Recruitment down, chance of draft revival up.(INSIDER REPORT)

"Faced with wilting recruitment and ongoing violence in Iraq, Army and Marine Corps recruiters are turning their attention to those most likely to oppose them: parents," reported USA Today for April 5. "The two branches are shifting from a strategy that focused first on wooing potential recruits to one aimed at gaining the trust and attention of their parents by using grassroots initiatives and multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns. The public relations push comes as the Army and Marines, which absorb the brunt of the casualties in Iraq, encounter one of their worst periods in recruitment."

One new recruiting approach involves home visits by a recruiter in the company of a veteran of the ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Under a provision of the No Child Left Behind law, school districts are required to provide military recruiters with detailed personal information about all of their students.

With plummeting rates of recruitment and retention, more than 130,000 troops still mired in Iraq, and the growing possibility of military conflict with Iran, Syria, or North Korea (or some combination thereof), the political Establishment is quietly but unmistakably preparing to reinstate conscription in some form.

As previously noted in these pages (see "Another Portent of Draft Revival" in our April 4 issue), the framework for draft revival will probably resemble a proposal outlined in "The Case for the Draft," an essay by Captain Phillip Carter, U.S. Army (Ret.), and Paul Glastris in the March 2005 Washington Monthly. Insisting that the United States "can be the world's superpower, or it can maintain the current all-volunteer military, but it probably can't do both," Carter and Glastris call for a system of conscription in which all 18-year-olds (regardless of sex) would be required to serve 1-2 years either in the military or a federally approved form of ...