AP/Ipsos Poll: Most Oppose Return To Draft, Wouldn't Encourage Children To Enlist
Washington, DC, June 24, 2005 - The latest AP/Ipsos poll shows opposition to reinstating a military draft is strong; nearly half of Americans strongly oppose a draft, and a majority of Americans say that if they had a child old enough to serve in the military, they would discourage their son or daughter from enlisting.
Despite the recruiting problems, seven in 10 Americans say they oppose reinstatement of the draft, and almost half of those polled strongly oppose that step, the AP-Ipsos poll found. About a quarter of the people in this country say they favor reinstating the draft.
Men were more likely than women to favor reinstating the draft and those over age 50 were more likely to favor it than younger adults. Republicans were more likely than Democrats to support the idea. But a majority of each of those groups opposed the draft.
"Things have been working well with the all-volunteer army and that's how it should stay," said Kathy Fowler, a 44-year-old mother from Chillicothe, Ohio.
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"If we had more manpower in the Middle East we could get this over with," said James Puma, a retiree from Buffalo, N.Y. "I'm a Republican, I'm with the president. But things in Iraq are not going good at all."
However, Jeremy Miller, a sales manager from Denver, said the Iraq war is "a situation the president has gotten us into and should be able to get us out of" without bringing back the draft.
More than half of those polled said they would discourage a son from enlisting in the military, while two-thirds said they would discourage a daughter from joining.
Democrats were more likely than Republicans to say they would discourage sons and daughters from enlisting.
If a military draft were reinstated, more than half in the poll, 54 percent, said they would oppose women being drafted.
Women were more likely than men to be opposed to drafting women. Adults born after the end of World War II but before 1965 were more likely to favor the drafting of women than people in other age groups.
The American public has strongly opposed reinstating the draft for the past couple of decades, according to various polls. And the decreasing support for the war in Iraq suggests that is unlikely to change anytime soon.
"People simply don't want their kids to be sent off to Iraq to be shot at in a situation in which the value of the war is becoming more and more questionable," said John Mueller, a political science professor at Ohio State University and author of "War, Presidents and Public Opinion."
"The draft has never been popular and there's little reason to believe it would be popular now," public opinion analyst Karlyn Bowman said.
The poll of 1,000 adults was conducted June 20-22 for the AP by Ipsos, an international polling firm, and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.