Many U.S. families breathed a sigh of relief last week when U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld again ruled out reinstituting the military draft.

Rumsfeld said he opposed bringing back the draft, despite the recruiting shortfalls that have been plaguing the Army this year. Rumsfeld said the all-volunteer force has proven the wisdom of the decision to end the draft, and his observation is correct.

Although the draft was halted in 1973, young men still are required to register with the Selective Service System. Selective Service is charged with maintaining an up-to-date list of men 18 through 25 for use in case a national emergency requires rapid expansion of the Armed Forces.

No one can be drafted unless a draft is ordered by Congress and the president. There is growing speculation, however, that primarily due to the Iraq morass and, lesser so, the U.S. military operation in Afghanistan, the time might not be far off when reintroduction of the draft will be necessary to bolster Army manpower.

That's because, with only four months left in the federal budget year, the Army barely is at 50 percent of its goal of 80,000 new recruits since last October. The Marine Corps too has been missing its recruiting targets lately but, fortunately, only by a small number.

The Air Force and Navy have been easily meeting their recruiting goals, primarily due to their much-smaller and less-publicized roles in Iraq and Afghanistan.

While officials have continued to speak optimistically about recruiting prospects over the next couple of months - now that a new crop of young people has graduated from high school - other officials have expressed concern privately, saying that the stated optimism is plummeting as enlistment numbers have remained stagnant. Officials admit that many young people and their parents have grown more wary of Army service because of the likelihood of being dispatched on combat tours to Iraq or Afghanistan.

U.S. troops are dying at a rate of two a day in Iraq, more than two years after President George W. Bush declared that major combat operations had ended. As of Monday, about 1,700 members of the U.S. military had died in Iraq since the beginning of the war in March 2003. Thousands of others have been wounded.

The Army says today's economy offers attractive alternatives to many high school and college graduates, but the bulk of the recruiting difficulty must be blamed on fears stemming from the Iraq war, which continues with no end to U.S. involvement in sight. Many Americans currently view Iraq as being in a military holding pattern because there appears to be no strong, sustained offensive push against Iraqi insurgents who continue to disrupt the country.

To those Americans, U.S. troops are seen as being required to wait for the enemy - insurgents and suicide bombers - to attack them, despite having the will, training and firepower to aggressively pursue and eliminate enemy operatives.

Americans also are becoming increasingly impatient with the inability of Iraqis to restore order and security to their country in the post-Saddam Hussein era, and more Americans than ever are now questioning the wisdom of this country having launched the attack on Iraq at all.

At this juncture, it would seem that the Bush administration has two options for improving Army recruiting numbers and ending speculation about the draft. They are to greatly improve enlistment benefits and to gain the public's confidence that America's involvement in Iraq is not as long-term as it currently appears. Improving veterans benefits, rather than looking for ways to curtail them, would also help the overall picture.

While return of the draft would be necessary to cope with a broad-scale war, the draft shouldn't be reinstituted on the basis of limited-scope military operations such as Iraq and Afghanistan. Rumsfeld is right that this country has done quite well with an all-volunteer military and should continue to follow that policy.

But the low recruitment numbers must be addressed, and mere expressions of pessimism aren't an avenue to a solution.