Word: draft
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...volunteer armed force would seem to have something for everybody. For the Pentagon, it would provide a careerist body of men staying in the ranks long enough to learn their jobs and do them well; as it is, 93% of drafted soldiers leave the service when their two-year tour of duty ends. For constitutionalists, a volunteer army would affirm the principle that free men should not be forced into involuntary servitude in violation of the 13th Amendment. For philosophers, it would restore freedom of choice; if a man wants to be a soldier...
...will soon achieve what Nixon has promised to build toward: "an all-volunteer armed force." A main reason for this is that the Pentagon's basic support for the idea of a volunteer army is heavily qualified by worries that it will not work-while the draft has now delivered the bodies without fail for two decades...
...without dependents and those willing to sign up for a three-year hitch. When the Berlin blockade and the Communist seizure of Czechoslovakia took place in 1948, the Pentagon complained that it was far under strength and that relying on volunteers had failed. Congress was told that the draft was needed to get manpower and show U.S. determination to check Communist aggression. The clumsily titled Universal Military Training and Service Act was passed. After that, proposals for returning to a volunteer army were not heard for years...
...military arguments against the volunteer army nowadays derive from new judgments about the size of the forces needed, the cost, and the necessity of flexibility. Certainly nothing but a draft could have supplied the 2,800,000 doughboys of World War I or the 10 million G.I.s of World War II, and the Pentagon's estimate of its current needs runs to similar magnitudes: 3,454,160 of the present moment, and 2,700,000 when peace returns. To raise the Viet Nam-inflated forces, the Department of Defense has relied on the draft to bring in about...
...number of military thinkers contend that establishing a volunteer armed force limits the flexibility of response to threats. When Khrushchev got tough with President Kennedy in 1961, for example, the President easily increased U.S. might by authorizing Selective Service to have each of its 4,000 draft boards pull in more men. Presumably war on a big scale could rapidly outrun the capacities of a volunteer army, possibly requiring every able-bodied man. Reserves therefore would have to be maintained-with incentives for reservists instead of the threat of the draft. Even the draft itself probably should be kept...