Word: volunteerism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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A 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...
Another reason that military men would hate to see the draft go is that they think it provides them with manpower of greater quality as well as quantity. As Colonel Hays noted, volunteers, unpressured by the draft, tended to be "marginal" when the Army last tried them. But he was...
Civilian reservations about volunteer armed forces also focus on some fears that tend to dissolve upon examination. Some 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...
Might not the volunteer army become disproportionately black, perhaps a sort of internal Negro Foreign Legion? Labor Leader Gus Tyler is one who holds that view; he says that a volunteer army would be "lowincome and, ultimately, overwhelmingly Negro. These victims of our social order 'prefer' the uniform...
As a matter of practice rather than theory, powerful factors would work in a volunteer army toward keeping the proportion of blacks about where it is in the draft army-11%, or roughly the same as the nation as a whole. Pay rises would attract whites as much as blacks...