Conscription & Commitment

a u. s. congressman proposes a revolutionary plan that would end the draft yet meet our military needs

The American military establishment is blessed with a vast array of the most sophisticated weapons that the world has ever seen, yet it persists in processing its most important weapon--manpower--through a system that has proved itself inefficient, inequitable and undemocratic.

The draft, with its 4061 local and autonomous draft boards and its antiquated machinery, is an anachronism in the Cold War era, a relic of an earlier time when vast quantities of raw manpower were thrown onto the battlefields of Europe and Asia to overcome by their very numbers the killing power of cannon, machine gun and tank. In the age of the skilled technician, the Armed Forces of the United States still rely on the Selective Service System, a World War Two expedient, to supply them with bewildered, untrained, often poorly educated youth. Immune to technological change and changing population structure, the draft has become the weakest link in our national security system and an unnecessary burden on our society. It is within our means to eliminate compulsory military service; that we have not done so, or begun to do so, is an announcement of our failure to adapt to the changing conditions of modern society.

Criticism of the draft, from parents, students, educators, civil rights workers, veterans' organizations and Congressmen, has reached crisis proportions in recent months; but the symptoms of obsolescence appeared long ago. The population explosion, which has affected every facet of our society, has taken its toll on the Selective Service System as well. The number of draft-eligible young men has grown from about 20,000,000 in 1951, when the present system went into effect, to 39,000,000 today, an increase of 95 percent. As a result, the proportion of men who are actually called upon to serve has declined sharply--from 70 percent in 1958 to 46 percent today. Assuming normal peacetime military strengths, it will drop to about 34 percent by 1974. Thus, many more men are allowed to escape from service altogether, and those compelled to serve feel they are being screwed by an uncaring, invisible and often unapproachable bureaucracy that calls itself "selective" but usually isn't.

The two major sources of the inequities that plague the draft are this failure to realize the effect of the manpower boom and the almost total autonomy of the local boards. Manpower procurement is a national problem; the supply of skilled manpower is limited and must be carefully allocated between the military and our booming civilian economy. Yet local boards, usually manned by "patriotic" retired veterans, see the problem only from the narrow perspective of their often idealized military experience and their often capricious assessment of national needs and priorities. The national Selective Service headquarters has attempted to promulgate some vaguely defined standards for classification and deferment, but these standards are merely advisory, and the local boards can ignore them, modify them or interpret them as they see fit.

As a result, deferments are not granted on the basis of equity but on the degree of pressure placed on the boards by Defense Department demands for manpower. When draft calls were low, as they were before the current build-up for the war in Vietnam, deferments were easy to come by. A man taking one night course was given a "student deferment"; married men were deferred across the board by Presidential order; and "occupational" deferments were liberally handed out to anyone who could claim even a faint relationship with the national security program. Today, with calls nearly at the Korean War level--46,200 for last October--standards for deferment have been reduced until the squeeze has been felt by the student, the father and the less-educated, who were previously placed low on the priority list. Many who thought they were free from the draft's reach now find their lives disrupted.

Loosely drawn standards and local autonomy produce widely varying interpretations of Selective Service regulations. One worker at a St. Louis defense plant is drafted, while his working partner, registered with a New Jersey board, receives an occupational deferment. A farmer, whose father is totally blind and whose mother supports a family of five on $350 a month, is drafted--while a Hollywood actor receives a "hardship" deferment on his $200,000 annual income. The cases are legion.

In addition, where one lives is often more important than what one does, because draft calls are distributed among the states on the basis of the number of men actually classified 1-A, not on the number of potential draftees. Thus, Michigan, with 4.2 percent of the nation's draft-eligible men, was called upon to supply 17,006 draftees in the first six months of 1966, while Texas, with 5.4 percent of the potential draftees, was tapped for only 14,990 men, according to figures obtained by Michigan Senator Robert Griffin. Obviously, Michigan draft boards are more conscientious in classifying registrants, and its young men are thus unwillingly more "patriotic" than their Texas colleagues.

