The Origins and Intellectual Foundations of Project 100,000

The concrete foundations behind Project 100,000 originated within the conclusions made in the report produced by Kennedy’s Manpower Task Force, titled One Third of a Nation. The report validated the previous findings of the United States Department of Labor by stating that one-third of all recruits were being dismissed from enlistment due to their failing intelligence and physical tests. The final report was released to Johnson in January 1964, fully demonstrating the inequities of the present draft system and resulting high numbers of disqualified recruits. In the transmittal letter, Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz framed the findings of his task force through historical analogy: “A generation ago President Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke of seeing ‘one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.’” Wirtz stated that “perhaps the most striking indicator” of the reality of persistent poverty in the United States was “the fact that one-half the young men called for pre-induction examination under Selective Service are found unqualified for military service, and that on examination it would be found that fully a third of the age group does not meet the required standards of health and education,” indicating these men had “missed out on the American miracle.”Footnote ²¹ An underlying message of inequality, framed in patriotic terms, typified the tone of One Third of a Nation. The report emphasized how Selective Service rejects were “victims of inadequate education and, to a lesser degree, insufficient medical care” and stressed how these men “were not born that way; they grew that way.” By utilizing such moralistic language, the report evoked a sense of urgency through its projections that “the total of rejections will rise to more than 600,000 a year for the rest of the decade” and urged that “the president should announce a nationwide manpower conservation program to provide persons who fail to meet the qualifications for military service with the needed education, training, and health services that will enable them to become effective and self-supporting citizens.”Footnote ²²

The socioeconomic conditions of Selective Service rejects were given devotion within the report due to how such conditions clearly demonstrated a generational cycle of poverty. The report framed the socioeconomic features of rejects within the language of the War on Poverty: “The most important single fact that emerges from these interviews is that a large proportion of the young men who fail the Armed Forces mental test are the children of poverty.”Footnote ²³ Underlining the clear educational inequities at play, the report stated that “Many of the rejectees, having been in the labor force for several years since dropping out of school, were working in jobs which offered little or no advancement opportunities and which could be filled by persons with a minimum of education and training.” In addition, the report also referenced how “over half of the fathers of the rejectees had never finished the eighth grade” and that “approximately seven of every 10 rejectees came from families with four or more children.”Footnote ²⁴ The pronounced concerns over family size and emphasis upon inherited generational poverty demonstrated the extent to which the administration saw these problems as a threat to breadwinner capitalism, particularly the gendered masculine ideals inherent within it. Entrenched poverty jeopardized these ideals and therefore required correcting—the military could serve as a “manhood framing institution” for these wayward men, where they would be “forged anew, retrained and salvaged for a lifetime of productive citizenship.”Footnote ²⁵ The implicit discussion of masculinity and the familial “cycle of poverty” pointed to the influence upon the report of a particular author: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the prominent Labor Department official in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and public intellectual whose writings on matters such as the Black family shaped societal discourse.

Moynihan’s writings serve as an intellectual throughline that reveals the broader societal underpinnings behind Project 100,000’s inception. The language in the report that emphasized the familial “cycle of poverty” indicated that a substantial portion of One Third of a Nation was written by Moynihan, as it directly mirrored his writing in The Negro Family. One Third of a Nation stated that the young men were the “products of poverty” who “have inherited their situation from their parents, and unless the cycle is broken, they will almost surely transmit it to their children.”Footnote ²⁶ In a strikingly similar fashion, The Negro Family stated that the “tangle of pathology” within the African American family “serves to perpetuate the cycle of poverty and deprivation.”Footnote ²⁷ Moynihan’s intellectual influence upon Project 100,000 was the most consequential of any Johnson administration official, as the process of authoring One Third of a Nation forged the arguments he made within The Negro Family, which, when disseminated, became a means of furthering the collective “othering” of African Americans within American society.Footnote ²⁸ Moynihan’s controversial arguments in The Negro Family, specifically his “racist stereotypes and assumptions” around how Black poverty should be attributed to an innate cultural “pathology” therefore provided “the intellectual underpinning for Project 100,000.”Footnote ²⁹ Indeed, Moynihan saw military service, most particularly for young Black men, as “an antidote to crime and other urban ills,” and specifically drew attention to how high rates of rejection for enlistment among this demographic would further exacerbate issues of delinquency and crime.Footnote ³⁰

The conclusions Moynihan had made in The Negro Family, written originally for the eyes of the White House only but speculatively leaked by Moynihan to the press in 1965, ultimately influenced White House and Department of Defense (DOD) officials’ thinking on the role of the military in masculinizing African American men.Footnote ³¹ In The Negro Family, Moynihan had argued that the military would serve to transplant African American men into an “utterly masculine world” which would remove them from their “disorganized” and “matrifocal” family environments, providing a “dramatic and desperately needed change.” Moynihan declared that in “a world away from women,” young Black men would be able to receive discipline that was “harsh … but orderly and predictable” and a sense of order in “a world run by strong men and unquestioned authority” that would reverse their emasculation.Footnote ³² Consequently, to officials such as Moynihan and McNamara, Project 100,000 would serve to “take black youth out of a matriarchy that emasculated them, and all poor youth out of a culture of poverty that disadvantaged them,” as through following military service they would emerge as citizen soldiers, responsible and determined.Footnote ³³ Yet, their service in Vietnam would also coincidentally serve to transplant them away from the streets of America, meaning that policymakers were coming to view military service and crime prevention as two sides of the same coin.

Moynihan and McNamara should be considered the intellectual godfathers of Project 100,0000, particularly as their own upbringings shaped their attitudes toward poverty. Moynihan grew up in a working-class household in Hell’s Kitchen, New York, where his family faced a period of economic hardship, especially after his father left when Moynihan was just ten. Moynihan expressed that his experience of being raised in a “broken family” facing financial deprivation “allowed him to understand African Americans who came from ‘mostly the same world’ as he did.”Footnote ³⁴ However, unlike African Americans who were not afforded the benefits of the G.I. Bill after the Second World War, Moynihan was able to receive an education from Tufts University that propelled him to further academic and political pursuits. Similarly, McNamara grew up in working-class Oakland, California, where he was taught in a “wooden shack” yet possessed a “drive for scholastic excellence” that he stated, “reflected the fact that neither my mother nor my father had gone to college.”Footnote ³⁵ McNamara further reflected that the experience of living through the Great Depression considerably shaped his life’s trajectory, noting how “the father of one of my classmates committed suicide because he could not feed his family,” and expressed how he was “shocked” by the violent labor strikes of 1934 and 1936 in California.Footnote ³⁶ McNamara and Moynihan were both heavily influenced by their own experiences of living through poverty and understanding the root causes of it, which guided their decision making.

