Is the Draft System Fair? A Faculty Group Answers

(When the Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted for the second time in January not to discuss the draft, Thomas C. Schelling, Professor of Economics, organized a 14-member group to study the United States military manpower system.

"I had the impression that no one, including me, knew what he was talking about at the Faculty meeting," Schelling says. The group, organized under the Kennedy School's Institute of Politics, met for 10 Saturday mornings to educate themselves on the selective service system. Initially, it did not intend to release statements, but three weeks ago released the following preliminary report, which was agreed upon unanimously by the 14 members.

"We held widely differing views on military and foreign policy and on Vietnam," says Schelling, "and initially we weren't confident we could settle issues as well as raise them."

Schelling organized the group from interested friends in the Economics Department, the Faculty members who first proposed the draft discussion at the December meeting of the Faculty, and one Professor of Law.

They are John T. Dunlop, David A. Wells Professor of Political Economy; Samuel P. Huntington, professor of Government; John Rawls, professor of Philosophy; Henry Rosovsky, professor of Economics, Charles Fried, professor of Law; Stephen A. Marglin '59, assistant professor of Economics and coorganizer of the group; Gerald D. Rosenthal, assistant professor of Economics; and Lester E. Thurow, assistant professor of Economics.

Three graduate students specializing in military manpower were also on the groups Graham Allison, Jr., Stephen L. Canby; and Robert V. Zupkis, Robert E. Herztein, a Washington attorney, and Jack W. Carlson, a Washington economist also attended the meetings.)

I: Abolish Deferments

All young men whose age, mental and physical fitness, and educational attainment qualify them for military duty should be equally eligible for conscription. Nobody needs to be deferred or exempted at age 19 or 20 on grounds that his career plans and educational intentions make him too valuable a citizen to go into the Army, or make it a national interest that his, and not others', service be postponed a few years.

The economic benefits of discriminating among young men are modest, and largely confined to the young men who benefit. It is even doubtful whether, in the interest of a student's education and career, the best time to do his service is after completion of college.

II: Lottery

If, as should be done, specific deferment of students is abolished, or comparable postponement is made equally available to all young men, the number of men eligible will exceed the number needed by the military services. The means of determining who serves and who does not serve, within this eligible group, must be fair and non-discriminatory and must appear fair and non-discriminatory both to those who are selected and those who are not. We know of nothing but a random process--a "lottery"--that will meet their conditions.

We therefore recommend choice by lottery.

III: Higher Military Pay

Military pay should be increased sufficiently to attract, in the absence of hostilities, at least two and one-half million men. There is no magic in this figure. It corresponds to what, a few years ago, was acknowledged to be the approximate "peacetime" level of the armed forces, less one or two hundred thousand that we believe might be replaced by civilian employees during the coming years. Nobody can exactly estimate the pay scale required to reach this goal; but pay scales must be set with some goal in mind, and this should be the goal.

In time of hostilities, the additional men needed, and any short-fall of enlistments below this goal, should be acquired through the draft, preferably by lottery.

IV: Minimum Federal Wages for Draftees

We have to ask young men to do our fighting for us, involuntarily if necessary; we should not ask the young men to pay our taxes for us. The draft should not be used as a means of shifting the financial burden of war or preparedness onto the same young men who are selected to carry the burden of risk and disrupted careers. The "cost" of attracting the 2.5 or 2.75 million enlistees in peace-time is not really saved when we draft them; it is merely shifted, in the form of lower wages, from taxpayers to the men in the service.

Too often the questions of fairness and discrimination are confined to the choice of who shall serve, with little attention to how we might shift some of the burdens of service from those who serve onto those who are served. Those of us who do not serve because we are too old or because we are otherwise not selected, should be careful not to use the draft as a way of holding military wages down. And there is no reason to suppose that a man's sense of duty is weakened, or his morale undermined, by having his services appreciated with a decent wage.

Surely the federal minimum wage is not too extravagant for a young man serving in the army in either peace or war.

