Military draft? Polls finds Americans opposed

On children, women
More than half of those polled said they would discourage a son who was the right age to serve from enlisting in the military, while two-thirds said they would discourage a daughter from joining.

If a military draft were reinstated, more than half in the poll, 54 percent, said they would oppose women being drafted.

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.”

Men were more likely than women to favor reinstating the draft, those over age 50 were more likely to favor it than younger adults. And Republicans were more likely than Democrats to support the idea. But a majority of each of those groups opposed the draft.

“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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