Project 100,000 must be understood through looking at America’s long history of racial segregation, particularly regarding educational inequalities between African Americans and whites. The widespread lack of access to equal education for African Americans, even following the 1954 Brown v. Board decision and mass resistance from whites, must be accounted for in future histories of Project 100,000 to understand why the lowering of the IQ rate with the program ended up targeting a disproportionate number of African American men, particularly from the South.Footnote ³⁷ Consequently, while the program also recruited hundreds of thousands of poor whites whose social uplift the administration also desired, contextualizing these historical inequities is essential to understanding this push by policymakers in the Johnson administration to rehabilitate young Black men through recruiting them into the military.

Pilot Programs and Coordination with Congress

Without congressional approval or acknowledgment, the administration began initiating pilot programs in 1964, with the largest pilot study of Selective Service rejects taking place in Utah. The federal dispersion of these pilot programs led to differing levels of success in the different states, with Utah, New Hampshire, Delaware, Wisconsin, Missouri, and Arizona being the quickest to adopt the training program. Utah began to develop a widespread pilot project in February 1964, where young men throughout the state were called forward for mental and physical examinations. Labor officials emphasized to the men “that they were participating in an historic experiment requested by the President and the Secretary of Labor and that participation would be helpful to them for the rest of their lives,” underscoring how Project 100,000 was shaped from its inception by the Labor Department’s commitment to the War on Poverty.Footnote ³⁸

The Johnson administration first intended to authorize Project 100,000 as a Special Training and Enlistment Program (STEP) through congressional approval. In May 1965, McNamara’s secretary David McGiffert wrote to Lyndon B. Johnson’s advisor Lawrence O’Brien detailing how it would be “necessary” to be able to “quickly” promote the program to members of Congress; however, he also noted that the principal objections to the program were “(a) that it is a military ‘job corps’, or (b) that it will create ‘instant’ veterans, or (c) that it involves lowering Army admission standards.” McGiffert stated that “none of these objections are valid” and offered a list of “pro and con” arguments slanted highly in favor of STEP.Footnote ³⁹ Ultimately, members of the House of Representatives approved STEP, although it was defeated in the Senate due to the divisive nature and significantly high cost of the program.

The Senate’s veto of STEP particularly enraged McNamara, who was personally committed to enacting the program as a means of extending the responsibilities of the War on Poverty to the Department of Defense. McNamara wrote to Johnson in September 1965 to recommend steps of action that could be taken under executive authority. McNamara recommended that the administration should not attempt to revive STEP but should instead more readily accept “below-standard” high school graduates who met the general requirements for training, as well as lowering the enlistment standard equal to the induction standard. McNamara noted how the current medical and mental enlistment and induction standards were turning away “about 100,000” men per year, which was “shrinking the draftable pool substantially.”Footnote ⁴⁰

From within the Johnson administration, certain officials expressed concerns over the secretive nature of the pilot programs and Congress’ reaction to learning of their existence. Assistant Secretary of Defense Alfred B. Fitt reflected that, following the congressional quashing of STEP—where members had started “raising questions about the use of the military for performing a social function”—McNamara had been “quite put out at having met this defeat” but quickly set to work trying to implement Project 100,000 through executive action.Footnote ⁴¹ Undersecretary of the Air Force Norman Paul expressed similar misgivings: “I think the military people were not overjoyed at this Project 100,000 because it meant they were going to have to spend more time training people, and they thought they’d get inferior people in the Armed Forces.” Paul further elaborated on his disapproval of the execution of Project 100,000, detailing how he was charged with notifying Congress about the pilot programs: “it blew up in our faces. They were irritated that we hadn’t consulted them before. They were informed of it, in their judgment, after it was a fait accompli, and they said, “Nuts, we’re going to hold up appropriations unless you cut this out.”Footnote ⁴² McNamara himself corroborated this charge: “When Congress learned that we were considering modest incremental expenditures on such individuals, it actually passed a law prohibiting such expenditures. This was because the program would deal with large numbers of blacks.”Footnote ⁴³ McNamara’s portrayal of the program as a rehabilitative tool for the African American community, while Southern members of Congress had tried to block it, points to the racial complexities inherent in Project 100,000. On the one hand, liberal elites such as McNamara, Johnson, and Moynihan saw Project 100,000 as serving a socially rehabilitative and masculinizing function to African Americans in poverty, while also believing that the program would “get them off the streets.” On the other hand, those in opposition, namely Southern members of Congress, had attempted to block what they saw as a military welfare program targeted specifically at African Americans. The irony is that while the Southern members of Congress opposed the program for the wrong reasons, the “liberal” officials who supported it ended up indirectly sending far too many Black men to their deaths in the name of social rehabilitation.

The Announcement of Project 100,000 and Ensuing Political Controversy

In his speech announcing Project 100,000 to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in August 1966, McNamara underscored his conviction that “Poverty in the United States is a social cancer. The metaphor is exact, for cancer grows within a body, hidden from view, its malevolent essence often undetected.” McNamara asserted that “Serious poverty is not merely socially corrosive, but is intrinsically self-perpetuating,” reinforcing the cycle of poverty thesis.Footnote ⁴⁴ This self-perpetuating poverty held the potential to erupt into violence, as McNamara argued: “We think of ourselves—and rightly so—as a stable and well-ordered society dedicated to the rule of law; and as a society free of the pathological need to resort to open violence in the streets.” McNamara noted how, since the end of the Second World War, the National Guard had been called “no less than 59 times to put down disorders that could not be controlled by police” and stated that “in most of these emergencies, factors related directly to poverty were involved.” Tying the predicament of poverty to national security, McNamara argued that “there is even a more measurable and concrete manner in which poverty affects our national security,” which was the fact that “fully one-third of the nation’s youth currently do not qualify for military service under Department of Defense fitness standards. 600,000 young men a year are rejected.” Announcing the eponymous numeric target, McNamara stated: “After studying the matter in close detail, I am convinced that at least 100,000 men a year who are currently being rejected for military service, including tens of thousands who volunteer, can be accepted.” McNamara asserted that Project 100,000 would “rescue” these working-class men from their “poverty-encrusted environments.”Footnote ⁴⁵