V: Volunteer Army in Peacetime

Most of the inequity in the present pay scale for draftees could be elimi- nated, and reasonable pay differentials maintaned among servicemen, with pay increases that would total between $2 billion and $3 billion per year. We recommend such increases on grounds of fairness and in the belief that a democracy with a GNF of over half a trillion dollars, and with income-tax rates lower than those prevailing before Vietnam, has no compelling need to use conscription to keep military wages down.

Official estimates of the likely cost of achieving a volunteer force of about 2.7 million men in peacetime appear to us somewhat exaggerated; pay increases on the scale we recommend should have an appreciable effect on enlistments. If so, the net cost will be reduced through reductions in training and other expenses associated with the higher turnover of drafted men.

VI: More Civilian Employees

Paying young men more nearly what they are worth in the civilian economy can have other benefits, through a better appreciation within the military services that drafted men are not cheap resources.

An energetic and continuous effort should be made to replace uniformed men with civilian employees, male and female, in all of those tasks in which the discipline, the traditions, and the other qualities associated with uniformed armed forces, are not essential. This may cost more; if so, we have been using the draft to save ourselves money by putting civilans in uniform.

VII: Review Policy on Reserves, National Guard

The Reserves and Natiodnal Guard should be considered ready, and should actually be ready, to serve in an emergency. If, however, as recent experience suggests, they are either not ready or not available for a war on the scale of the war in Vietnam, the worth of continuing the present reserve and National Guard system ought to be brought into question.

VIII: No State Quotas

Military service is national service, not service to a state or locality. Eligible young men ought to be equally vulnerable to selection, no matter what state they reside in. Randomized selection should be designed to achieved this and should not be based on state quotas.

IX: Choice of Timing Under Lottery

A lottery can be designed that, without becoming too complicated, permits a young man some freedom of choice in the year that he chooses to serve. Such freedom of choice should be equally available to all young men.

One workable arrangement would be to call young men in their twenty-first year in an order of call determined by lottery, but with the lottery taking place in the young man's nineteenth year. At age nineteen a young man would have a good idea of the likelihood of his being called two years later, and could anticipate his service by electing to be drafted at age nineteen or twenty. A longer period of choice might have the unhealthful effect of inducing young men to speculate unduly on changes in the prospects for war and peace or even for changes in the draft law.

Young men high in the priority of call would be on notice that two years' service probably awaited them at age twenty-one and a strict denial of dependency exemption at age twenty-one would not then involve significant hardship. This arrangement would substantially eliminate the issue of college-student deferment: and it would benefit the college student by letting him know at age nineteen the likelihood that he would be called at twenty-one, so that he could make his own choice whether to complete college before or after military service.

X: If Deferments Continue ...

If, contrary to what we believe best, college students are deferred and others not, college students should become, upon graduation, equally vulnerable to the draft along with younger men who are not deferred. Exceptions should be made only for medical students, officer candidates, and others whose choice of career makes them more liable to military service, not less liable, than others.

If college students are not permitted and they should not be permitted--to avoid eventual liability for military service, the supply of eligible young men will exceed the military demand for them about as much as if nobody were deferred. Thus the need remains for a randomized selection process to determine who shall serve.

XI: Reform Pay Structure

The pay structure of the armed services should be continually rationalized to improve efficiency, to provide stronger incentives to remain in service and thus to reduce training costs and to preserve the skills created by both experience and training, to achieve the best allocations of skills and qualities among and within the services, and to avoid wasting military manpower on jobs that civilians or civilian contractors can do.

XII: Keep Current Standards

Increased pay, along the lines we recommend, should increase the number of men who enlist under the present physical and mental standards. There is a natural tendency, and a commendable one, for the armed services to want the highest quality personnel they can get; and with higher pay they would be able, and might be tempted, to raise standards of acceptance rather than to admit a larger number of enlistees.

In order, however, to reduce reliance on the draft and to spread the opportunities for service as widely20THOMAS C. SCHELLING, professor of Economics and specialist on theory of conflict, organized the 14-member group under the Kennedy School's Institute of Politics.