WASHINGTON -- In recent weeks, motivated partly by a looming war in Iraq, a debate has again begun about whether the United States should adopt military conscription to replace its all-volunteer force. While the motivation behind this debate is understandable, it would be a very bad idea -- the equivalent of replacing the New York Yankees with a bunch of middle-aged weekend softball players in a sports event.

We do need to consider new ways to bring people into today's armed forces, which increasingly involve only certain strata of the American population. But the draft is not the answer.

First, today's U.S. military is outstanding, and one should be careful to fix things that aren't broken. In fact, today's U.S. military is the best in world history. Thirty years after conscription ended, it has completed the transition to a truly professional force. Most military personnel today are well-educated, experienced in their jobs, disciplined and highly motivated. A trove of data back up this claim; one particularly telling fact is that today's soldier, sailor, airman/woman and marine has served an average of more than 5 years in the armed forces, the most ever. The U.S. has won its last two wars, Afghanistan and Kosovo, with a total of less than two dozen Americans killed in action, and the 1991 Persian Gulf War remains one of the great mismatches of military history.