Word: presenting
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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 one-third of new troops and on the scare power of the draft to induce thousands of others to "volunteer." The draftees...
...critics have raised the specter of well-paid careerists becoming either mercenaries or a "state within a state." Nixon, for one, dismisses the mercenary argument as nonsense. The U.S. already pays soldiers a salary. Why should a rise in pay-which for an enlisted man might go from the present $2,900 a year to as much as $7,300-turn Americans into mercenaries? Said Nixon: "We're talking about the same kind of citizen armed force America has had ever since it began, excepting only in the period when we have relied on the draft." The Pentagon itself...
...position from which to start working for a volunteer army is that, to a large extent, the nation already has one-in the sense that two-thirds of its present troops are enlistees. Neither Nixon nor anyone else visualizes a rapid changeover. The draft will doubtless endure until the war in Viet Nam ends, but it could then be phased out gradually. After that, the draft structure can be kept in stand-by readiness, thinks Nixon, "without leaving 20 million young Americans who will come of age during the next decade in constant uncertainty and apprehension...
...they would get if they were civilians, or forcing other young men into early marriages and profitless studies to avoid the draft. Incentive, substituted for compulsion, could cut waste and motivate pride. Not least, a volunteer army would work substantially toward restoring the national unity so sundered by the present inequalities of the draft...
...minds on the Middle East, along with Britain and France as the only other potential sources of arms, the question remained to what extent a settlement could be imposed on the quarrelsome antagonists. The Arabs now seem eager to have their borders guaranteed by the big powers, and the present leaders of the Arab world know that an imposed settlement is the only kind that they could politically survive. Israel insists that any lasting peace can only be negotiated by those responsible for living with it, and stoutly opposes big-power intervention. Against this is the fact that Arabs...