Many of the problems created by local autonomy could be alleviated by automating Selective Service procedures and centralizing the selection process; but Lewis B. Hershey. the glib, folksy retired Army general who has headed Selective Service since the 1930s, refuses to trust the computer. He was willing to put up with the mistakes of the local board, he told the House Armed Services Committee last June. Despite the disparity in draft-board criteria and the paper log jams that kept 522,472 men out of 641,958 in the 1-A pool unavailable in January 1966, because their records were not processed, General Hershey insists that computers have no "compassion." For the married man or graduate student who was forced into uniform because his draft board had too many men in this "paper mill," Hershey's words have an ironic ring.

An oft-heard charge that the draft is racially and economically discriminating comes from the Negroes and the poverty-stricken, who see the wealthy (and usually white) and college-educated deferred while the poor are drafted. This argument, however, is not entirely supported by the facts, which show that 56 percent of the men who have attended college eventually see service, while only 46 percent of noncollege men serve (Selective Service statistics, June 1966). Noncollege men have a far higher rejection rate for mental and physical reasons than college men and thus are more likely to be exempted from the draft altogether.

The charge that Negroes are drafted at a higher rate than whites is also unsubstantiated. While it is true that there is a higher proportion of Negroes in the Army--14 percent as opposed to a Negro population of 11.7 percent nationally--this is due to the higher enlistment rates among Negroes, who see more job and educational opportunities in the military than they can find in civilian life. The re-enlistment rate for Negroes in the Army is 49.3 percent, compared with an 18.5 percent rate for whites. Advocates of the racial-discrimination argument point to Selective Service statistics that show that 13.4 percent of inductees in May 1966 were nonwhite--a higher percentage than their proportion in the national population--to document their charges. But the statistics fluctuate; in June 1966, the nonwhite induction rate was down to 10.4 percent.

Last June, Representative William F. Ryan told the House Armed Services Committee that there were no Negroes on any draft boards in Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, and revealed that one member of a New Orleans draft board was "the head of the local Ku Klux Klan." Despite this indication of possible discriminatory draft selection in the South, Ryan could not cite any figures that would show that Negroes were being drafted at a higher rate in the South than they were elsewhere.

However, draft standards, common to most local boards, that set a minimum of 15 hours of classroom study for the 2-S student deferment do discriminate against the young man who is forced to work his way through school. The part-time student, supporting a family and going to school at night, is not deferred; therefore, money does have its advantages in dealing with the Selective Service's college deferments. Also, the much-maligned College Qualification Test, a six-hour "comprehensive" examination given to over 1,000,000 college students last spring as a "guide" to local boards in granting 2-S deferments, is slanted toward the scientific-minded student. General Hershey admits that science and mathematics students would have an advantage on the tests because questions in these fields "are easier to grade." Combined with a rank-in-class standard, which gives the student at a poorer-quality school an advantage over his intellectual equal--or superior--at one of the more prestigious schools, the College Classification Test must be rated a farce, a farce that is denounced by almost all of our nation's distinguished educators, including Yale's Kingman Brewster and Princeton's Robert Goheen. Brewster said the result of this deferment system had been "to encourage a cynical avoidance of service, a corruption of the aims of education and a tarnishing of the national spirit." A group of 142 Midwestern university professors began a campaign last April "to discourage the use of the institutions of higher learning as instruments of the Selective Service System," and student sit-ins at Oberlin, the University of Chicago and City College of (continued on page 167)Conscription & Commitment(continued from page 90) New York, among other places, have dramatized the dissatisfaction of both students and faculty with the college-deferment system.

The social costs of the draft include far more than an inequitable distribution of the military obligation among our nation's youth. Professor John Kenneth Galbraith stated these social costs succinctly when he said, "The draft survives principally as a device by which we use compulsion to get young men to serve at less than the market rate of pay. We shift the cost of military service from the well-to-do taxpayer, who benefits by lower taxes, to the impecunious young draftee. This is a highly regressive arrangement that we would not tolerate in any other area. Presumably, freedom of choice here as elsewhere would be worth paying for."

