12. Project 100,000: A Shameful Solution to the Pentagon’s Manpower Needs
US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara faced the dilemma of coming up with raw bodies for the Vietnam War, while minimizing the draft’s impact on the children of the middle and upper classes. So he and the Pentagon came up with a shameful solution: Project 100,000. It was touted as a Great Society program that would take poor and disadvantaged youth, and break the cycle of poverty by teaching them valuable skills in the military. It was nothing of the sort.
In reality, Project 100,000 simply amounted to lowering or abandoning minimal recruitment standards to sign up those who had previously been rejected by the draft as mentally or physically unfit. Recruiters swept through Southern backwaters and urban ghettos, signing up almost anybody with a pulse, including at least one recruit with an IQ of 62. All in all, Project 100,000 ended up recruiting 354,000 otherwise unfit young men.