Word: drafting
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Eighteen years, a war, a police action, and 12½ million men after Secretary of War Henry Stimson pulled No. 158 out of the jar, young U.S. men are still being drafted into the armed forces-and the draft remains a subject for controversy. Last week, with selective service scheduled to expire June 30, Defense Secretary Neil McElroy moved against simmering congressional end-the-draft sentiment, asked for a four-year extension...
...asking an extension, McElroy hoped to head off arguments that the U.S. could save $28 million a year in draft board administration costs and still keep the services sufficiently strong through volunteer enlistments. In fact, although the Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard do not need draftees to maintain their force levels, the Army does: at a current draft rate of 9,000 men a month, 28% of the Army's 804,000-man enlisted personnel is drafted. More important, as McElroy pointed out, the omnipresent threat of selective service "stimulates" young men to volunteer...
...most valid criticism of the draft as now operated is that it is inequitable. Of the nation's 2,200,000 physically fit men in the 18½-to-26-year-old bracket, only 120,000 get grabbed by the draft each year. Thousands of others volunteer, but the fact is that in the skimpy-quota peacetime era it requires little imagination to think up a reason to be deferred, e.g., as a student, a farmer, a scientist or a hardship case. Thousands of 17-and 18-year-olds exercise their alternative right of fulfilling military obligations with...
Strangely enough, those most affected seem to fret least about the apparent inequities of the peacetime draft. "I don't worry about the draft," says a Dallas high school student. "Why should I? There's no war." Says a Chicago draft-board official: "Most boys of draft age have never known a time when there was no draft.-They regard it as a part of their lives." And-Manny Celler & Co. to the contrary-for as long as the young men feel so, there are likely to be more numbers drawn in the long line of succession...
...draft law has been on the books continuously since 1940, except for 15 months in 1947 and 1948, when it was allowed to expire at the suggestion of President Truman...