Connecting social citizenship to military service, McNamara believed the program would socially uplift these men, which would simultaneously strengthen their sense of masculinity. McNamara declared that “the poor of America have not had the opportunity to earn their fair share of this nation’s abundance, but they can be given an opportunity to serve in their country’s defense,” which would ultimately give them the “skills and aptitudes which for them and their families will reverse the downward spiral of human decay.”Footnote ⁴⁶ As Rutenberg argues, the end goal of Project 100,000 was to “provide poor men with the health care and skills they would need to get and hold good jobs in their civilian lives, and thus support their families”—an ideology Robert Self has labelled “breadwinner liberalism,” to refer to how liberal political culture intended to uplift the social status of thousands of men in the United States, serving to restore both their economic prosperity and their masculinity.Footnote ⁴⁷

Crucially, McNamara tied the fight against poverty in the United States to poverty abroad, revealing the extent to which the administration theorized that Project 100,000 could help reveal how poverty manifests and influences insurgency in foreign nations. McNamara stated that “Our understanding of poverty in our own country will help us understand it in others. In the protracted, twilight-wards of insurgency and subversion—which our adversaries claim will characterize our era—that understanding is important.”Footnote ⁴⁸ This reveals an important nexus regarding the multiple motivations behind Project 100,000: McNamara and Johnson understood that poverty held the potential to ignite social unrest and violence, yet by rehabilitating those suffering under its conditions in the United States, they could potentially replicate such measures abroad and thus maintain a state of pacification, preventing crime at home and abroad. Project 100,000 represented the social experimentation ground for the administration’s attempts at modernization and pacification in Vietnam, consequently serving the Global Great Society.Footnote ⁴⁹

The speech garnered considerable public controversy and coverage over McNamara’s contentious decision. Mary McGrory in the Washington Star described Project 100,000 as McNamara’s “new front in the anti-poverty war” and detailed how it was linked to the administration’s determination to get “riot-prone teenagers” off the streets following the racial unrest in Watts. McGrory also detailed how Johnson and McNamara attempted, following the defeat of STEP, to work around Southern Senators who were concerned that the lowering of military standards was a “concealed civil rights move” within the context of the War on Poverty. In addition, McGrory noted that “Soundings were taken in the civil rights community, where the draft is alternately regarded as a penalty for poor boys whose fathers cannot keep them in college and as an opportunity for Dead End kids.”Footnote ⁵⁰

Both within and without the administration, the announcement of Project 100,000 led to significant controversy, with members of Congress and members of the public expressing concern over the lowering of standards. Civil Rights leader and Representative Adam Clayton Powell (D-NY) argued that Project 100,000 was equivalent to “genocide” and was “nothing more than killing off human beings that are not members of the elite.” Powell further stated that the mortality rate would be higher for these “salvaged” men since “they are the least equipped to handle sophisticated weapons,” underlining the fundamental problem with the program’s ill-fated design.Footnote ⁵¹ In agreement, Floyd McKissick, director of the Congress of Racial Equality, argued that the program was “a cynical method to punish black youths for the social ills imposed on them by the major society.” McKissick also pointed to how the program would ultimately “increase the imbalance of black Americans in the war in Vietnam,” demonstrating the extent to which civil rights leaders at the time already recognized the cynical motivations behind Project 100,000 and the long-term repercussions the program would inflict upon society.Footnote ⁵²

Such sentiments reflected the widespread contention that Black men were being sent off to Vietnam at a rate disproportionate to whites and experienced the war in a profoundly different way from white soldiers, namely because they saw the main “war” as the one being fought at home for civil rights. As Wallace Terry discusses in Bloods, by 1969, “a new black soldier had appeared … replacing the careerists were black draftees, many just removed from marching in the Civil Rights Movement or rioting in the rebellions that swept the urban ghettos from Harlem to Watts,” underscoring how the administration believed it could export its race problem abroad.Footnote ⁵³ Melvin Coleman, a Black Vietnam War veteran, argued that “There were very few Ivy League graduates who died in Vietnam, the war was fought primarily by blacks and working class whites”—the sections of society Project 100,000 directly targeted.Footnote ⁵⁴ Moreover, many Black GI.s. found that the racism ingrained into the military structure was near unbearable, as Tom Tuck, a Black Vietnam veteran, expressed in a 1969 publication of The Black Panther: “Black GI’s are denied promotions, they’re the first to be sent to the field in Nam. The army is at least as racist as the rest of America. Yes, it’s even more of an oppressive institution than we experience in the Ghetto.” Tuck agreed that the “riot training” required by the military was intended to be “aimed against America’s Black population” and added, “the state is out to try to crush all Black organizations and even white peace groups.”Footnote ⁵⁵

Project 100,000 likewise met significant pushback from Black Power activists who charged the administration with sending innocent African American men off to die in Vietnam. A propaganda poster from the Harlem Progressive Labor Club from 1967 revealed how strongly the organization felt about the racial inequities of the draft and was subsequently circulated within the DOD and White House. The poster used highly satirical rhetoric to illustrate the hypocrisies of the war, emphasizing that recruits could “Become a member of the world’s highest paid black mercenary army!” and “Receive valuable training in the skills of killing off other oppressed people!” Utilizing the painful analogy of Second World War Holocaust gas chambers to underscore the true cost of the war to African Americans, the bottom of the poster stated: “So run to your nearest recruiting chamber!” to provoke outrage from its intended audience.Footnote ⁵⁶

On the other side of the political spectrum, Senator Richard Russell (D-GA) had argued that lowering military standards would ensure that “damn dumb bunnies” were unable to escape the draft, which came with significant racial implications attached.Footnote ⁵⁷ For these politicians, “it was safer to send a black man to Vietnam than to leave him to the civil rights movement, especially as cities across the nation erupted in violence in 1967,” which meant that recruiting boards across the South utilized McNamara’s “New Standards” so as to “draft African Americans well out of proportion to their representation in the population as a whole, just as more men were being sent into harm’s way.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Committed segregationists like Russell came around to the idea of lowering standards by means of comprehending the fact that the program would take in far more African Americans.