The draft has served as a crutch for the military services, a means of avoiding the development of sounder personnel policies. As Professor Galbraith states, the young draftee is forced to suffer relative poverty in order that the Army can procure cheap labor. Yet our modern Army requires specialists and technicians, not automatons with rifles; so the military services must then waste millions of dollars training these draftees in skills they will never use in later life and skills they will forget once their tour of duty is over.

Military pay in the lower grades is lower in the United States than in any of the other NATO powers, including those, such as France and West Germany, that have compulsory service. According to Bruce Chapman, whose book The Wrong Man in Uniform documents the case against the draft, an Army private's pay is "less than that of a peasant on a collective farm in Communist Rumania." A private E-1 in the United States makes approximately $90 a month--hardly enough to support himself, much less a wife and family, even considering allowances. With an increasingly lower average age for marriage in this country, it is not surprising that many married draftees are forced to depend on relief payments to support themselves. For example, in 1964, the Air Force alone found over 5000 cases of men who were receiving relief support. Such economic facts hardly encourage volunteering and certainly discourage re-enlistment.

Department of Defense figures reveal that only about 8 percent of draftees stay in the service and only 25 percent of first-term volunteers re-enlist. In 1964, the re-enlistment rate for inductees was down to 2.8 percent, and it has never been greater than 20 percent. Thus, approximately 80--95 percent of all the manpower obtained by the draft is temporary--and the skills of these men, which took about $6000 per draftee to develop, are wasted in the process. The cost, in wasted training and lost skills alone, is approximately $2.4 billion a year--for the privilege of depending on compulsion to secure manpower. This cost must be borne by Professor Galbraith's "well-to-do taxpayer"; it is the penalty we pay for our inefficient manpower-procurement system.

In addition, the draft ignores the basic changes that have occurred in the technology of war during the past two decades. Back in 1957, a report prepared by a "blue-ribbon" commission, headed by Ralph Cordiner, former president of General Electric, observed that "It is foolish for the Armed Services to obtain highly advanced weapons systems and not have men of sufficient competence to understand, operate and maintain such equipment.... The solution here, of course, is not to draft more men to stand and look helplessly at the machinery. The solution is to give the men already in the Armed Forces the incentives required to make them want to stay in the Service long enough and try hard enough to take these higher responsibilities, gain the skill and experience levels we need and then remain to give the Services the full benefit of their skills."

But it is precisely these skilled personnel who leave the military services for higher-paying, more satisfying jobs in civilian life. The Cordiner Report showed an inverse relationship between degree (and cost) of skills obtained and re-enlistment. "Reduced to its simplest terms," the Report stated, "the personnel problem appears to be a matter of quality as opposed to quantity." By relying on the draft, we have sacrificed quality for manpower and reduced the effectiveness of our military establishment.

This sacrifice becomes more obvious when we consider the misuse of skills and talents that permeates the current military personnel policies. On August 30, 1962, Senator William Proxmire read into the Congressional Record a study prepared by a former Army engineer that showed that "the effective utilized time of the enlisted scientist or engineer spent on work commensurate with his qualifications is ten percent." This waste of scientific talent was confirmed by the Army's Adjutant General's Office and illustrates the inability of the military services to use civilian-trained skills in a system where 80--90 percent of college-trained men remain in service for only the minimum two to three years.

In addition, the military has a unique talent for trying to fit square pegs into round holes. A General Accounting Office study, noted by Senator Gaylord Nelson in 1964, revealed that at least 35,000 soldiers were employed in the wrong jobs, wasting some $48,000,000. Helicopter pilots were serving as dog handlers, and airplane mechanics as military policemen. The GAO described the Army's handling of men as a "personnel system that generates misassignments."

