Defense Report Would Keep the Draft

Like death and taxes, the draft, it appears, will be with us for at least a little while longer.

A Defense Department committee on military manpower yesterday reported that there is a continued need for compulsory military conscription if the size of the armed forces is to be kept at its present 2.6 million.

The committee recommended three main changes in existing policy. It proposed drafting younger men, widening deferment possibilities, and increasing military pay and fringe benefits as inducements to enlistment and longer service.

Samuel Huntington, professor of Government, who helped prepare the committee's report, yesterday said that the central problem is that the expanding number of men now eligible for the draft far outstrips the needs of the military. Thus the draft board is faced with eliminating men according to a rational scheme.

One way out of this confusion, he said, would be to draft all eligible men of a certain age, unless they were deferred. Those who were not drafted would "go to the end of the line," he suggested, and, in effect, never be drafted.

Huntington said that the committee had not considered the problem of college students who take leaves of absence. "Our group was concerned with the big picture," he explained.

The $1 million study, described when undertaken as the most comprehensive analysis ever done of the problems of military conscription, was launched last year by President Johnson.

At the time the study was announced, the President told a news conference that an alternative to the present draft selection system would be to accept men on "an entirely voluntary basis in the next decade."