The essential controversy of Project 100,000 lay in its targeting of deficiently educated men, meaning that the program was entirely composed of poor, working-class men, a third of whom were African American. As One Third of a Nation stated, “fifty percent of the families of the rejectees had total money income to support these large families of less than $4,000 in 1962” and that “one-fifth of the families had incomes of less than $2,000 in that year,” which relative to the $3,000 family poverty line in 1962 demonstrates the severe lack of wealth among those who became the eventual Project 100,000 recruits.Footnote ⁵⁹ By selecting the poor and racial minorities to be sent off to war, the growing divide between those who had the means to avoid the draft and those who would be drafted merely due to their ill-fated status in life widened and produced political repercussions that would go on to shape American life for decades. McNamara’s “subterranean poor” would go off to war and lose their lives or return with physical or psychological disabilities, while the middle-class whites, many of whom protested the war on moral grounds, would be protected from the draft through their innate privilege.Footnote ⁶⁰

Project 100,000 symbolizes an evolution of the meaning of social citizenship that originates in the New Deal understanding of social citizenship as comprising the ability to earn a decent living while serving to better the nation. The program represents an inverse of this vision of social citizenship, as it weaponized the ideals of economic and social prosperity to promise recruits a full sense of belonging within the American community, when in reality it sent them off to fight an unwinnable war over 8,000 miles away from the American dream.

The Burdens of Implementing Project 100,000 During the Height of the Vietnam War

The process of executing Project 100,000 amid the Vietnam quagmire was particularly controversial among military leaders who balked at the idea of having to deal with additional training procedures before being able to send men off to fight. Implementing the program involved the various branches of the military integrating the necessary training for Project 100,000 recruits into their existing procedures. By folding literacy training into skills training for all new recruits, the Department of Defense was able to “circumvent the congressional stipulations that forbade the use of defense dollars for special educational programs.”Footnote ⁶¹ These “New Standards” men were to be inducted into all branches of the military; however, most of these new recruits were sent to the Army and the Marines. Overall, around 22–26 percent of all new military inductees comprised McNamara’s “New Standards” men, or, as many officials referred to them, “McNamara’s morons.”Footnote ⁶²

Department of Defense officials acknowledged that Project 100,000 men would require more comprehensive training compared to average recruits, yet were confident that the military was capable of this adjustment. As Assistant Secretary of Defense Alfred B. Fitt detailed, the training of Project 100,000 men naturally fit within the structure and training processes of the military, stating “the business of military departments, aside from fighting wars, is to train people. They are the best training institutions—most able in our whole society in terms of taking masses of men who don’t know something and over a period of time teaching them.” However, Fitt also acknowledged that Category IV men (Project 100,000 recruits) would require extensive additional training: “Nobody pretends that these low aptitude men, or at least low aptitude test score men, are going to be as easy to train and as good performers as are men with high aptitude test scores.” Fitt recognized that “every extra burden you ask the training base to bear has some cost” but framed this as being advantageous within the context of the War on Poverty: “So to the extent that we are spending more time with the new standards men, giving them literacy training, recycling them in basic training, yes, there is an economic cost associated with it, but we think it’s worth it …” as they believed the “long-run gains to society … will be very large.”Footnote ⁶³

The additional burdens associated with training Project 100,000 men were therefore seen by the administration as an acceptable cost, yet far too often these men were sent directly into combat as it required less rigorous training, further demonstrating the disconnect between the social rehabilitation aims of the program and the relentless demands for manpower in Vietnam. Fitt confirmed this by stating that “a larger than average proportion” of Project 100,000 men “go into the combat arms because there is less book learning involved and less theoretical material to have to deal with.” However, Fitt defended this by asserting “But it isn’t really a case of using these men as cannon fodder,” even though around 45 percent of all Project 100,000 men were going into combat forces and internal memorandums from Fitt himself expressed concern over the “cannon fodder” charge.Footnote ⁶⁴ In March 1968, Fitt reinforced the point that “We’ve got to protect Project 100,000 against a cannon fodder charge” in light of the Marine Corps assigning a large number of Project 100,000 to combat roles.Footnote ⁶⁵ This reveals how the men of Project 100,000 were primarily “trained for war.”Footnote ⁶⁶

Despite the attempts from members of the administration such as Fitt to shield Project 100,000 from “cannon fodder” charges, it was clear that the easiest way to “recycle” these men was to send them directly into combat, therefore minimizing additional training costs. Since the Pentagon omitted casualty rates and combat deaths for Project 100,000 recruits, the obvious deduction is that a significantly high proportion of these men were killed, given the rate of Category IV men being placed in combat positions. High combat casualty rates were a significant concern within the Department of Defense, as Fitt expressed in a memo in February 1968: “How come Marines are putting 84% of their N.S. men into combat occupations? This seems way out of line in comparison with Army.”Footnote ⁶⁷

The callous disregard for human life constituted an inherent part of the program, particularly as the educational training of the recruits was expedited to place them in combat. In an oral history interview from 2022, educator Sonya Lawbaugh detailed her observations as a teacher to Project 100,000 recruits, noting how “they were supposed to in six weeks learn what they’ve supposed to be learning from ages six to ten,” underscoring the extreme educational deficiencies of these recruits. Lawbaugh further elaborated upon how the men were viewed as disposable by military officials:

Despite the program’s public and private controversies, President Johnson was highly supportive of Project 100,000 and sought to connect the expansion of opportunity for military service among young men to the Great Society ideals of economic and social citizenship. In January 1967, Johnson praised Project 100,000 publicly in a message to Congress:

In March 1967, Johnson reinforced his support for the program upon receipt of the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Selective Service. Johnson stated that Project 100,000 “will be a continuing program” as “the nation can never again afford to deny to men who can effectively serve their Country the obligation—and the right—to share in a basic responsibility of citizenship,” fortifying the ties between military service and civic duty.Footnote ⁷⁰

In 1968, administration insiders and Department of Defense officials sought to emphasize the successes of Project 100,000 and future objectives for the program. However, this followed the departure of McNamara who had been suffering from extreme stress in his final year of office, frequently experiencing spasms where his jaw would shake for hours on end.Footnote ⁷¹ McNamara’s resignation at the end of November 1967 came after he personally petitioned Johnson to put in place a freeze on the number of troops entering Vietnam, which Johnson dismissed out of hand. When Clark Clifford took over the role, Project 100,000 remained active, but without McNamara’s personal devotion to the program, its prioritization lessened. However, Alfred B. Fitt continued to forward memos on Project 100,000 to McNamara at the World Bank. In August 1968, Fitt wrote to McNamara about the results of comparing literacy levels of Project 100,000 men to a control group: “It confirms our belief that Project 100,000 is reaching a group significantly below average in reading (hence, earning) ability” and “also tends to confirm what we already knew: Negro youngsters overall have an unequal chance the day they are born and their chances decline relative to whites thereafter.”Footnote ⁷²

