The Draft: The Equity of a Lottery

In a few days the President's Commission on the Draft will release its plans to reform the Selective Service System. The indications are that the Commission will propose the gradual abolition of the 2-S student deferment and the institution of a lottery -- a system which would draft men at random from a pool of all 18 and 19-year-olds mentally and physically fit to serve. The lottery should be enacted by Congress when the present Selective Service Act expires in June.

The primary value of the Commission's plan is that it will exempt no class from active participation in the limited, conventional wars in which the United States seems often to be engaged. As long as the 2-S continues, those who can afford higher education reside in a privileged sanctuary from the inconvenience and violence of military service.

Efficiency v. Morality

The best defense of the student deferment is that it is economical. America, the defenders of the 2-S insist, must protect its students to prevent the decimation of a generation of college students, such as occurred in Great Britain during World War I. The ranks of America's future leaders should not, they say, be thinned by war. A related argument is that most of the men in college deserve to be there, that the university in America is more the haven of the intellectually talented than a refuge for the rich.

But America has simply too great a wealth of human resources to justify a procedure based on the premise that a loss of some portion of its students would be catastrophic. The other argument--that people in college deserve to be there--is beside the point. In no sense is it moral to use the draft to separate those who are too precious to be sent to war from those considered acceptable cannon fodder. Of course, there are times when a nation must ignore moral principles and worry about self-preservation. Now is not such a time. Because of its clear social inequity, the 2-S deferment should be discarded.

The Commission's lottery will achieve a distribution of military service appropriate to this nation's democratic traditions. Young men would go into the pool right after high school, when, according to many sociologists, a break in formal education would do them the most good. The Commission may also propose four-year, non-renewable deferments to allow men to complete college before going into the pool--but they would go into the pool.

Another advantage of the lottery system is that it will eliminate the problem of uncertainty that has poisoned the prospect of military service for so many in recent years. Either a man will be notified of his obligation at the age of 18, or he will be released permanently. Holding the lottery later than 18 would work a special hardship on those who plan to get a job immediately after high school, since employers hesitate to spend money training men who may soon be drafted.

Within this compulsory system, however, some provision should be made for conscientous objection to a particular war, as is done in England. The exact form of such exemptions deserves careful consideration, but should be enacted along with the lottery.

Friedman's Folly

An alternative to the draft by lottery is an all-volunteer army of the type suggested by Milton Friedman, professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. It would, he estimates, cost the government $5 billion a year to bring military salaries to the point where enough volunteers could be attracted to obviate the need for a draft.

Department of Defense officials maintain that the volunteer army would cost $17 billion a year. Some observers also feel that a volunteer army would soon become an army composed largely of Negroes -- shifting the burden of military service onto a minority group. There is also the argument that a volunteer army -- a professional army -- would be a seedbed for a Seven Days in May-style putsch.

These are not the strongest objections that can be leveled against the volunteer army. The easiest way to determine the actual cost, after all, is to raise salaries and see if enlistments increase. The ratio of Negroes in the army would probably not rise fantastically, since mental and physical tests would no doubt exclude a disproportionate percentage of members of disadvantaged minority groups. As for coups d'etat, they are usually led by officers, not enlisted men, and there is no reason that reliance on voluntary enlistments would significantly alter the composition of the officer corps.

Poor Man's Military

What remains obscured by most arguments for the volunteer army is that it will not, for the most part, include the wealthy or well-educated. That is the critical objection. It means that class distinction, even without 2-S, would endure -- simply in a less obvious form. Do the rich have the right to expect others to serve in the nation's military when they will not? It is the well-to-do who by and large write the laws, and it would be discouraging to see the well-to-do demand an end to coercion and then legislate themselves out of battle.

The lottery will not guarantee that every man is as likely to come under fire as his fellow; the army sorts its recruits, often sending the brightest into special training and service behind the lines. But the lottery will spare the United States the immorality and the embarrassment of maintaining an army of part of the people.