the first time in a decade, it fell about 10%--or 5,000 soldiers — short of its annual goal for recruits. The pool of youngsters who have committed in 2004 to join the Army next year is only 18% of the total required, about half what the Army likes to have banked away. Roughly a third of the 3,900 Individual Ready Reservists mobilized for combat — who thought their days in uniform were over — are resisting the military's call-up. "These are the cracks that are beginning to show," Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island and a former Army officer, told TIME. "With more deployments, those cracks are going to get bigger. We're in grave danger of breaking the force."

What can be done? The Pentagon has applied a host of manpower tourniquets to keep bodies in uniform and on the front lines. For example, the military has issued "stop loss" orders that have prohibited thousands of soldiers at the end of their enlistment obligations from leaving if their units are bound for Iraq, a policy Kerry likens to a "back-door draft." Kerry wants to increase the size of the Army by 40,000--double the one-year increase authorized by Congress last week. To more effectively hunt down insurgents and terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere, he also proposes doubling the size of Army special-operations personnel. Michael O'Hanlon, a military expert at the Brookings Institution, applauds the Kerry plan. He says it would add $10 billion to the nation's $450 billion annual defense budget but would provide the military with insurance in case war-weary troops start bailing out in higher numbers. "It just ensures that we won't break the force by driving people out," he says.