National Affairs: Graduation Date

The Pentagon saw its duty—and backed into it. Ever since Korea, the military planners had known that some type of universal military service was the only fair answer to a long-term U.S. armed force of 3,500,000 men. Last week, while it talked cautiously about amendments to the present leaky draft law, the Department of Defense gingerly proposed what amounted to the nation's first U.M.S.

It was something of a makeshift, but the effect was the same for U.S. youth. The generals wanted permission to draft all able-bodied young men right after high-school graduation, or at 18, on a "substantially universal basis." (The...

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