Draft in the House

For several weeks now, the House of Representatives and its Armed Services Committee have been kicking around the new draft bill. They have not done a good or a creditable job. They have amended and re-amended the Universal Military Service and Training provisions, which are the only fair way of drafting, until there is very little left and they have allowed themselves to be pushed off the track by public pressures and Administration indiscretions.

Perhaps the greatest of those indiscretions was the President's order deferring practically all college and graduate school students until they finished their education. Coming when it did, while the Administration was calling for equality of sacrifice, it could only cause a negative response in the Congress.

More important, the directive helped divert Congress from its primary and necessary task, the establishment of Universal Military Service and Training. The bill on which the House will vote today would force the President to re-submit U. M. S. T. for Congressional approval after he had drawn up a complete plan for the program. It does not suspend Selective Service--a system that was adequate so long as the armed forces could be kept up to strength with volunteers but cannot handle equitably the problems of long- term partial mobilizations.

Continued Selective Services, with its exemptions, deferments, aberrations, and inequities, will not be good for anyone, college students included. It will require constant revision, it will continue the injustices perpetrated by individual draft boards, and it will give exemption to men who carefully juggle their careers so as to be in the right position at the right time. U. M. S. T., on the other hand, would take men for training and service at a time when it would interfere least with their education, and it would guarantee equality of sacrifice. If the plan for 75,000 deferments yearly were included, U. M. S. T. would also meet the armed forces requirements for trained medical men and technicians.

But, one may well ask, if Congress succeeds in pigeonholing U. M. S. T. (which is quite possible), then is not the President's directive on deferring students a good thing? As it stands, no. For one thing, individual draft boards are not legally bound to follow the directive; the House actually voted that they need not use a man's score on the nationwide test as an excuse for deferment. Thus, there will still be room for the same local discrimination that has plagued some applicants for 2-A classification this year. But worse still, though the directive specifies "deferment" and not "exemption," there is no way provided to catch up with the man who stays in school until he has passed the critical age of 26 or until he has buttressed himself with a wife and children.

With these deficiencies patched up, the deferment plan would be about the best students could hope for under Selective Service. But the situation would still be far worse, for both students and colleges, than it would be under U. M. S. T. Colleges would be sitting on perpetual pins and needles, wondering how many students they could expect in any particular September. Students would often be sandwiching in their armed service at inappropriate times in their careers, and would be involved in a continual race for grades to keep out of the army.

U. M. S. T. is the only solution. If a Senate-House conference can restore it and write it into law now, then the long and often irrelevant Congressional discussion will not have been in vain.