WASHINGTON (AP) – Most Americans don’t want to see the return of the military draft, although men, older Americans and Republicans were most likely to say it’s a good idea, an AP-Ipsos poll found.

A majority of those polled also wouldn’t encourage their own children to enlist – highlighting the problems faced by the military as recruiting is in a slump.

“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.

Unfortunately, the military’s efforts to meet recruiting goals in the all-volunteer service haven’t been going well this year.

The Army is falling behind its recruiting goals as the country is fighting extended wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Army has repeatedly missed its monthly recruiting goals this year, falling short by 42 percent in April.

And all four branches of military service are having trouble attracting recruits to their reserve forces.

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 poll found. About a quarter of the people 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.

More than 1,700 members of the U.S. military have died since the start of the Iraq war and thousands more have been wounded. Gen. John Abizaid, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, told members of Congress on Thursday that the Iraqi insurgency is as active as six months ago and more foreign fighters are flowing in all the time.

The shortfalls in military recruiting have led to speculation that the government might be forced to reinstitute the draft. But Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has ruled it out, saying the all-volunteer force has proved the wisdom of ending the draft in 1973. “There isn’t a chance in the world that the draft will be brought back,” Rumsfeld told a House hearing Thursday.

One draft supporter said expanding the size of the armed forces might help move the Iraq campaign along faster.

“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 than people of other age groups to favor the drafting of women.

The American public has strongly opposed reinstating the draft for the past few decades, according to polls. And 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.

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Ipsos: http://www.ap-ipsosresults.com

AP-ES-06-24-05 1805EDT

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