This talent drain can be more clearly seen if it is compared with the personnel policies of the Navy's Seabees during World War Two. In the Seabees, it was the practice to take trained bulldozer operators, engineers and other skilled personnel and place them immediately in jobs with which they were familiar. This resulted in large savings in training time and costs--and encouraged enlistments, because the enlistee was guaranteed the opportunity to make use of his previous skills in a job he wished to perform. Unfortunately, even the Seabees have dropped this policy today.

Instead of utilizing the vast number of job-training programs available in the civilian sector, many of them financed by Federal funds under the Manpower Development and Training Act of 1962, the military establishment persists in maintaining duplicate training facilities. Even though 80 percent of military jobs are congruent with jobs in the civilian economy (according to the Department of Labor statistics), the Armed Forces continue to ignore the skilled civilian labor market in favor of untrained youths who can be "molded" into military material. These attitudes, products of the ingrained tradition of the free world's biggest bureaucracy, are motivating factors behind the military's strong reluctance to consider alternatives to the draft.

The draft's inefficiency has equally profound effects on the civilian economy, effects that are often ignored by draft boards composed of retired veterans with little or no training in economics. The current military build-up in Vietnam has intensified these pressures, as revealed in a June 1966 survey in Personnel Management--Policies and Practices, a trade journal published by Prentice-Hall. The Prentice-Hall study of 192 American business firms showed that 35 percent of these firms faced serious employment shortages because of the draft. A large number of companies have initiated new job-training programs but now cannot find young workers to train. Even in peacetime, the draft constricts the labor supply by forcing many companies to restrict their hiring to men over 26, or men who have fulfilled their draft obligation. Thirty-nine percent of draftees between the ages of 22 and 25, reported the Department of Defense during the June House hearings, were refused jobs in the civilian economy because of their draft liability. Even when manpower is plentiful, the draft restricts hiring and contributes to unemployment in the draft-liable 20--26 age group.

The final area of military mismanagement and inefficiency that can be attributed to military reliance on the draft is the patent neglect of the Reserve and the National Guard. Originally established by Congress in 1955 to serve as a ready source of trained manpower in the event of a build-up, the Reserve has become a repository for overaged ex-Servicemen and young men seeking to avoid the draft. For the most part, Reserve units are untrained--a study prepared by the Governors' Advisory Committee on the National Guard indicated that 90,000 men, or 30 percent of the total strength of the Guard, had never received training. General Hershey stated to the Armed Services Committee in June that 50,000 Reservists were in "control units" and had never received training. The Army recently completed a program whereby selected Reserve units were given updated training in order to bring them to combat readiness. These Selected Reserve Force Units were produced by "a redistribution of the personnel and material resources of the remaining approximately 70 percent of the Army National Guard," said the Governors' Committee. To get a few Reserve units ready for call-up, the Army let all other Reserve and Guard units deteriorate.

There is a reason for this mess, and it again exemplifies the total lack of coordination between the military and the civilian sectors. In 1961, the Reserve was called up to meet the Berlin Wall crisis. The result was chaos in many communities; essential employees and fathers were called away from their jobs. The same situation would result today; for example, at Lambert Airport in St. Louis, many of the key employees are Reservists. A call-up would shut down this important military and civilian airport. The same deadly results would occur in many industries across the nation. Thus, the Reserve is relegated to the backwater of military planning, and the Army is content to draft and train a new 500,000 men to fill its expanded rosters.

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This long history of inept handling of men and inequitable distribution of the burden of military service should lead us to welcome and encourage moves to end the draft and work toward a modern, career military force. Such a force--sustained by volunteers through increased pay and other benefits--would have a higher morale, would be better trained and more able to meet immediate military threats to our security.

The essential elements of a career force would include the following:

1. Better pay, better housing and other benefits that would make military life comparable with civilian jobs employing the same skills.

2. Coordination between military and civilian sectors in the training and use of available manpower, including using civilian personnel in military jobs as much as possible and making full use of civilian training and educational establishments in producing military technicians, scientists and skilled workers.

