Will there be a draft if Bush is reelected? Hmm. Why is this even a question?

I hate to do reposts, but this is something I wrote for Rox Populi on Wednesday that hasn't been published on Loaded Mouth until now. I've been covering the possibility of a draft for a while now, and with the topic now on the front pages, I want to repost this piece for two reasons: It's a great summary of all my coverage on the topic, and it gets the summary on a PBA blog if the alliance chooses to use it.

"I hear there's rumors on the Internets that we're going to have a draft. We're not going to have a draft, period." - President Bush, 10/8/04

Oh, really? That's not the way I see it.

The fact is that in Iraq, a country a bit larger than California, we only have 140,000 soldiers deployed to fight a guerrilla war. The only situation we have to compare this to is the Vietnam War, where at the height of our commitment there, we had 543,000 soldiers deployed to South Vietnam, a country which is only half the size of New Mexico.

Do the math. It doesn't take somebody who is acutely familiar with our military to figure out that to win the peace in Iraq, we'll need hundreds of thousands of more troops -- But it helps that Col. David H. Hackworth has also done the math and arrived at the same conclusion I have. To back up his case, Hack's column includes choice bits like this: "Although Pentagon puff artists insist they’re making quota, recruiters are already saying it would be easier to find $100 bills on the sidewalk outside a homeless shelter than fill their enlistment quotas, even with the huge bonuses now being paid."

Despite Hack's assertions, many on the right still believe President Bush. Power Line says this "rumor is the most vile" in their vengeful diatribe against the Democrats for even mentioning the draft in an election year. Jay Tea at Wizbang has a somewhat well-reasoned argument against the draft being reinstated. I say somewhat, though, because he simply details his perceptions of the legislative and legal process a draft bill would need to go through. Jay Tea never touches upon the numbers which dictate a need for the draft. In fact, I haven't seen anybody on the right take a look at the numbers.

Well, anybody besides Hack, of course. And we all know what he thinks.

Look at the numbers, do the math. If Bush is reelected and allowed to continue his policy in Iraq, the draft question is a no-brainer. The questions we should be asking are if the age limit will be raised and if women will also be drafted.