Abstract

During the Vietnam War, the U.S. Department of Defense (“DOD”) created a new program that targeted marginalized communities, resulting in thousands of deaths and adversely impacting the lives of more than one hundred thousand others. This Article—which draws on original archival research from obscure DOD files—uncovers the origins and effects of the program called “Project One Hundred Thousand.” This research reveals that the program drafted members of impoverished communities to serve in the place of more privileged men, who received draft exemptions. The program enabled the U.S. government to continue the war at scale without incurring an unacceptable loss of political support for the war from middle-class voters.

Project One Hundred Thousand achieved the goal of drafting and inducting more service members by revising the mental aptitude and physical military entrance standards, admitting service members who were previously ineligible to serve in the armed forces. Then–Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara justified the program to the American public, saying it would “uplift” underprivileged men. Instead, the program sent more than half of these men, called “New Standards Men,” to a combat zone and thousands of them to their deaths. The U.S. military issued over one hundred thousand surviving New Standards Men less than honorable discharges—potentially resulting in lifelong exclusion from benefits at the Department of Veterans Affairs, imposing severe economic, social, and psychological costs to these service members.

This Article makes two distinct contributions. First, it spotlights an example of how a “system” of systemic racism gets built and draws attention to how systemic racism tangibly impacts the armed forces. Second, it offers a way for the U.S. government to address the injustices it inflicted by suggesting presumptive discharge relief, meaning the DOD would presume the discharge was unjust. The proposed remedy is modeled after the remedy afforded to victims of the military’s past discriminatory policies based on sexual orientation. Informed by this Author’s professional experience representing New Standards Men, this proposal offers a way for the U.S. government to make reparations for the harm it inflicted on marginalized communities.

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