Death by Compromise

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Crazy Quilt. There was still an outside chance that U.M.T. might be salvaged in the Senate. But the House verdict stood, nonetheless, as a monument to the futility of trying to make a soft, downy crazy-quilt out of hard military necessities. In 1945, General George Marshall pleaded for a U.M.T. with one year's training, well knowing that anything less would make less than a qualified reserve. The Pentagon subsequently retreated to the six months' short-course and the notion that UMTrainees should be treated more like Boy Scouts than soldiers. The Korean war stepped up the draft to build a standing army of 3.5 million men, and sources of young manpower for U.M.T. were virtually exhausted. But Assistant Secretary of Defense Anna Rosenberg kept plugging hard for the peacetime model of U.M.T. on the theory that this was the time to get the bill passed—for use at some unspecified future peacetime date.

The House vote was not necessarily a rejection of the U.M.T. principle. It was a rejection of slick salesmanship and illogical compromise.