3. Lowering physical standards where appropriate to utilize less than A-1 physical specimens in noncombat jobs.

4. Improving the capabilities of Reserve units so that they may serve as a means of retaining and maintaining needed skills for potential military usage, and coordinating Reserve organizations with the civilian society.

5. Revising the Uniform Code of Military Justice to include only those personnel engaged in combat or training for combat, and restricting its application to combat occupations.

These factors can produce a vastly different and--I would argue--superior military establishment. And yet they have never received the detailed study necessary to initiate them. The Defense Department, steeped in the traditional resistance to change that marks every bureaucratic establishment, stops short on the first point. The Department claims it would cost too much to rely entirely on volunteers. Its latest cost estimates--taken from a report offered by Assistant Defense Secretary Thomas D. Morris at the June draft hearing--range from 4 billion dollars to 17 billion dollars. However, the Department bases its figures, which are almost so vague as to be ridiculous, on its estimates of what it would cost to "hire" 500,000 new men annually without any other changes in military policies. The Department later wrote me that "no estimates were made for the draft study of the combined effects of improvement in fringe benefits upon the rate of volunteering ... since these benefits--with the exception of training and educational opportunities--were not found to be effective inducements for initial enlistment" (emphasis added). Thus, the military establishment has erected an artificial monetary barrier to a volunteer Army, for it has failed to consider the large increase in re-enlistments and concomitant savings that would result from improvements in pay and other benefits.

Bruce Chapman, using 1965 figures leaked from the Pentagon study, has estimated that a pay increase totaling three billion dollars would reduce--through higher re-enlistments--the number of new Army personnel needed each year from 500,000 to 150,000. Greater fringe benefits and other improvements in military life could bring the number down even further. At the same time, the military would save at least 2.1 billion dollars in annual training costs by retaining the 350,000 men who otherwise would have left after their first hitch.

Further savings would result from using existing civilian training establishments, including college campuses, vocational schools and on-the-job training programs, to train military personnel. As nearly 90 percent of the technical skills used by the military are also employed by the civilian economy, military training programs could be reduced to the training of only the 10--20 percent of combat and combat-support jobs (field maintenance, ordnance, battalion-level supply, etc.) that need military, as opposed to vocational, training. The resultant savings for the military could be extensive. Such a program would also be a stimulus to increased business investment in our manpower resources and could produce a greater number of skilled workers for the civilian economy.

A career military force would open up more job opportunities for those in our society who are now most disadvantaged--the Negro, the less-educated and those who are presently unemployed as a result of automation. The Department of Defense statistics used in the draft study reveal that the highest rate of enlistment under the present system is found in Southern and South Atlantic states where median annual income is only $2441 and $2849, respectively, and unemployment rates are the highest in the nation. Improvement of career opportunities would further increase the rate of enlistment among the disadvantaged and would provide real opportunities for those youths now unemployed because of their inability to get the vocational and technical education our automated industries require.

Furthermore, civilian personnel could be substituted for military personnel in many cases. Under a program begun by Secretary of Defense McNamara in 1965, 74,300 military jobs were replaced by 60,500 civilian positions. This substitution resulted in an over-all decrease of 13,800 jobs--since trainees and trainers could be eliminated entirely for the civilian positions. The military is limited in a replacement program of this type by the requirement that many military positions be retained in order to rotate combat troops into Stateside jobs, but extensive reductions can still be carried out.

Improving the Reserve should be one of our first priorities, since the Reserve provides a way to retain crucial skills for military use. An effective Reserve program would be coordinated with the civilian economy, so that a call-up would not endanger important industries, and Reservists under such a program would be supplied with the latest equipment and training. Such a ready Reserve could be employed in time of crisis much more rapidly than a conscript Army, which takes a year or more to develop and train. American military theory has always centered on a relatively small standing Army with a strong Reserve, and this strategy could be achieved through a voluntary Army of the present peacetime size of 2,700,000 men, plus a well-trained Reserve of 1,000,000. The neglect of the Reserve is one of the major reasons for today's enlarged draft calls.