In February 1968, General Counsel of the Army Robert Jordan penned a letter to David Ginsburg, Executive Director of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, on the need to temper recruitment for Project 100,000 while simultaneously accelerating the recruitment of African Americans into the program. Jordan wrote that the Commission should “modify” their recommendation that Project 100,000 should be enlarged; he argued that, while he was “convinced that the program will be vastly beneficial as part of a broad attack on American poverty,” the reality was “we have not progressed with it long enough to be certain that the Armed Forces can accommodate—without sacrificing performance standards—many more than the 100,000 annual intake now planned.” Jordan asserted that, beyond these measures, “other actions almost certainly must be taken to attract more rootless urban Negro 17–22-year-old males into the Armed Forces” and projected that by September 1968, 50,000 of the new Project 100,000 recruits “will be Negroes.” Moreover, Jordan asserted he had “directed a step up in specific recruiting efforts in the poverty areas of our cities” and that the primary “recruiting target” would be “the young unemployed urban Negro male generally—not just those whose low aptitude scores would place them in Project 100,000.”Footnote ⁷³ The specific targeting of African Americans for Project 100,000—and the communication with the Commission on Civil Disorders—reveals how the administration inherently viewed the program as a means of quelling domestic social unrest by shipping the young Black men who could ignite such unrest off to fight in Vietnam.

In July 1968, Clark Clifford provided an extensive update to President Johnson on the progress of the program almost two years into operation. The memorandum provided a contextual background on how the Department of Defense initiated the program in October 1966: “we were convinced that these men would qualify as fully satisfactory servicemen when exposed to modern instructional techniques used in the Armed Forces and that their service would prepare them for more productive lives when they return to civilian life.” Linking the broader ideals of social citizenship to military service, the memo noted that “the revision in entrance standards is also resulting in a more equitable sharing of the opportunities and obligations of military service among the Nation’s youth.” The memo also declared that the key policies governing the program included that “Project One Hundred Thousand men are not stigmatized” and that “Performance standards are not lowered.”Footnote ⁷⁴

If the number of recruits brought into Project 100,000 was a marker of success, then the Department of Defense had succeeded. The Clifford memo stated that between October 1966 and June 1968, approximately 118,163 men had been recruited into Project 100,00 and that a further 21,837 men were to be recruited from June to September 1968, therefore meeting their two-year goal of 140,000 men. The profiles of Project 100,000 men were also detailed in the memo, with the average age of a recruit being 20.4 years, while 40 percent were non-white, 57 percent had not completed high school, and the median reading ability was around sixth grade, demonstrating both the over-representation of African Americans in the program compared to the population at large as well as the severe educational deficiencies of the recruits.

Clifford also revealed that 13 percent of Project 100,000 men required extra training, compared to just 5 percent of all other men. Detailing how these men were trained, the memo noted that “after completing basic training, they receive skill training in formal course or on-the-job” and that “in formal skill courses, more than 87% graduate. Those who fail are reassigned to other type course or to on-the-job training.” Moreover, regarding “educational upgrading,” the memo noted that the Army had initiated “large-scale remedial reading programs in April 1968,” which produced “average reading gains of 2 grades,” suggesting that Project 100,000 was quite literally rehabilitating America’s illiterate army. This was the making of the militarized War on Poverty, the effort to combine social rehabilitation with military training, yet the hostility of officers toward these recruits and widescale planning problems ultimately foreclosed its success.

The future of Project 100,000 was outlined as involving follow-up studies of recruits to assess the “beneficial impact of military service” as well as noting that these men were “a priority group for receiving TRANSITION training during their last months of service.”Footnote ⁷⁵ As Adam Yarmolinsky, a former McNamara aide, stated in 1971, “success in basic training” for Project 100,000 men became the basis “for further education and advanced training,” which produced the Pentagon’s second experiment in social rehabilitation: Project Transition.Footnote ⁷⁶

McNamara’s 1967 Department of Defense and War on Poverty Speech

Project 100,000 and Project Transition were consistently framed by the administration as constituting an integral part of the War on Poverty, with McNamara eager to emphasize the ways the Department of Defense served a crucial role in this effort. In early November 1967, just a few weeks prior to his departure, McNamara made a speech to the National Association of Educational Broadcasters detailing how the Department of Defense was uniquely placed to deal with the “social problems wracking our nation.” He detailed how the Department of Defense was contributing to the War on Poverty through three key programs: the Open Housing initiative, which was attempting to eliminate vestiges of segregation within the Armed Forces; Project 100,000, which McNamara stated was a “program to salvage the poverty-scarred youth of our society” by taking in and training 100,000 additional men each year; and Project Transition, a new initiative that would “assist the three-quarters of a million men leaving military service each year to select and train for the role in civilian life that will contribute most to their personal fulfillment and to the nation’s benefit.”Footnote ⁷⁹

The Open Housing initiative formed a significant means by which the Department of Defense was attempting to tackle systemic racism. McNamara asserted that “The color of the blood that our men shed in the defense of Asia is all the same shade,” but “when these men return home, it is not the color of their blood that matters: it is the color of their skin.” McNamara argued that the military had failed in its effort to fully desegregate housing, but going forward would mobilize support for non-discriminatory off-base housing by enacting punitive measures on proprietors who refused to comply with non-discrimination orders. After fully detailing these anti-poverty programs, McNamara maintained that he wanted to “make it unmistakably clear” that the “primary responsibility” and “clear mandate from the President and from the Congress” was principally to “maintain in a high state of combat readiness whatever military forces are necessary to protect this nation from external attack, keep our commitments to our allies, and support the objectives of our foreign policy.”Footnote ⁸⁰

When introducing Project 100,000, McNamara framed the program as within the realm of the “social field” and argued that the findings that informed the creation of Project 100,000 demonstrated that “the burden of military service was not being shouldered equally. Inequities were serious: inequities by region; inequities by race; and inequities by educational level.” More than in any other previous speech, McNamara stressed the destructive nature of poverty, stating that Project 100,000 rejectees were “the hapless and hopeless victims of poverty: a poverty that is not the mere absence of American middle-class affluence, but something infinitely more complex: a corrosive and decaying mix of social, educational, and environmental deprivation.” He underscored the fact that the men held “potential” but that “the slow and silent poison of the poverty virus has paralyzed it in many of them” and, echoing similar arguments made in Moynihan’s The Negro Family, asserted that these men had “grown up in an atmosphere of drift and discouragement.”Footnote ⁸¹

