Feel A Draft?

In late 2001, when Boston-based peace activist Barry Zellen first registered the domain name Stopthedraft.com, traffic on his site was slow. After all, what was there to stop? As U.S. soldiers bobbed and weaved through the Afghanistan countryside, it was even more apparent (lest anyone forget) that America has the largest, most well-funded, kick-ass military in the world. A draft seemed simply unnecessary. But two years – and another war – later, the number of visitors to Zellen’s site has increased ten-fold.

“The number of hits went up to about 10,000 per month,” Zellen says. While a lot of the people posting comments on the site were hardened anti-draft activists from the ‘60s, Zellen says many were simply worried citizens. “There are a lot of letters from moms and sisters of kids who are potentially draft age who are just scared.”

Last fall, a small notice was posted – and later removed – from a Department of Defense website, seeking applicants to fill positions on 2,000 local draft boards nationwide. About this time, $28 million was added to the 2004 Selective Service System’s budget. Fueled by the twin bills lingering in the House and Senate that require military service for both men and women, rumors began to circulate about a government plan to restart the draft in 2005.

In recent weeks, several government offices and news agencies also reported a dramatic rise in the number of e-mails and calls concerning the draft. Most were in reaction to the Army’s June 2nd announcement that it was issuing “stop-loss orders” on all units deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. National Guard and Reserve members make up roughly 40 percent of the forces in the two countries. And with enlistment numbers down, the order retains already stretched troop levels by preventing volunteer soldiers from retiring or leaving the service – something that presidential hopeful John Kerry and others have criticized as a “back-door draft.” While it agitated the ranks and their families, the program was “a finger in the dike,” one Army official told the L.A. Times, adding that a possible backlash and future exodus from the military was a gamble necessary to meet current commitments.

Speculation about the possibility of a draft would probably never have surfaced from the press and the dark dwellings of the Internet, were it not for the very real spectacle of the American military taking hits from an unexpected Iraqi insurgency. A frustrated Congress voted overwhelmingly on June 17 to add 20,000 troops to the Army. Public anxiety about over-extended Army troops and angry Reservists languishing in indefinite deployment seemed to legitimize the conspiracy theories just enough for the mainstream media – including The New York Times – to take notice in recent months, with the gist of most news reports being: A new draft? No. But despite vehement denials from Senators and even ol’ Rummy himself, skeptics and proponents remain.

As the U.S. military faces a growing and increasingly amorphous list of adversaries, conflicting agendas on how such wars should be fought often come down to a battle of the numbers. According to the Defense Department, there are about 548,000 soldiers on active duty in the Army and Marines, and 20,000 Air Force members deployed in spots around the globe, mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Only about one-third of the Army’s divisions should be deployed at any one time, advises the Council on Foreign Relations, “to give the forces time to retrain and prepare for the next mission.” Currently, 138,000 troops – roughly one-third of the Army’s total number – are stationed just in Iraq, with the possibility of more to come.