This is coolbert: During the Vietnam War, a lot of criticism was leveled against the Selective Service for issuing so many student deferrals. A situation was created where students would obtain deferment after deferment to attend college and not worry about being drafted. The consequence was that you tended in the sixties to get a professional student class that to avoid the draft continued with their college education way beyond what they ordinarily would have. You ended up with a pool of persons being drafted that were rather poor, lower class or lower-middle class not college material. This formed the bulk of the military draftees. A whole lot of people that would have been eligible for the draft just were not. And these were some pretty smart people that should have shared the military experience. Or so was the feeling at the time. People were sliding that should have not. So was the perception at the time.

Well, why did this policy exist and why was it continued in the face of criticism? American observers had seen the British experience in World War One and did not want to repeat the same here.

This experience was the Battle of the Somme and the aftermath for British society over many decades subsequently. The Battle of the Somme was an absolute disaster for Britain. The first day of the battle, the British suffered 60,000 casualties, of which 20,000 were killed in action!! And this on the first day alone.

It was not so much the number of casualties that was the problem, as great and as bad as that was, it was the type of men comprising the casualties that was the problem. This was the force of the Kitchener Army, the army raised by Britain in the years just after the outbreak of the Great War. This Kitchener Army was comprised of the most able, intelligent, physically fit, energetic, and capable members of the military age generation in Britain. Having a small but very efficient and well trained army at the start of the war [the "Old Contemptibles"], Britain had to raise a large army, train that army, and prepare for a climactic offensive [which was the Battle of the Somme], that would win the war in one great battle [it did not]. A recruiting campaign was launched after the outbreak of the war to raise this large army that would win the war in one great battle, and this force was raised, a volunteer force of the most able young men in Britain. From across all strata of society. Upper crust university young men [became officers of course], mixed in with the shop keepers, craftsmen, tradesmen, etc.

This Kitchener Army [named after General Kitchener], was organized, equipped, trained, and prepared for the one great battle everyone felt would win the war with Germany in one fell swoop. It did not, and the casualties were just horrendous. Especially among the young university men who were officers and led forward the enlisted rankers. To give you an idea of how horrific this battle must have been, an entire brigade was wiped out even before it reached it's assembly point, not even at the jumping off point at the front trench! This brigade was caught in the open and wiped out by concentrated machine gun fire!

This one battle had disastrous consequences for Britain as a whole in the subsequent decades. So many young university men were killed in this one engagement alone that a whole future generation of doctors, lawyers, politicians, captains of industry and commerce, and societal leaders was destroyed. This was a blow that some have said Britain did not recover from. Losing the best and brightest, and losing them all at once, and from all stratas of society, was just to much for the society as a whole to bear. Slow but steady decay set in that could not be reversed, and Britain lost it's position of leadership in the world, not to recover it.

While this might be an exaggeration, it is what the U.S. Selective Service had in mind when it established the draft rules during the Vietnam War.

coolbert.