Rumsfeld rejects idea of returning to the draft

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Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld yesterday dismissed the notion of reinstating the military draft, saying that the Pentagon, if needed, can dig deeper into Reserve and National Guard forces to relieve troops deployed in the war on terrorism.

"I don't know anyone in the executive branch of the government who believes it would be appropriate or necessary to reinstitute the draft," Mr. Rumsfeld told a Washington gathering of members of the Newspaper Association of America, the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the Associated Press.

Using a metaphor to explain that the military already has a huge pool of personnel from which to draw, he likened the increased wartime demand on military forces to a spigot and the available pool of troops to a keg full of water.

Presently, the spigot is "too high" or does not reach very deep into the keg, Mr. Rumsfeld said. "We need to lower the spigot. We don't need to get a bigger barrel."

Including the total Reserve and Guard force, there are about 2.3 million people "in this universe of the water keg," he said. "At the present time, we're only accessing a very small portion of the 2-plus million men and women in the active force and the Reserves in our current deployments."

In addition to troop commitments in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, South Korea, Haiti and Liberia, "all we're trying to do is sustain 135,000 in Iraq," he said, adding that the number of deployments required by the war on terror can been met easily through better management of the current level of 1.4 million active-duty troops.

"It simply requires changing the rules, changing the requirements, changing the regulations in ways that we can manage that force considerably better," he said.

In addition yesterday, White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters that a draft "is just not something that's under consideration at this time."

Mr. Rumsfeld's remarks came during a question-and-answer session after his address to the national gathering of newspaper editors.

Afterward, a senior defense official said the defense secretary's "water-keg" metaphor was "meant to address the longer-term problem of how our active and Reserve forces are organized and where the specialties lie."