Word: unfitness
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Also present at the meeting in the Pentagon, held Wednesday, were representatives of the Association of American Universities, headed by Gordon Gray, president of the University of South Carolina. Both groups endorsed U.M.S., which could draft all men at 18, even those unfit for combat...
...burden would fall on the nation's youth, 1,100,000 of whom turn 18 every year. Assuming that 30% of them would be rejected as physically or mentally unfit, the fit would be barely enough to fill the annual quota of 750,000. Under the present law they could volunteer or be drafted. But last week, adding confusion and solving nothing, President Truman raised the question again of universal training. He left out the "military," as he always does in discussing the ticklish subject. To the convention of National Guardsmen the President said: "Eight times I have asked...
...gearing our entire economy, even dairy-farming, to our military effort, have become unfit for such men as these . . . hadn't we better examine ourselves and see if we haven't, without knowing it, developed the contagious moral leprosy of those we claim we are fighting against...
Hershey was facing an uncompromising set of facts. Once they reached the 3,000,000-man level the armed forces would need 750,000 men a year to stay there. Every year, only 1,100,000 turn 18, and 30% of them are predictably physically unfit. Left to the draft: an annual crop of approximately 800,000 boys from which to raise the 750,000 needed...
...Selective Service Lewis Hershey urged that the term of service be increased from 21 months to 30, that World War II veterans under 26 be included in the draft, that rules be changed in order to rope in more men claiming exemptions and men previously judged to be unfit. This was not a temporary program, Hershey said, but a program for an "indefinite" period, perhaps for "a generation...