In his most forceful and eloquent assertion that tied the significance of social citizenship to an individual’s sense of worth, McNamara declared that “It is not simply the sometimes squalid ghettos of their external environment that has debilitated them—but an internal and more destructive ghetto of personal disillusionment and despair: a ghetto of the human spirit.” This concept that poverty was morally corrupting and was something internal to these men—an “inner ghetto” as McNamara asserted—underlines how the administration viewed this as a distinctly racialized problem. With that summer’s riots in Newark, New York, and Detroit fresh in his mind, McNamara argued that this “inner ghetto” personality held the potential to “fester into explosive frustrations of bitterness and violence.”Footnote ⁸²

Presenting the progress of Project 100,000 after a year in operation, McNamara was eager to emphasize the program’s seeming successes. Noting that the first year’s goal was to take in 40,000 men, McNamara proudly announced that they had exceeded this by taking in 49,000 men, most of whom were unemployed or “earning less than $60 a week,” signifying that they were “gripped in poverty.” Tying their rehabilitation to the import of social citizenship and worth in the American capitalist system, he stressed that “If nothing were done to give them a strong sense of their own worth and potential, they, their wives and their children would almost inevitably be the unproductive recipients of some form of the dole 10 years from now.” Central to the motivations behind Project 100,000 was not only the desperate need for additional manpower in the Vietnam War but also a more fundamental concern over the long-term economic consequences of chronic unemployment and underemployment on American society. McNamara declared that after a full year of experience with the program the successful graduation rate for Project 100,000 men was “96 percent—only two percentage points less than our traditional recruits,” and asserted that “the plain fact is that our Project 100,000 is succeeding beyond even our most hopeful expectations.”Footnote ⁸³

Pivoting to the announcement of Project Transition, which Sherry terms the “ideological and programmatic follow-up to Project 100,000,” McNamara argued that the “real test” of the program would be how the men transitioned back into civilian society.Footnote ⁸⁴ McNamara stated this would be determined by whether they felt “the vital sense of achievement and self-confidence” gained via the program, or whether they would “return to the depressing downward-spiraling, poverty-in-the-midst-of-plenty phenomenon that plagues our urban ghettos and our rural pockets of economic stagnation.” McNamara reinforced his belief that the Department of Defense was integral to this “salvaging” operation, arguing that “hundreds of thousands of men can be salvaged from the blight of poverty, and the Defense Department—with no detriment whatever to its primary role—is particularly well equipped to salvage them.”Footnote ⁸⁵

Introducing Project Transition as the natural evolution to Project 100,000, McNamara stated, “we return some 750,000 men from the services annually to civilian life. Some of these men can move readily into civilian jobs without difficulty, but a significant number of them are faced with genuine problems,” many of whom would gradually comprise Project 100,000 men due to their lack of education and training backgrounds. Project Transition would specifically target men with 30 to 180 days of service time remaining, and would give priority to men disabled in battle, men without a previous civilian occupation, and men serving in combat operations with minimal civilian occupational skills, the majority of whom were Project 100,000 recruits. McNamara argued that the program met the “four basic needs of the man leaving the service: counseling, skill enhancement, education, and job placement.”Footnote ⁸⁶

Project Transition would involve the cooperation of government agencies including Labor, HEW, and the Postal Service, as well as, importantly, “a number of police departments around the nation,” which were proactively offering “solid job offers” to these men. The establishment of this relationship provides a bridge to understanding the military–police entanglement that took hold during the 1960s, as scholars such as Stuart Schrader and Elizabeth Hinton have uncovered.Footnote ⁸⁷ The connection between Project Transition and local law enforcement illustrates how the Department of Defense and the federal government spearheaded police professionalization measures in the wake of racial and urban unrest in the 1960s that ultimately engendered strategies of social control and pacification. Ironically, many of the men targeted by Project 100,000 and funneled into Project Transition training, if they made it back from Vietnam, were the very men the administration was concerned about causing potential social unrest. Indeed, McNamara asserted how, through Project Transition, “we are going to be able to give the returning Negro veteran—particularly the Negro veteran who without help might be compelled to drift back into the stagnation of the urban ghetto—an opportunity for valuable training and satisfying employment.”Footnote ⁸⁸

McNamara ended his speech by once again linking national security to the social problems facing the nation, declaring that “Our primary responsibility … is the security of this nation. But in the ultimate analysis, the foundation of that security is a stable social structure.” He stated that “the three social programs I have described to you today are the kinds of programs that will bolster the security of this nation” and were “partial answers to the basic question: can our present American society afford to meet simultaneously its responsibilities both at home and abroad?” Framing the answer as one that struck at the core of American ideals, McNamara rhetorically asked his audience: “Do we have the requisite faith in ourselves? Do we have the requisite confidence in our constitutional objectives?” The effort to “curb aggression abroad” and “meet our pressing social problems here at home” was one of mere “will power” on the part of the American people—despite the reality that such objectives were often in juxtaposition.Footnote ⁸⁹

The Administrative Execution of Project Transition

Putting Project Transition into place was comparatively easier than implementing Project 100,000, particularly as the program’s coordination with other government agencies and private corporations ensured a greater degree of success and minimized the program’s expenditures. When McNamara delivered his speech in November 1967, the program had already been trialed in pilot version for five months. McNamara requested the Army establish a pilot program in Fort Knox, Kentucky, and shortly notified the secretaries of the service branches that the Fort Knox pilot should be the model for the Marines, Navy, and Air Force. The Marines established their program at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, while the Air Force selected Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, and the Navy chose the Naval Station on Treasure Island in San Francisco, California. These pilot programs served to lay the groundwork for the expansion of Project Transition, establishing core guiding principles for the program, such as that all men with one to six months of service remaining would be prioritized for the program, that the program would be offered on a voluntary basis, and that education and training courses would be offered to elevate the knowledge and skill levels of these men. The program would provide counseling to help men plan their future and would coordinate with the private and public sectors to secure employment, expanding the military-industrial complex President Dwight D. Eisenhower had warned of a decade prior.Footnote ⁹⁰

