Reformers Seek Ways to Correct Inefficiency, Inequity in the Draft

Only six months ago a special committee appointed by the President submitted a top-secret report proposing that the Selective Service System in its present form should be eliminated in 1967. "Those fellas in Washington pronounced us dead and were preparing for the funeral," says General Lewis B. Hershey, national director "Well we fooled em--We're back in business."

The committee's report has never been released, for the assumption on which it was based--that the armed forces' manpower needs relative to supply would decline drastically--has been obviated by the rapidly escalating conflict in South East Asia. To fight the "half war" it is now waging in Vietnam, the administration has launched a "half draft" at home.

The present call-ups of 45,000 monthly are only a fraction of the 450,000 called during the Korean war. But the Army is now expanding its standing manpower from 2.6 million to slightly over 2.9; and the Defense Department, according to officials in Washington, now plans to increase the number of U.S. troops in Vietnam to 400,000.

Hershey continues to insist that "there's really no reason to expect that we'll have to begin taking full time undergraduates." He expects an increase in voluntary enlistments that will enable the Selective Service to cut its monthly calls from 45,000 to 30,000.

But the state director for Massachusetts, John C. Carr, predicts that if the present trend continues, local boards will be forced to reclassify "substantial numbers" of full time students. "It's a matter of which increases faster," says Carr, the "enlistments or the manpower requirements. Right now its too early to tell really which will grow more quickly." If students are inducted on a massive scale, Carr expects that the system of tests and class rankings used during the Korean war will be reinstituted. At that time, the armed forces drafted students who scored less than 70 per cent on a standardized examination and were in the bottom quarter of their class.

Local Boards Decide

The decision as to whether or not a student is deferred--granted 2-S status--now rests almost entirely with his local board. Under the present system, the Universal Military Training Act establishes various classifications, and specifies the "sequence". The law provides that local boards must take single men aged 19-26 before married men, and married men without dependents before those who have them. It also grants exemptions to those who fail the physical and mental examinations, those who have certain essential skills or occupations, conscientious objectors, sole surviving sons, and ministers.

But as for granting deferments, the law states only that local boards should wait as long as possible to induct men whose activity is in the national interest. And although the boards are requested by state and national headquarters to grant 2-S deferments to students, they are not required by law to do so. "The 2-S status," says Hershey, "is merely a courtesy that the boards grant students because they believe they will be more valuable when they complete their courses." Even in granting exemptions, the law is so vague that local boards are almost completely autonomous.

This autonomy allows the boards to accomodate their standards to the particular features of each case, Harold Heinstein, chairman of the Brookline board, calls this adjustment "the human factor." "We consider every aspect of the registrant," Heinstein says, "his family's financial condition, his standing with friends and employers right down to the part of his hair."

The registrant, notes Heinstein, "only tells us what he wants us to know. But we have ways of finding the truth." Boards may subpoena information or witnesses, and make special investigations. "Most of the cases," says Heinstein are pretty easy to resolve."

Individuals can appeal, of course--first to a state board and then to the President, who has appointed a committee to deal with these requests. But the process is slow and rarely favors the registrant.

The only effective means of assuring that the decisions of the local boards are uniform or consistent is the system of quotas formulated by national headquarters on the basis of reports prepared by local boards. These reports, outlining the number and characteristics of the board's registrants, are sent to state headquarters where they are correlated on a statewide basis and passed on to national headquarters. In Washington, Hershey and his staff allocate quotas to the states, aiming as Hershey says "to spread the burden evenly." These quotas are then divided among the local boards.

Ideally, Equality

Ideally no board in the country would exhaust its pool of 1-A manpower or change the criteria it uses for classification before any other. A board, for example, with only 20 eligible registrants left who are not students should not be required to furnish more than 20 men until other boards are also forced to dip into their student population.

In practice, however, boards face widely different situations and have adopted widely divergent policies. In fact, the increase in call-ups has accentuated the lack of uniformity which existed in past years. The proportions of the current call-up allow some students to continue their education while others are taken. The present system of quotas and reports has not been flexible enough to adapt to the new situation, and so the selective service has become selectively arbitrary.

In affluent districts which send large numbers of their eligible young men to college, or in farm districts which have a substantial portion of their registrants in draft-exempt agricultural employment, boards have been extremely hard-pressed to find non-student inductees. Boards in southern states have already drafted substantial numbers of full-time students. But in other states--Illinois and Michigan, for example--there is no indication that boards will take students.

Some boards are inducting students who have taken a year's leave of absence and others are not. Boards apply different criteria in judging whether or not an individual has "dependents;" whether his particular field of graduate study is "in the national interest;" whether a student is making "satisfactory progress."

Hershey argues that these inconsis-