Posting #17: The Story of Junior ROTC

The Story:  Junior ROTC is a federally-funded program whose objective is to train 8^th-12^th graders to be the very best of American citizens.  It touts itself as “one of the largest character development and citizenship programs for youth in the world.” The curriculum teaches life skills, like how and when to lead and how and when to follow, in addition to US history and geography.  Participating in it does not accrue an obligation to enlist, nor is it at all designed by the military to recruit potential enlistees.  Still, because many JROTC cadets choose to join the military workforce, it is valued as an investment in American youths.

My take on the story: My interest in this story was piqued by two recent events.  First, I read in the Heritage Foundation’s “Mandate for Leadership” (see Posting #16) that the Department of Defense needed to “Rescue recruiting and retention.”  The chapter’s author, the Trump administration’s last Acting Secretary of Defense, Christopher Miller, made five recommendations for this “rescue” (102-103).  These include: 1.) appoint a Special Assistant to the President on issues of recruiting; 2.) suspend the use of private medical records of potential recruits, records that can delay or cancel their enlistment; 3.) both expand the access of military recruiters to high schools and also require all students in high schools with federal funding to take the military aptitude test (i.e. ASVAB); 4.) encourage Congress members to allot time to military recruiters during the members’ district visits; and 5.) increase the number of Junior ROTC programs in secondary schools.  Clearly—based on 3 and 5—DoD relies on high-schoolers being channeled into the military, with #5 revealing the pretense of JROTC’s being about citizenship.  Instead, JROTC is one of the primary means of recruiting.    

Second, a January 28, 2024 drone attack on a US military outpost in Jordan killed three Army soldiers and wounded tens more.  All three killed were from a Georgia Army Reserve unit, were Black, and two of the three were young women: Breonna Moffett was 23 and Kennedy Sanders was 24. Though I had to do some digging on local news to find this information, I learned that both women had participated in JROTC.  Moffett was held up as an exemplary cadet at her high school, and Sanders was said to have “joined JROTC in high school, leading her to a career in the military and giving her life to service.” Though their reasons for joining the Army after high school are no doubt complex, it appears that JROTC influenced their decisions. Army JROTC says that “A major component of the JROTC leadership and citizenship program is female Cadets. Female Cadets make up 40% of the Cadet population.” That women are a “major component” of Army JROTC and Black women are overrepresented in the US Army  makes it unsurprising that JROTC recruited these two women into the service. 

Why do some schools offer the program and others don’t?  Was it coincidence that Moffett and Sanders both had participated in JROTC and ended up in the Army?  I think not.

History of JROTC:  The fortunes of JROTC have been aligned with those of ROTC.  Both originated in the lead-up to American involvement in World War I as part of the National Defense Act of 1916.  Until after World War II and the advent of the Cold War, very few Americans participated in these entirely federally-funded programs.  JROTC was mostly conducted at military high schools and, though many land-grant universities required their male students to participate in ROTC, few elected to become commissioned Army officers.  Making ROTC voluntary and the prospect of a war in Viet Nam meant even more severe plummeting numbers.

In 1964, the ROTC Vitalization Act enlarged both ROTC and JROTC, with the promise of ROTC scholarships and stipends, the extension of ROTC and JROTC to all of the branches, the use of retired military personnel as instructors instead of those on active duty, cost-sharing with the educational hosts of ROTC and JROTC instead of full federal funding, plus the five-fold expansion of JROTC to a maximum number of 1200 units.  During the 1965-1973 Vietnam War, JROTC numbers continued to grow as ROTC numbers contracted; in 1972, young women were permitted to join JROTC and ROTC. 

Following the Vietnam War in 1973 and the birth of the All-Volunteer Force that same year, in 1976 President Gerald Ford increased the maximum number of JROTC units to 1600.  During the 1980-1988 Reagan administrations, JROTC grew by about 60 units per year. But, astonishingly, the 1993 National Defense Authorization Act raised the maximum number of JROTC units to 3500, with the aim of planting units in inner-city schools and states that were not in the South, where the preponderance of JROTC units already were. This mid-1990s expansion produced nearly 1500 new units, for a total of about 2600, and forty-seven percent of the new units were in inner-city schools.

By 2000, there were about 2900 units in all fifty states and approximately 450,000 students were participating.  As of 2017, there were 3400 units with just over 550,000 participants.  Moreover, in the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act, any schools receiving federal funds—that is, all public schools—are required by law to provide access to their campuses and students to US military recruiters. 

Although recruiting has not been effective (Posting #3), recruiting activity is already robust.  Why does Miller want more of the same thing?  DoD reports that JROTC might be the most effective recruiting tool it has, with 40% of cadets who complete three years of JROTC joining the military (Breaking the War Habit 4). But many people object to the “predatory behavior” of JROTC and military recruiters in high schools.          

Critiques of JROTC:  The primary criticism about JROTC is how it normalizes militarism—i.e. war—as the solution to all problems. “War begins,” concludes Breaking the War Habit: The Debate Over Militarism in American Education, “in the shaping of…the psychological mindset that creates young people submissive to authority and in thrall to military symbolism” (139).  Key to JROTC’s headway at creating this submission and thrall is that it has infiltrated the educational landscape, with one out six public high schools hosting a JROTC unit (135).  Most are in the South.

