Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 212, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 September 1919 — PLANS MADE FOR GREAT CITIZEN ARMY. [ARTICLE]

PLANS MADE FOR GREAT CITIZEN ARMY.

Organization through a new system o$ universal military training of a great citizen army to be known as the National Guard Corps was proposed Saturday by the National Guard Association in a statement made public through the National Security League. Thirty divisions of the National Guard Corps, functioning as a separate corps of the United States army under the direction of the secretary of war, is proposed. Instead of subjecting all 19-year-old youths to a three months course of intensive military training, as proposed by the war department, the guard association would have military training as a part of the national public school system, with youths entering this course when 14 years old. After this preliminary training they would be given two months’ training in the field and would be graduated into the guard, where they would serve actively for two years and nine months before being placed in the reserve for three years. . ' Estimating that 500,000 youths would be graduated into the guard every year, the statement said that after six years “we would have a most effective army of 3,000,000 men, 1,500,000 in the so-called active service and 1,500,000 in reserve, all of them graduates in the training camps.” To establish immediately the National Guard Corps “and give it a start,” the association proposed that the law .provide for the reorganization in the corps of the former 'National Guard and the National army divisions which existed during the great • war. All officers who were discharged from such units would, upon their own application, be recommissioned in the grades held by them at the time of discharge and assigned to units of the National Guard Corps in the vicinity of their homes.