Armed Forces: Second Chance

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The child of poverty in the U.S. often receives an ironic privilege: exemption from the draft because he is too underschooled, underdoctored or underfed to meet the military requirements of education and physique. One-third of American youth do not measure up to Defense Department standards, and each year the armed forces turn away 600,000 men, half of whom cannot pass the mental tests. Their rejection mirrors the U.S. poverty map: more than 68% fail in Mississippi, only 7.5% in Minnesota or Washington. To Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, besieged by critics of the draft's inequalities, this is one privilege that the poor can do without. Last week he announced plans to draft, over the next ten months, 40,000 men who failed to meet requirements — men who are now classified 1 Y, liable for call-up only in a national emergency—and to take 100,000 such men annually in the years ahead.

Waste of Talent. "I do not believe that the qualification standards for military service should now be lowered," McNamara told the Veterans of Foreign Wars at their 67th convention in New York City. "What I do believe is that through the application of advanced educational and medical techniques we can salvage tens of thousands of these men each year, first for productive military careers and later for productive roles in society." In a speech in Montreal last May, McNamara warned that pauper nations endanger world peace and thus U.S. security. His V.F.W. address brought this thinking home: "Poverty in America affects our national security, too, by its appalling waste of talent."

Defense officials believe that 85% of the reclassified draftees will eventually graduate from basic training; they will not only be able to perform about one-third of the military jobs now held by others, but will be trained in skills that later can be useful in civilian life. Mc Namara intends to use the resources of the Defense Department's own educational system, the world's largest, to train the men for all the services. He also suggested a complete re-examination of the whole concept of aptitude tests, saying that there is "ample evidence" that some of the tests reflect cultural value systems that are foreign to the underprivileged and therefore do not correctly assess their basic intelligence. As for medical rejects, military doctors will try to salvage the less serious of them by getting overweight men to diet away excess poundage. Next year, the doctors will also begin performing surgery on men with defects that can be put right in a short time, such as hernias.