The person most heavily involved with Project Transition was Assistant Secretary of Defense Alfred B. Fitt. Before McNamara’s November 7 speech, Fitt ordered the military departments to extend the program, requesting the Army to increase its installations to forty-two, the Air Force to twenty-seven, the Navy to thirteen, and the Marine Corps to three. The day after McNamara’s speech, Fitt transmitted a fact sheet on Project Transition to National Security Council members, detailing the program’s objectives. Fitt stated that skill training provided in Project Transition would originate from three sources: the military; local, state, and federal government agencies; and private industry. Relaying the end goal of Project Transition, Fitt stated, “The aim of the program will be to impart to the returning serviceman marketable skills which will essentially enhance his chances of good employment.” Recognizing that many of the men entering Project Transition would be Project 100,000 men, Fitt asserted, “In addition to skill training needs, some men will require further education,” requiring the program to “identify those with only some elementary schooling or some high school education,” who would require additional academic credentials. Fitt detailed how the program was actively sourcing placement opportunities for these men, particularly through coordination with the Labor Department as well as state and local agencies. “The intent of the program,” he noted, “is to have actual job opportunities made available to the servicemen upon successful completion of the course and release from active duty.” In addition, Fitt identified the training activities established at the current pilot studies, which ranged from the Postal Service training servicemen to become postal workers, to private industry providing training courses, to the Los Angeles Police Department designing a course for servicemembers to become police officers. Fitt noted that “The Los Angeles model will be used on a national basis” to recruit former soldiers into law enforcement.Footnote ⁹¹

Following McNamara’s departure as secretary of defense, Fitt spearheaded the execution of Project Transition in the final year of the Johnson administration. However, the process of putting Transition into place was onerous, as the Army found it difficult to recruit suitable Vietnam returnees for the program. Deputy Undersecretary of the Army Arthur Allen wrote to Fitt in December 1967 to detail how the Army had been unable to source enough volunteers: “The initial orientation and survey conducted in Vietnam resulted in the nomination of only 5 volunteers. A subsequent survey produced negative results.” Allen argued that the “reception and limited response by the eligible returnees indicates that insufficient numbers will be available for the full-scale program, thereby negating the purpose of the test run. For this reason, the Army is taking no further action on the test run or its evaluation.”Footnote ⁹²

Due to the lack of engagement from deployed servicemembers, the Army was unable to effectively communicate the benefits of the program on the ground in Vietnam. Frank McKernan, the Department of Defense official charged with overseeing Project Transition, relayed to Fitt a conversation he had with General Zais after learning the Army was closing the test run: “I indicated to him that I was somewhat disappointed by this but realized that the communication problem between here and Vietnam was probably one of the reasons for the lack of response.” McKernan further elaborated, “I feel that the more Project Transition becomes known to the troops, the more direct inquiries from Vietnam will be made concerning the program.”Footnote ⁹³ In response, Fitt agreed with Allen that the trial run should be temporarily suspended, but stated, “we should re-examine the point in April 1968, after the Army has established a wider geographic and training choice for prospective Transition participants now in Vietnam,” and asserted that he had asked McKernan “to work with your staff in developing a definite plan for a second look at how we can make Project Transition realistically available to Vietnam returnees,” revealing the anxieties within the administration over returning Vietnam veterans.Footnote ⁹⁴

Fractious internal communications from the Department of Defense showed how much Project Transition formed an operational struggle. In March 1968, McKernan wrote disparagingly to Fitt: “The state of our Project Transition statistics is discouraging” and asked for a “specific schedule for the correction of the deficiencies you have described.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Officials acknowledged that Project Transition was far from successful in its initial months, and attempted to alter how the program was presented; McKernan requested of Fitt: “Please take out the reference to those being discharged under other than honorable conditions. They probably won’t participate anyhow, but if they wish to, the least we can and ought to do is counsel. We do that much and more for a man being paroled from prison.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Fitt was particularly eager to see Project Transition succeed and emphasized to Clark Clifford, McNamara’s successor as secretary of defense, that the program “is expected to pay off by encouraging men to take up vocations with critical civilian shortages (ghetto teachers, medical technicians, policemen, etc.) and by widening and informing the vocational choices of men already possessing marketable skills.” Fitt asserted that the main task for Defense in 1968 was to “make certain” that “Project Transition is not only operational but effectively so” and stressed the importance of measuring the “results of Project Transition efforts.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Fitt saw Project Transition as a means of mitigating the disasters of Vietnam by providing some form of assistance to its veterans and expressed the hope that “When Senator Kennedy is in the White House” the program would be continued.Footnote ⁹⁸

Despite the tumultuous events of the summer, from Robert Kennedy's assassination to the discord of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, by September 1968, Fitt was able to present more positive data on Project Transition to Clifford and wrote to the Military Secretaries to laud its success and encourage its expansion. Framing Transition as providing a critical solution to the social rehabilitation of veterans, Fitt declared: “Project Transition is the most significant program, with the most exciting potential for good, of all Manpower programs in the Department of Defense.” He believed that Project Transition held greater long-term potential than Project 100,000 and was comparatively far less publicly controversial. Fitt noted that the men who decided not to reenlist were “eager for pre-separation help” and that “65% of them—2 to 3 times as many as we expected—want formal training and job counseling and placement services. 65% means half a million men in FY 1969.” Fitt and other Defense officials recognized that Transition held significant potential for transforming the economic conditions of servicemembers as well as providing necessary manpower for private industry. Fitt explained that “Major civilian employers all over the country are eager to commit their own resources to the operation of Transition training programs at or near military bases” and that there was “an extraordinarily happy conjunction of interests between our separatees and the nation’s employers, and Project Transition is the agent for bringing them together.”Footnote ⁹⁹

Through emphasizing the economic benefits of Transition, and its ability to partner with private enterprise to secure employment for veterans, Fitt persuaded Clifford to encourage the secretaries of the military departments to significantly expand the program. Clifford underscored the advantages of the program in his letter to the secretaries: “This program is enormously important—to the individual serviceman, to the Department of Defense, to employers all across the country, and to American society as a whole.” Harnessing the language and pathos of the War on Poverty, Clifford further remarked:

