Draft By Lottery

The Marshall Commission's report has lived up to its advance billing. It is a carefully-written, well-considered, document. The majority decision that 2-S should be abolished is reasonable and just.

It is not yet clear when the President intends to replace the current draft system with a lottery. In his special message to Congress Monday, he gave no indication that he would act before 1969. The President should move more quickly. The inequity protected by the current draft is magnified by the war in Vietnam.

The President should use his Executive power to establish a lottery this year. All 19-year-olds and all older men holding student deferments--medical students excluded-should go into this first pool. The large number of men involved in the draw will be at least partly offset by the larger draft calls--so the probability that a man will be drafted will be very roughly equivalent to that in later peacetime pools which include only 19-year-olds. Non-students over 19 but under 26 will not face the lottery, though this is the age-group most affected by the present system. However, most of the older, draftable men have been drafted. Doctors, the one group to retain student deferments, would enter a separate lottery after graduating from medical school.

In succeeding years the lottery could be conducted as the Commission suggests. All men physically and mentally fit to serve would be given a randomly determined position in the order of call. The military would then call up as many men as needed. If a man was passed over in his 19th year, he would be placed at the bottom of later orders of call, and could trust that he would not be called.

The Commission's decision to fix the year of maximum vulnerability at 19 is well informed. Any earlier and the draft would interfere with education in slow-paced slum schools; later, and men would have to interrupt their junior or senior year in college--the time when most schools ask a student to devote himself to his major field of study.

But any forcible method of staffing the army will disrupt lives and the President ought to limit that disruption whenever possible. The Commission suggested that a study be conducted to see if men who had been called for duty might not be able to choose the time they entered the service. Thus a man notified at 19 that he would have to serve could delay induction until he was, 23 and presumably finished with college.

If such a system can be devised--and we are not at all sure it can be--it ought to be applicable to non-students as well as students. Under no conditions should students be allowed to use this system as a way of avoiding service in a shooting war. When war is declared or when substantial numbers of American troops are killing people all temporary deferments should be cancelled.

The Marshall Commission would leave substantially unaltered the definition of conscientious objectors as men opposed to all war. They did, however, recommend that the system of appeals be streamlined. This is not satisfactory. The President should ask that men who have moral objections to particular wars be exempted from them. A society with power to coerce men into killing must be especially careful to observe the right of individual conscience.