A Plea for Lady Luck

...The military manpower debate has been with us ever since the passage of the Selective Service Act, just before World War II, by a margin of one single vote in the House of Representatives...

...Reviewed by DAVID BERNSTEIN Editor, the Binghamton "Sun-Bulletin" I happened to read Who Will Do Our Fighting for Us?, George Reedy's little book on conscription, while on board the Empress of Canada, sailing with my family from Montreal to Liverpool...

...To all this, Friedman rather pris-sily responds that a draft lottery "makes service in the military subject to Lady Luck," and that "it reduces the solemn obligation to serve one's country to the level of the Las Vegas gaming tables...

...Reedy favors continuation of the draft, but with some changes...

...Indeed, the young newsman attempted to persuade my 17-year-old son to jump to Toronto, stay with someone for a while, then settle down and complete his education, get a good job, and take out Canadian citizenship...

...One of the few remaining brakes on the so-called military-industrial complex is the fact that the American draftee despises the martial life...

...During World War II, which few opposed, the griping of 13 million reluctant heroes had political repercussions—conceivably too much so, resulting in the pell-mell demobilization after V-J Day, and the need shortly thereafter to tool up all over again for the dreary succession of crises and cold wars, Korea, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Vietnam...

...His concerns are more pragmatic...

...Above all, he is out to knock down the arguments in favor of a "voluntary" professional army...

...There are other arguments, of course...

...Friedman suggests that the conditions offered to new recruits must be substantially improved—higher pay, better housing and food, more efficient matching of skills to tasks, and so on...

...He thinks an all-volunteer force would appeal only to the poor and the black—by which he presumably means poor whites and poorer blacks—intimating that this would be harmful and perhaps dangerous...

...On the assumption that international difficulties will not cease after the Vietnam war peters out (if it ever does), he is worried about how the United States will continue to obtain the manpower it needs for the military commitments of the future...

...Probably the most persuasive argument against a wholly professional army," he says, "is that no one can be sure of finding the right kind of men at the right time through voluntary recruitment...

...It can even be argued that the more universal the threat of conscription, the less the danger that we will become a permanent garrison society...

...But I believe that a democracy can live more easily with the conscripts than it can with the professionals...

...It may purport to do so, but in fact it does not, as the most casual examination of the capricious behavior of local draft boards around the country will reveal...

...He would prefer even the present system, because it "at least purports to select on the basis of rational criteria...

...The most interesting passengers we met during the voyage were a Toronto journalist, an Ontario psychologist, and a Saskatchewan sociologist, all of whom—separately and later collectively—talked at length about their country's proud policy of confounding American draft laws by welcoming draft evaders...

...It seems to me that the draft lottery for 19-year-olds is the least foolish of the alternatives open to us...

...The Canadian approach is probably more rational and moral than ours...

...But the Canadians can afford to be rational and moral only so long as the United States maintains a large military establishment in a time when other nations have political goals they might wish to advance by military means...

...Any attempt to attract young men into the Armed Forces makes me uncomfortable...

...Possibly the greatest objection to an all-volunteer army is that enlistees, whatever their background, would not only accept their lot in the Armed Forces but be proud of it...

...The author notes that he has yet to meet an aggressive advocate of the voluntary army who is a potential volunteer, or an aggressive advocate of the present system who is a potential victim of it...

...These have been put forward by a mixed bag of proponents, including a group of middle-of-the-road Republican congressmen, Paul O'Dwyer, last year's pro-McCarthy senatorial candidate in New York, and Professor Milton Friedman, who is still touted as Barry Goldwater's economist-in-residence during the 1964 campaign...

...He would make all 19-year-olds subject to conscription during the year between high school and college, with the choice made by a national lottery—or, to use the current euphemism, random selection...

...Nor is this peculiar to the present unpopular conflict...

...Reedy's book reflects his work as a member of the National Advisory Committee on Selective Service...

...This is essentially the point George Reedy makes, with support from Senator Edward M. Kennedy, who wrote an admirable introduction to this small tract...

...On the other hand, if every man in Vietnam and every man scheduled to go there had been a volunteer, recruited from the Harlems and Ap-palachias of America, the Vietnam war might have been accepted as a relatively cheap solution to the urban crisis...

...The former do not like what they are doing—and that is precisely the reason why they should be preferred...

...But as long as the military life carries with it the possibility of danger and occasional overexertion, along with subordination to the authority of noncoms and officers, there is no assurance that such changes will attract enough of "the right kind of men at the right time...

...I do not relish either a conscript or a 'volunteer' army," Reedy writes...

...One is that dropping coercion would cost too much...

...Reedy, formerly President Johnson's press secretary, touches upon problems of foreign policy and the morality of compulsory military service only in passing...

...One wonders, though, whether such self-segregation might not be attractive to some who are eager for upward socio-economic mobility from the ghetto...

...Although Reedy does not say so, I suspect that our conscript Army was one reason for the decision of his former boss, Lyndon Johnson, to withdraw from a confrontation with the voters of the United States...

...It has been wrangled over, piecemeal, mostly by people who think about it viscerally...