It's Getting a Little Drafty: Our armed forces need expansion. How to go about it?

We need more troops. Ever since the Clinton administration drew down our military, while simultaneously undertaking humanitarian interventions in places like Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo, our armed forces have been overstretched. During the Clinton years, despite our stated doctrine, America lost the capacity to fight major wars in two theaters at once. Surely that lost capacity encouraged North Korean provocations during the run-up to our invasion of Iraq. Since 9/11, continued deployments in Afghanistan, counterterrorism operations throughout the world, and increased demands for "force protection" (guarding military installations, power plants, etc., from terrorist attack) have strained our armed forces still further.

The military has resorted to a variety of strategies to address the problem. The Pentagon has issued "stop loss" orders, forbidding troops in some job categories to resign. In January, the Marines put a stop- loss order on the entire service. As Nicholas Confessore pointed out in The Washington Monthly, "large swathes of the U.S. military . . . no longer meet the definition of a volunteer force."

Additionally, training and education requirements have been lowered to help meet recruitment quotas. And the Reserves -- many of whom are firemen, policemen, nurses, and other first-responders who will be needed at home in the event of terrorism on our soil -- have been called up repeatedly for overseas service. With Reserve duty now turning into de facto full-time enlistment, the Reserves found themselves unable to meet their recruiting goals in January and February.

These problems are serious, but an occupation of Iraq, in conjunction with possible war in North Korea, will create a full-fledged military manpower crisis. With even conservative estimates of the number of American troops needed to police a postwar Iraq running to 60-75,000, we will simply not have enough personnel left to handle the ongoing war on terror. In short, we need more troops.

How can we get them? With Rep. Charles Rangel using the specter of a draft to rally the public against the war, and recruiters barely making their quotas, the president appears to be in a trap. Yet a politically unpopular draft may not be the only solution to our manpower problem. Congress recently approved a bipartisan proposal by Sens. Evan Bayh (D., Ind.) and John McCain (R., Ariz.) establishing an 18-month enlistment option, targeted at college students. This 18-month enlistment would be followed by a period of service in the Reserves.

Although the idea of "citizen soldiers" has garnered bipartisan support in Congress, its key advocates are Marc Magee and Steven Nider of the Progressive Policy Institute, a think tank affiliated with the politically moderate Democratic Leadership Council. PPI's interest in citizen soldiers is part of a broader enthusiasm among moderate Democrats for civilian volunteer programs, such as President Clinton's AmeriCorps and the current president's proposed Freedom Corps.

Many conservatives are ambivalent about such ventures -- they want to encourage an ethic of service, but would prefer private volunteerism to government-run programs. Yet conservative Republicans and moderate Democrats can at least agree on the need to encourage service in our nation's armed forces. Magee and Nider deserve credit for rising to the challenge of how to staff our overstretched military, when conservatives have generally avoided the issue.