Rumors about the possibility of a reinstatement of the draft have run rampant on college campuses recently, which is no surprise since young people aged 18 to 26 would be the target of such a move.
And recent offensives in Fallujah and elsewhere suggest that the war in Iraq, rather than winding down, is continuing apace and may require more manpower.
"Clearly there's no end in sight, and by all indications things are going dramatically downhill," said Ben Brandzel, director of the national group Move On Student Action.
Some critics are concerned that the military is close to depleting its voluntary forces and will have no choice but to turn to involuntary conscription.
"I'm trying not to be a conspiracy theorist about it, but if you need more people, where are they going to come from?" said Luke Yu, membership outreach coordinator of the Tufts Democrats.
The Bush administration has already integrated the National Guard and Individual Ready Reserve (IRR) units into active duty, and has mandated the involuntary extension of soldier's contracts who have already served their previously allotted commitment.
"We have forced over 80,000 soldiers to serve beyond what they were contracted to serve," Brandzel said. "Forty percent of the forces in Iraq are National Guard. The military has never been more depleted, ever," he said.
During his campaign, John Kerry charged that these actions constitute a "backdoor draft," a phrase that resonated with critics of the way the war is being conducted.
But President of the Tufts Republicans Nicholas Boyd disagreed with Kerry's term. "There is no 'backdoor' draft," he said. "Nobody serving in the United States military today was forced into duty. Every member of the armed forces, whether Reserve, National Guard, or full-time understood the possible nature of their commitment and entered into it freely," he said.
"It is wrong to diminish their service and courage by implying they have been drafted against their will," Boyd said.
Citizens' commitment to military service in general has flagged recently. September's issue of Army Times reported that two out of three civilians called back to service through the IRR failed to respond.
The Army has also had trouble attracting new recruits - the National Guard recently failed to meet its recruiting goals for the first time in a decade, Brandzel said.
And further worries have been raised by the transfer of U.S. troops from South Korea to Iraq, which has been in progress since May.
"It's still just as important for the other places to have the troops that we put there in the first place, and if we're already overstretching the forces that we do have, then calling up the National Guard and making people do national tours of duty, then I don't see a way around reinstating the draft," Yu said.
But the Bush administration has repeatedly and unequivocally denied that it plans to reinstate the draft. "It is the policy of this administration to oppose a military draft for any purpose whatsoever," Pentagon Chief Spokesman Lawrence Di Rita told The New York Times in October. "A return of the draft is unthinkable. There will be no draft."
Noises have been made in Congress to the opposite effect, however. Two almost identical bills presented this fall, one in the Senate and one in the House of Representatives, proposed draft readjustments and reinstatement.
New measures would include drafting women into the Army and eliminating exemptions for students, instead allowing them to defer only until the end of the semester.
And the Smart Borders Declaration with Canada, passed in 2001, would close escape to Canada as an option for possible defectors.
The first bill, H.R. 163, was defeated in the House when it came to a surprise vote on Oct. 5. The Bush administration cited this defeat as proof that there were no plans for a draft.
"Informed Tufts students understand that the Bush administration and Congressional Republicans strongly oppose the draft, and that only Democrats are likely to support its implementation," Boyd said, pointing out that the bill was introduced by Democratic Representative Charles Rangel.
Rangel himself voted against the bill, however. Brandzel explained the move as a gambit to raise awareness of the current crisis in military enlistment.
"Charlie Rangel certainly went on the record saying he proposed it not because he wanted a draft, but because he wanted everyone to consider that the lives of their own children were at stake," Brandzel said.
"Right now the bills introduced by Democrats are protest bills, to make a point, to illustrate where we're headed. This is not something we need to worry about immediately," Brandzel said.
The Tufts Daily was unable to reach the Senate Committee on Armed Forces for comment on the second bill, S. 89, which is currently tabled in the Senate.
"It's politically a huge problem for the Congress to pass [S. 89]," Political Science Professor Jeff Berry said. "The fallout would be extreme and the Republicans would suffer the consequences, so you would see a lot of protest, and I just don't see it getting through."
Berry said bringing the draft to the forefront of election issues was part of the Kerry campaign strategy. "I certainly think that the Kerry campaign was trying to catalyze concern on the part of young people, young men in particular, so they pushed that," he said. "Congress responded by passing the resolution almost completely."
Government intention and execution are not always the same, Brandzel said. "I will also say that I don't believe President Bush wants a draft, I don't think that's on his agenda," he said.
But Brandzel remained pessimistic about U.S. prospects in Iraq. "Our support from our allies doesn't seem to be increasing. After the elections, Hungary became the latest country to pull out of our coalition, nobody has joined since the invasion and many, many countries have pulled out," he said.
Retaining the United States' volunteer military - which Brazndzel called "by far the most effective route" in terms of morale and training initiatives - will require a more collaborative foreign policy than the Bush administration's, he said.
"Whether you're opposed to reducing the effectiveness of the military or conscripting young people to serve, what it means is we need a new foreign policy, and what that has to look like is one that is more supportive of genuine international collaboration," Brandzel said.
As a practical solution, "we need more money allocated to pay for more volunteer troops," he said. Bush doesn't want to allocate that money, when it comes to putting more soldiers on the payroll he's very squeamish, and that's something he's going to have to do if we want to avoid a draft," he said. "We have to watch the situation very carefully."
Berry said the nation's prime concern should be "whether or not our military is sufficiently adequate to face the calls of the world we live in right now. I think there's a lot of concern that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld has greatly exaggerated the degree to which he can fight a war with a lean fighting force," he said.