The question that must be asked, of the military and of Congress, is, "Why not such a system now?" The answer lies in the resistance to change that is entrenched in the military services, and the ingrained prejudices about the draft that have developed in Congress and in large segments of the public. In part, this is a generational difference: the draftees and volunteers of World War Two are now the decision-making generation in America, and their experiences are the basis from which current attitudes on the draft have developed. Changing social and economic conditions have rendered these experiences obsolete, but the old attitudes persist.

Chief among these attitudes is the feeling that "If I had to serve in the Army, then everybody else should have to, also." General Hershey summed up this feeling when he told the House Committee, "I enlisted in the National Guard in Indiana when I was sixteen years old, and there were a thousand kids that didn't, and there was nothing fair about the fact that I assumed voluntarily a responsibility they ought to share." This attitude is reflected in the opinions of the Congressmen and veterans' organizations advocating "universal military training." The feeling is understandable in a generation that fought World War Two, but it is not in tune with technological and demographic changes that have reduced the need for raw manpower while making more of it available. The persistence of this feeling has created a wide gulf between our nation's youth--who face the draft firsthand--and the older generation that is living with memories of the past.

Similarly, the attitude that military training is good for everyone, that it makes better citizens, reduces juvenile delinquency and, in fact, is a panacea for all the ills of our society, is rooted in the experiences of the World War Two generation. Those days of sacrifice and heroics are fondly remembered, and all the horrors and follies of those experiences are erased by time. The experiences of World War Two gave birth in 1951 to the Universal Military Training and Service Act, which was intended by its proponents to lead to actual UMT. However, after the National Security Training Commission brought forth its report on UMT in 1951, Congress decided not to accept it, and UMT has been largely discredited since then. Nonetheless, the attitude remains, and men such as Hershey still believe in it. Hershey again advocated UMT at this year's draft hearings, and L. Mendel Rivers, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, expressed his support of the principle. It is the persistence of this feeling that has been a primary factor in the opposition to a volunteer, career Army.

Universal Military Training and its "liberal" substitute, "universal national service"--which would allow Peace Corps work or similar service to satisfy the military obligation--are abhorrent to our democratic society. Senator Robert A. Taft said in 1940, "The compulsory draft is far more typical of totalitarian nations than of democratic nations. The theory behind it leads directly to totalitarianism. It is absolutely opposed to the principles of individual liberty which have always been considered a part of American democracy." America has long mistrusted military authority and has rejected compulsion in favor of individual freedom. The draft has only been justifiable as a measure of necessity: now that it is no longer necessary, it is no longer justifiable.

Yet the proponents of UMT, intent on realizing their past experiences in the younger generation, fail to see that these goals transgress the American value system. When General Hershey says, "I think we have gone hog wild on individual rights in this country," or when Chairman Rivers adds his "God bless you" to Hershey's advocacy of drafting Vietnamese war protesters, we must be concerned about the maintenance of our system of values. Solutions, such as UMT or "universal national service," inappropriate to our value system may pose a greater threat to our way of life than the dangers they are expected to dispel.

The voluntary system I have proposed has as one of its purposes the reduction of military authority over the lives of our citizens. The military establishment, of course, strongly objects to such concepts as replacement of military with civilian personnel, limitation in the scope of military law and the use of civilian training establishments for the Armed Forces. It is in the nature of bureaucracies, especially military bureaucracies, to attempt to extend their control over as many people as possible. This tendency exists in a democratic society, as well as in a totalitarian one, and should be resisted as strongly as possible.

