Dr. Ben Zdencanovic, Postdoctoral Scholar at the Luskin Center for History and Policy

This talk traces the largely forgotten history of “Project 100,000,” a Defense Department initiative which recruited tens of thousands of poor and working-class nonwhite men into Vietnam from 1966-1971. Contrary to the “guns versus butter” narratives that we typically have of this era, “Project 100,000” was conceived as a component of the domestic War on Poverty. In the hopes of Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, labor official Patrick Moynihan, and others in the Johnson administration, “Project 100,000” would simultaneously address conscription needs for the Vietnam War and also serve a social function by providing vocational training and a disciplined masculine environment for underemployed youths of color. The talk thus shows how the Great Society state combined paternalistic welfarism and conscriptive militarism to discipline and manage marginalized, underemployed, and putatively volatile nonwhite urban populations. The story of “Project 100,000” indicates that the War on Poverty is best understood not as an expression of well-intentioned but paternalistic liberalism (as scholars typically depict it), but rather as a technocratic effort to mobilize and manage the manpower of racialized surplus labor in the context of the Cold War national security state.