However, despite this impassioned defense of the program, Fitt revealed to Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Nitze he felt that the service branches had “responded rather weakly” to Clifford’s financial request. Fitt remarked disapprovingly to Nitze: “The alternative you approved on 27 November was for $18.3 million. The effect of this is to hold Army and Navy to current levels, to cut the Air Force program, and to give the Marine Corps an end strength increase of 1,000 without increasing the resources actually dedicated to Project Transition.” Acknowledging congressional obstacles, Fitt stated, “I am aware of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees doubts about Project Transition and their injunction to hold the program to the FY 1969 level” but sought to emphasize the “extraordinary popularity” of Transition with separating servicemen and civilian employers, which revealed that the program was “filling a real, thus far unmet human need.” He argued that the difficulties with Congress could be overcome by requesting the amount “we think Project Transition deserves and defend[ing] that amount in the hearings” as the alternative was “quite likely to jeopardize the program.” Fitt’s fierce advocacy for a program that, in over a month, he was due to have no control over illustrates the extent to which he, and other defense officials, believed Project Transition provided a key form of social and economic rehabilitation for returning veterans. However, Transition’s connections with law enforcement raised questions over the ethics of recycling servicemembers, particularly those fresh from the vicissitudes of war.Footnote ¹⁰¹

The Law Enforcement Connection to Project Transition

The idea to supply local law enforcement with former veterans emanated from communications between the administration and police chiefs of major cities around late 1967, following the long summer of racial unrest in urban areas such as New York and Detroit. The veteran-to-policing pipeline is a common phenomenon in modern America, yet the origins of this connection between the military and law enforcement were solidified in the 1960s as the entanglement between the Department of Defense and local law enforcement intensified in the wake of urban riots, coinciding with enhanced police professionalization.Footnote ¹⁰²

In November 1967, McNamara announced that the Department of Defense was partnering with law enforcement agencies across the nation to fill thousands of police officer vacancies. He stated that Project Transition would form part of this recruitment drive, with the Los Angeles Police Department serving as one of the first law enforcement agencies to develop a training program for Project Transition men to prepare for their careers in policing. The Washington, DC, Police Department also established a test program that involved the dispatchment of representatives of chiefs of police to military installations to “interview military men who will be leaving active duty about their interest in police work.”Footnote ¹⁰³ This procedure circumvented traditional Department of Defense policy to allow face-to-face interviews with law enforcement representatives with military men who had fewer than 180 days left of service. The administration was broadly concerned over the 15,000 police force vacancies across state, county, and city law enforcement agencies and therefore approved measures that would expedite the recruitment of military veterans, such as allowing police representatives to perform physical examinations of Project Transition men at military bases.

Communications from Fitt to McNamara revealed the extent to which police departments were eager to recruit military veterans and were particularly interested in increasing the number of Black police officers. Fitt wrote to McNamara that “D.C. is anxious and able to send recruiting teams to interview men at military bases, but thus far has been limited by our rules to the mere leaving of literature; face-to-face employment solicitation is not permitted,” which led to the reversal of this policy. Fitt also noted that once Project Transition was fully in operation, Defense would be able to “easily put a police department in touch with men returning to the particular area,” therefore establishing a solid pipeline from military to policing. Referring to the Washington, DC police department’s desire to recruit more Black officers, Fitt stated “D.C.’s police force is 21% Negro. Last year’s intake of 216 was 30% Negro. They want more.” Fitt further recommended to McNamara that “we should also consider an early release program for men within, say, 180 days who have been accepted by, and committed themselves to employment with, a civilian police force.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The effort to push Black veterans into law enforcement reveals how the administration took a population they viewed as socially restive, and after transforming them into soldiers, encouraged them to become police officers who would patrol the very cities where racial unrest was occurring. As Michael Sherry argues, Project Transition was representative of racial fears within the administration around Black veterans, for “channeling black vets into civilian jobs, including police work, was among the program’s goals,” helping to quell these fears of Black veterans causing potential disturbances.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Recognizing the various issues that would arise with this military–police connection, Fitt noted that “there are some questions we ought to think through and discuss with the military departments,” which included “What should we recognize as a police force? Any? Only big cities? Sheriffs? State police?” and “What safeguards can we devise to make sure an early release actually goes through with his commitment?” Fitt concluded by declaring that “as soon as key decisions are made on how far DOD will go in assisting police departments nationwide in getting up to strength, I will have appropriate materials prepared and put out by the Office of Information for the Armed Forces.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ In further instructions to the service branches, Fitt asserted that “because of the nationwide rise in crime rates and a nationwide police force vacancy rate of about 5% (15,000 men), it may be appropriate to adopt a formal early release program for active duty personnel (within six months of separation) who have a confirmed offer of employment with a state, county or municipal police force,” and if this was achieved, “the program will be given maximum publicity through IAF and other channels.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷

To expedite this process, McNamara wrote to President Johnson on the preparations to fill civilian police force vacancies with former servicemembers. McNamara noted how Defense had been in touch with Washington, DC police officials to arrange the direct recruitment of service members into their police force, with “the object of filling all DC Police recruit vacancies by 31 December 1967.” McNamara stated, “we are prepared to make similar test arrangements with the police departments in Detroit and Newark, or any other city you wish,” but suggested “it would be advantageous if you or someone acting directly for you were first to call the mayor of each such city.” He noted the military secretaries had been requested to provide advice on the “military personnel implications of, and how best to implement, a plan to authorize early release of servicemen within six months of separation who have a bona fide offer of employment from a civilian police force.” McNamara concluded: “Such a plan might be quite helpful in reducing the estimated 15,000 nationwide police force vacancies.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸

The irony is that many of the men who were transformed into police officers by Project Transition constituted the very same men targeted by Project 100,000 as holding the potential to ignite social unrest. These men had very literally been “recycled” from perceived social “threats” into police officers capable of enforcing the social order the administration desired. By June 1968, the Army asserted they were “convinced” that the Department of Defense Civilian Police Recruiting Program was a “vital and important supplement to the many programs designed to assist servicemen in obtaining meaningful employment if they elect to return to civilian life.” Moreover, the memo commended the program for providing “an opportunity to recruit young men who, by the training and discipline acquired while in the service, can, if otherwise qualified, provide the nation with the type of police officers desired.” Through the vessel of Project Transition, military servicemembers were actively directed towards law enforcement, with little regard for the countervailing psychological effects of war and how this could impact their ability to perform as responsible police officers.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Project Transition was not formally continued by Richard Nixon's administration yet notably influenced understandings of veterans’ readjustment to civilian life, paving the way for future transitional measures, such as the Transition Assistance Program, which remains in effect to this day. However, the most controversial legacy of Project Transition was the way it solidified a significant connection between the military and police departments through the funneling of former military servicemembers into policing roles, the repercussions of which remain consequential, as seen in the continued militarization of police forces across the nation.