| Questioning JROTC
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JROTC is a Recruiting Program for Dead-End Military Jobs
We know that the two main forces behind the JROTC expansion are recruiting and public relations, yet military officers will argue until they're blue in the face that JROTC is not a recruiting program. It's mission is simply "to motivate young people to be better Americans," and if that means that more than half of all JROTC graduates join the military, well that's just coincidence. Of the half who join up, 70% enter as privates (the lowest rank), with only 30% going on to college ROTC programs or service academies. The DoD doesn't know (or won't say) how many of that group actually become officers, as the program's name misleadingly promises.
In a New York Times op-ed last year, retired Rear Admiral Eugene J. Carroll, deputy director of the Center for Defense Information wrote: "It is appalling that the Pentagon is selling a military training program as a remedy for intractable social and economic problems in inner cities. Surely, its real motive is to inculcate a positive attitude toward military service at a very early age, thus creating a storehouse of potential recruits." Militarization of our culture and recruitment go hand in hand.
Despite all the indignant sputtering by the DoD, most people correctly assume that JROTC is about getting young people to sign up -- and they have no problem with that. The Pentagon spends well over 1.9 billion dollars a year convincing Americans to "be all that you can be;" to join the "few, the proud, the strong;" to "aim high" (you've seen the billboards, they appear in low-income neighborhoods right next to the Jack Daniels signs). At the same time, the federal government slashes education, job training, rehabilitation, social services, until the only options many young people (and their parents) see are the military or prison.
Veterans Are Worse Off Economically Than Non-Veterans
For too long most of the peace movement has argued against enlistment on strictly moral grounds (e.g. the military's evil because it kills people). To talk to young people today, we need to understand the way the system's set up to funnel them into uniform and what they can expect when they get there. The culture of militarism is so strong that even many "progressives" believe the military's lies about job training and financial aid for college. Ohio State University researchers Stephen Mangum and David Ball (in a 1984 study funded by the military entitled, "Military Service and Post-Service Labor Market Outcomes") found that only 12% of male veterans and 6% of female veterans use skills learned in the military in their current jobs. Even the Veterans Administration 1993 annual report acknowledges that Veterans aged 20-34 have a higher unemployment rate than non-veterans. At least half of all homeless men are veterans.
And the military is not a reliable way to fund college. |