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Odd Solutions to Historic Problems

Khalid Elhassan December 9, 2020 32 min

United States - American Civil War — Young recruits during the Vietnam War, circa 1967. History

12. Project 100,000: A Shameful Solution to the Pentagon’s Manpower Needs

Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. ThoughtCo

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.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.