Unfortunately, the civilian chiefs in the Department of Defense and the Administration are not in a position to resist. The Defense Department is a part of the bureaucratic structure, and the Executive is limited by bureaucracy. There have been many studies of military manpower procurement--the National Security Training Commission in 1951; the Cordiner study in 1957; the Gorham study in 1964; the recent Department of Defense study of the draft; and now the Presidential Advisory Commission on Selective Service, headed by Burke Marshall, former Assistant Attorney General. Each of these committees has suffered from the same lack of democratic procedures--open hearings, free testimony, rebuttal and surrebuttal opinion and published records--that characterizes all special executive committees. These commissions and study groups are also captives of the department they are created to serve. Senator Richard Russell, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said of a proposed draft study in 1959, "Usually we end up getting the same recommendations from the commissions that we have had from the Department of Defense on the same subject. It is really a new way of asking for the views of the Department of Defense."

The President's involvement in the draft is also political, as military policy is an offshoot of foreign policy. President Johnson, committed in Vietnam, will not allow the draft, associated in the public mind with the war effort, to be debated in Congress. In 1964, three days before 24 Republicans presented their demands for a Congressional draft study, the President announced the formation of his Defense Study Group. The results of this executive study were kept secret until last summer, when the House Armed Services hearings forced the subject into the open. Then, Assistant Secretary of Defense Thomas Morris released the results of this study in a brief and nonfactual report, and immediately the President named a new commission to study the same subject. The results of the new commission's work will be ready early this year; but it will be too late for any independent study by Congress before the draft law expires at the end of June 1967.

Executive efforts have been inhibiting factors in reforming and modernizing the draft, but Congress' failure in this area is even more reprehensible. Senator Russell said in 1959 that "Congress cannot dodge or eliminate that responsibility [to study the draft]," but Congress has done just that. The current draft law has been extended three times since 1951 with only cursory debate. Vigorous attempts by Republicans such as Robert Ellsworth, Bradford Morse and myself, and Democrats such as Robert W. Kastenmeier and William Ryan to get Congress to take up this responsibility have been in vain. The draft has been a political football, booted back and forth between Executive commissions and Congressional committees. It is revealing that the draft-extension bills have always come up in nonelection years. General Hershey remarked in 1955, "Let us hope, pray or what not that this thing expires in a year that is not divisible by two." Politics, not sincere concern for the welfare of our draft-age youth or the development of a modern Army, has motivated many Congressmen to oppose changes in the draft.

The principal responsibility for the failure of Congress in this area must rest with the Armed Services Committee, in whose jurisdiction military manpower procurement falls. Members of the Armed Services Committee have usually acted as if they were spokesmen for the military services themselves, fighting the eternal war against the civilian heads of the Defense Department. As such, they listen only to the military point of view and resist "encroachments" on their jurisdiction from other members of Congress or from the public.

The problem of manpower procurement is more than a military one, and the arguments I have advanced over the past 15 years for a voluntary Army affect the civilian sector, our American value system and the whole universe of military and civilian life. Therefore, it is imperative that the draft issue be studied in its broadest aspects before we decide on concrete proposals. I have insisted that a Congressional draft study must include members from the House Education and Labor and Senate Labor and Public Welfare committees, as well as members whose specialties and interests are more general. Only in this way can we focus on the totality of the manpower-procurement problems. The parochial jealousies, narrow viewpoints and political fears that mark the attitudes of some of our Congressional leaders toward the draft are tragic. Congress is the only body that can evaluate the draft, informing and involving the public in its hearings and debate; its failure to act is an indictment of the whole Congressional process.

The draft is obsolete and can be dispensed with; but politics, misty visions of a 20-years-past experience, ingrained bureaucratic obstinance and a refusal to face the changed condition of an automated, overpopulated society continue to give it life. For the sake of what we have labeled "security," America has sacrificed some of its liberty, has subjected its youth to the confusion and irrationality of a system long past its prime and has neglected its opportunity to streamline and modernize our military forces. We should ignore labels and prejudices to seek viable answers to a problem that affects so dearly the life of our society. We can no longer afford to be complacent, because a new generation, charged with an idealism and a purpose we have often forgotten, will not wait. If we must send this generation to war, we in Congress and in the public at large must also meet our responsibilities to make our society and its institutions as democratic, as equitable and as strong as we can.