Oh Baby, It's Drafty Out There

"Feeling a draft?" asks the Village Voice.

"Talk of a draft is chilling," intones The New York Times.

Even fashion magazines weigh in: "Could Cosmo girl get drafted?"

In city streets, town squares and rural strip malls, military recruiters are beleaguered. The Army is unable to meet recruiting targets even after lowering quotas and standards. At the same time, recruiters are overwhelmed by scandal and scrutiny, and uncomfortable in the face of growing anti-war sentiment.

Though half a world away, the war in Iraq feels close. Mounting U.S. casualties, exhausted soldiers and an intractable civil conflict in which the only thing different factions agree on is that U.S. soldiers are the problem, make military service increasingly unattractive to even the most gung-ho patriot. Meanwhile, Washington is determined to "stay the course" right over the brink.

J.E. McNeil, executive director of the Center on Conscience and War, is preparing for the worst. She sees a "perfect storm" of conditions brewing a return to the draft. So far, more than one million U.S. military personnel have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. An estimated 341,000 soldiers have done double deployments (and many are now entering their third deployment). And they are not just serving, they are dying. More than 1,700 have been killed, and an average of two more soldiers die each day.

Recruiting Nightmares

For more and more young people, joining the military doesn't mean "Be all you can be," it means going to war. And the Army is feeling the chill.

Major General Michael Rochelle, Army Recruiting Commander, worries that the war and other military commitments present the "toughest challenge to the all-volunteer army" since its inception in 1973. Staff Sergeant Spurgeon M. Shelly, a recruiter, complains how tough recruiting is. "I will hear 'No' more times in one day than a child would hear in their entire childhood. If I had hair, I would pull it out."

He signed up four recruits in six months, putting him way below his quota of two recruits per month.

Recruiters are hiding police records, mental illness and physical ailments to make their quotas. An Army investigation into recruitment improprieties found 1,118 incidents involving one in five recruiters. The Army substantiated 320 of these cases in 2004, up from 213 in 2002 and 199 in 1999. Recruiters and some senior army officers admit that for every documented impropriety, there are at least two more that are never discovered. "We have to play fast and loose with the rules just to get by," one recruiter told The New York Times.

Another recruiter laments, "The only people who want to join the Army now have issues; they're troubled, with health, police or drug problems."

After a dismal record of missed quotas each month throughout the spring, the Army stalled on releasing enlistment data for May. Finally in mid-June, the Army reported achieving 75 percent of its monthly recruiting goal of 6,700. But the Army did not attract more recruits; it moved the goal posts, lowering its May target from 8,050 new recruits, asserting it would make up the difference this summer.

Furthest From Our Thoughts?

The Pentagon and the President promise that the draft is a thing of the past. "The D-word is the farthest thing from my thoughts," Francis J. Harvey, Secretary of the Army, told a Washington Post reporter in March, laughing.

The Pentagon's position is that a professional all-volunteer army performs better, has higher morale and is less costly to train. Last October, President Bush was adamant on the question, saying, "I want every American to understand that, as long as I am President, there will be no draft."

The Nixon administration retired the military draft in 1973, but mandatory registration of men at the age of 18 was reinstituted in 1980 under President Carter, and today the Selective Service System has 13.5 million men ages 18-25 registered.