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Show General HUGH S. Johnson Un Fnnunt J WNU S-ta Washington, D. C. DRAFT PRINCIPLES The attempt to have all New York city policemen and firemen exempted exempt-ed from the draft, it successful, would weaken popular confidence in the fairness of the selective system. sys-tem. The underlying principle of the draft is that each man's case shall be considered on Its own individual in-dividual merits and under exactly the same rules governing the selection selec-tion of all other men. If he has dependents, he is not exempted. He is merely deferred after establishing dependency in his particular case. Occupation deferments are determined deter-mined in the same way. A man can be deferred for his occupation only if it is shown in each individual j case, that he is indispensable to ' some necessary industrial enterprise. enter-prise. Some particular fireman or some particular policeman might be shown to be indispensable to a city police or fire department, and so deferred, though it is difficult to see how. That is exactly the rule in New York city now, but it' is not what New York's mayor wants. He wants to say to the national govern- ment: "You can't take any fireman fire-man or policeman." A man's badge ousts the board from even considering consider-ing his case. This is what is called a "blanket exemption" automatically lifting out of the selective service systems two entire and very numerous classes of men. It couldn't be done without changing an established national na-tional policy of the draft. If it is permitted in New York, it must be permitted everywhere throughout the nation in some cases with grotesquely gro-tesquely absurd results. This is old stuff. The first six months of the 1917 draft were a continuous battle to prevent the system sys-tem from being discredited and impaired im-paired with "blanket" exemptions pressed for by some of the most powerful influences. This case of policemen and firemen came up first. Equally strong pressure was brought to exempt locomotive engineers engi-neers and firemen, brakemen and finally all railroad employees as a class, for reasons here stated and, for another reason, we successfully resisted. The other reason was that we feared that the creation of blanket exemptions would create loopholes as broad as boulevards for wholesale whole-sale draft evasion. And so it proved, for finally we gave in on one case a blanket exemption for the Emergency Emer-gency Fleet corporation. DEFENSE PROGRESS Recent promising official utterances utter-ances giving dates when we shall have ready specific numbers of army divisions, navy ships and army and navy fighting planes are something like the earlier way of reporting armaments "on hand or on order." Progress has been commendable. Most officials in the armament effort ef-fort have done the best they could under present handicaps of faulty organization, planning and insufficient insuffi-cient authority. But it is a mistake to make promises of performances so far ahead and especially to do so in terms of "airplanes," "divisions," "divi-sions," or "men under arms." They are too general in their meaning. They do not paint the true picture to people who are not familiar with just what the words mean. They are apt to paint too rosy a picture. A survey of all the utterances of the war department, for example, over the past few years, would generally gen-erally indicate a continuing satisfactory satis-factory state of affairs at least up to the spring of this year. A glance at our present predicament, in comparison, com-parison, would Indicate how mistaken mistak-en and misleading they have been. The phrase "5,000 army airplanes" air-planes" in estimating future production produc-tion is not very informing. It doesn't tell whether they are fighting planes or transport planes or bombers and that lack of specification is confusing confus-ing enough. But there is an even greater confusion. One airplane isn't a good unit of measure. One airplane means at least one and sometimes three or four extra engines. It means a crew aloft of one or more highly trained pilots and sometimes as many as eight other more or less expert technicians. techni-cians. It means an adequate mechanical me-chanical ground equipment and a ground crew of skilled mechanics as numerous as the flying crew and sometimes more numerous. Even more significantly it means armamentcannon, arma-mentcannon, light and heavy machine ma-chine guns, torpedoes, bombs and, for all these, sometimes tons of explosives ex-plosives and Incendiary material in the racks or in reserve storage on the ground. Of many of these things our present pres-ent supply is a trifling quantity. Preparations are being pressed to get them on principal units. Some of the published reports and estimates esti-mates are fairly clear. But of others, oth-ers, like cannon, trained personnel and ammunition, the difficulties ol 1 getting into production from a near-I near-I zero point of existing capacity have been so great that it is almost cer-i cer-i tain that they cannot be delivered in step with the air force that requires them without a time lag of from one to two years |