After the Second World War, the American government entered into the global power bracket. It became an integral political and economic powerhouse in the world. As a result, most of the developing nations turned to it for support. As Vietnam struggled to free itself from the South Vietnamese communist Common Front, the American troops were sent to help the incumbent government gain control of the country.
The entry of the United States into Vietnam became one of the most controversial wars in the history of the United States. In America, military conscription had been in use for years during its wars. The cold war and the world wars were examples of the wars that used conscription to find soldiers.
The draft system was eventually abolished in 1973; however, men who fell in the draft age bracket often had to register to the selective service system to guarantee access to a draft in case they needed one. The draft was based on the Selective Service System, which later opted for the use of a draft lottery method.
A deeper analysis of the draft system reveals the grave biasness that was rampantly in use and thus resulted in the new draft lottery system. The focus of this paper is to look at the transition from the draft to the draft lottery system and the causes that resulted in the drastic changes. Up until the end of the year 1965, the entire American military was manned by volunteers.
However, with the escalation of the Vietnam War in 1966, there was a drastic shift to a drafting system through a local draft board. The magnitude of the war meant that there had to be an increased support from the United States in terms of troops. The draft boards had the responsibility of choosing the member who would be sent to Vietnam.
The draft boards were about four thousand, and this meant that they were subject to difference of opinion and policies in drafting men into the military. The methods and choices that were being made by the local draft boards were often found to be questionable. In the course of the Vietnam War, the United States military service was composed of two-thirds volunteers while the rest were catered for through the drafting.
As the war began, the names of all American men who met the draft-age category were collected by the Selective Service. The names would then be called, and the individuals were expected to report to the local draft board. The local draft board was composed of a myriad of community members who had the role of evaluating the drafted individuals.
The local draft boards, in this view, had a rather powerful responsibility in deciding the people that had to go and those who would stay. The drafting process depicted were mainly composed individuals from the working class and the poor. The very minute political power sections were mistreated.
The drafting process was largely considered to be biased in regards to the choice of individuals who would join the war in Vietnam. For one, the American troops in Vietnam comprised of fifty-five percent men from the working class, twenty-five percent came from the poor families and the remaining twenty-five came from the middle-class bracket.
The upper-class families were hugely unrepresented since most of the soldiers were taken from farming communities and rural towns. The idea of fighting in a war in Vietnam was not that appealing to every man in America. For various reasons, people thus came about with a way to delay or entirely avoid the service.
There were legal ways of delay or avoiding conscription, which could be pursued by non-willing draftees. However, even these pathways were subject to manipulation by the society elites. The drafting also came with the deferment option where one had to provide a reason as to why they could not serve in the military.
The most common deferments were the college student deferment and the existence of dependents. The college student deferment was, however, only permitted upon verification of the required satisfactory performance in academics. The years between 1966 and 1968 saw an expansion in drafting, and with the expansion came the draft resistance movement.
A number of individuals had become dissatisfied with procedures that were being employed in the drafting. Increasing dissent among the people saw the creation of Blue-Ribbon commissions, which had the mandate of studying the Selective Service and developing reforms. As a result, the policies of drafting were changed and altered either through new legislation or executive orders.
A good example of the change was the elimination of the deferment for graduate study in 1967. Physical incapability and problems or individuals who were in college or those who had familial responsibilities were exempted from service by virtue of deferment. A further analysis of the men who received deferments indicates that most of them were from the educated and wealthy families.
The political and social elite had ways of compromising the local boards and in effect avoiding conscription into the military. A great deal of the young men in America fled to Canada in an effort to avoid the military service. Such groups received the derogatory reference to being draft dodgers. However, from a deeper level the American Society was slowly finding it unnecessary to fight in the Vietnamese war.
For the wealthy families, their children had the option of remaining in college on a full-time basis and as a result, they managed to qualify for student deferments. This option was, however, not available for students who had to work on a part-time basis to pay their way through college. This was another element of unfairness that the deferment and drafting process depicted.
Antiwar organizations and protests began to increase in prevalence even as the war advanced. The drafting process was at the center of protests, with some members going on to burn their draft cards during the 1960s, in an effort to erase the biasness and unfairness in the policies that were being used in the drafting process.
The culmination of the change in the drafting process came in the year 1969 when the Selective Service System chose to utilize the lottery system in drafting. The lottery system employed the use of capsules that contained dates of years which were mixed before they were single out one at a time.
The method that was applied in the lottery system assigned every single day of the year a number, which was then written on paper slips. The slips would then be placed in separate capsules that would be mixed up and dumped in a glass jar. The capsules would then be drawn from the jar one at a time; this meant that the men who were called to serve would share birthdates.
Probability studies into the lottery system highlighted that the method was not as random as it had been presented. This was because the birthdates that occurred towards the end of the year happened to be chosen much earlier. The cause of the reduced degree of randomness was found to be as a result of the insufficient mixing of the capsules.
In as much as court cases arose in regards to the lottery system, it was continually used two times with different procedures before it was eventually abolished in the year 1973. The Vietnam cease-fire announcement in 1973 also marked the end of the drafting system before the expiration of the draft law.
In essence, the draft had been operational continuously right from the Second World War until its eventual end in 1973. The Vietnam War had a myriad of challenges and obstacles. It became greatly scrutinized and criticized in relation to its goals. The growing unpopularity of the war was also as a result of its drafting system.
A great deal of class, income, and racial biases was realized in the drafting process that the Selection Service System employed. The lottery system was an attempt to eliminate the unfairness of the drafting, and it also failed. Antiwar protests criticized the drafting system, and this would result in its eventual elimination. Solving the drafting problem was done through the conversion of the military to an all-volunteer force.
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