Armed Forces: The Draft Debate

For months, as the number of draftees in Viet Nam has swelled to more than 65,000, complaints have risen in the U.S. about unfairness in the system by which young men are selected for, or exempted from, military service. There is considerable grumbling about the fact that local draft boards, under the current system, tend to induct poor boys, Negroes and school dropouts, while sparing richer or brainier youngsters. Many Americans feel uneasy—and the draftee may feel downright angry—that the 971,000 active reservists and National Guardsmen are exempted from extended military service for the price of a brief training period and periodic home drills. Last week both the President and Congress took note, in different ways, of the rising dissatisfaction with the draft—which, the Defense Department announced, will be boosted for the month of October to a peacetime record of 46,200 men.

Unwanted Power. The Senate zeroed in on the reserves. "We can't permit the six-month reserve-training program," said Missouri's Stuart Symington, "to become an umbrella for avoiding active service." Georgia's Senator Richard B. Russell, prestigious Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Massachusetts' Republican Senator Leverett Saltonstall sponsored an amendment to the record $58.2 billion defense budget giving the President authority to call individual reservists to active duty for as long as two years. The Senate voted, 66 to 21, to adopt the amendment, which exempts men who served in World War II or Korea or who have already put in two years' active duty.

The amendment stands a good chance of adoption in the House as well, but it gives the President a power that neither he nor Defense Secretary McNamara particularly wants. Though he already has the authority to mobilize entire units by declaring an emergency, Johnson has refrained from using it, not only because it is an election year but because he and McNamara feel that the men are not yet needed.

Shortage of Facilities. Nonetheless, the inequities of the draft are clearly on his mind. At a gathering of 14,000 young students of government in Washington, he suggested that "student leaders and young citizens" should have a voice in writing a new draft law, disclosed that his recently appointed Presidential Advisory Commission on Selective Service has orders to ask "some fresh, hard questions." One question, on which the committee is to report by Jan. 1: whether young Americans can be given the alternative of serving their country as civilians without dangerously thinning the armed forces. Said the President: "We are not interested in just a system. What we want and need is a just system."