Aside from the worry that JROTC is a covert recruiting mechanism by normalizing war, there are other criticisms:

·      Who decides whether to have a unit?  School Boards decide whether to host and finance a JROTC unit, but their motivations often are dubious: prevents gangs, offers inexpensive vocational training, instills patriotism, encourages politeness, teaches discipline, and cures character defects.  But because the schools have to pay for a meaningful part of the program, like instructors’ salaries, other educational programs, like college preparatory classes, are deprived.

·      Is it compulsory or voluntary? Until the 1964 ROTC Vitalization Act, ROTC was mandatory at land-grant universities and JROTC was mandatory at military high schools.  According to a 2022 New York Times article, however, although both have ostensibly been voluntary for the last nearly sixty years, students across the country are being placed into JROTC classes without their permission and when they try to withdraw, are told the class is mandatory.  

[D]ozens of schools have made the program mandatory or steered more than 75 percent of students in a single grade into the classes, including schools in Detroit, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Oklahoma City and Mobile, Ala. A vast majority of the schools with those high enrollment numbers were attended by a large proportion of nonwhite students and those from low-income households, The Times found.          

·      Is it freeing or disciplinary?  In her 2015 Citizen, Student, Soldier: Latina/o Youth, JROTC, and the American Dream, Gina Perez asserts that motivations for Latinas especially deciding to participate in JROTC are complex, but a main reason is that it offers them “gendered autonomy otherwise unavailable to them” (23).  Perez’s notion that JROTC is freeing is countered, though, by her other idea, that the Latinas have to “continuously demonstrate their deservingness of inclusion in the U.S. nation-state” (204), and that “JROTC is one of the few ways working-class and youth of color are publicly recognized and valued as members of our society” (209).  In 1998’s “Disciplining Social Difference: Some Cultural Politics of Military Training in Public High Schools,” Lesley Bartlett and Catherine Lutz note how JROTC and serving as a soldier have been tools to discipline “others” in the United States from its origins: immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe in the World War I era, Native Americans, Japanese Americans, and African Americans during the World War II era, and African-Americans in the 1990s. Bartlett and Lutz conclude that “JROTC offers a ‘color-blind society’ that never challenges white privilege” (133), an idea Perez’s book also suggests as Latinas strive to demonstrate “deservingness.”  

·      Who oversees the program?  DoD’s Cadet Command is responsible for overseeing the JROTC program. The curriculum is questionable, however, as it is taught by instructors who are retired military personnel, not certified teachers, and the overriding message (that does not appear to have been reviewed by educational experts) is that war is good, authority is good, and leadership means enforcing compliance with authority. Therefore, unqualified instructors with an agenda are operating on malleable minds.  The same 2022 New York Times article that found evidence of students being forced into JROTC also found fault in the program’s textbooks: “[C]ritics have long contended that the program’s militaristic discipline emphasizes obedience over independence and critical thinking. The program’s textbooks, The Times found, at times falsify or downplay the failings of the U.S. government.”  Another recent New York Times article reported that, with a lack of oversight and an emphasis on authority, many instructors “have been criminally charged with sexual misconduct involving students, far higher than the rate of civilian high school teachers in jurisdictions examined by The Times. Many others have been accused of misconduct but never charged.” A House Oversight Committee member called this “predatory behavior.”  Other critics have called even the presence of military recruiters in high schools “predatory grooming.”    

So what? 

We can see that in the hundred-plus years of JROTC’s existence, so much of why students would even consider participating in JROTC has depended on the US military’s reputation.  When the US military is seen as destructive, students don’t join; when it is seen as the best place to perform patriotism, they do.  But this is perception of the military, not its actual status, as very few of us know much about this institution and young people, even less.  Consequently, DoD spends billions of our tax dollars on convincing all of us that militarism is normal and that the best way to be a patriot is to join military-affiliated organizations.  Aside from advertisements, think of the billions of dollars spent by DoD on military flyovers at football and baseball games, the sponsoring of movie and television programs, the offering of Hummers and weapons of war on civilian streets, the militarization of the police, and even camouflage as a fashion statement.  All of these, I contend, influence us into thinking militarism is citizenship/patriotism/right-living.  

JROTC is one of those costs to the Pentagon as the program works this message on young people before their brains are fully developed.  Just as the cigarette industry worked to hook people on tobacco when they were young, just as social media companies are being sued for allegedly “knowingly using features on Instagram and Facebook to hook children to its platforms,” the Pentagon also understands the malleability of young brains and the need to shape those perceptions.  JROTC is one of their methods.  Other brain-shaping programs include: “America’s Army,” a first-person-shooter video game that was funded by the US Army for 20 years; “March2Success,” a seemingly harmless test-taking website that we find in the fine print is sponsored by the US Army which gathers personal information; and “Starbase,” a DoD-sponsored program that targets fifth-grade “[s]tudents who live in inner cities or rural locations, those who are socio-economically disadvantaged, low in academic performance, or have a disability.”  The program takes these ten-year-olds to military bases for STEM classes taught by military personnel.  “Starbase” sounds like a funnel into JROTC and then into the US military. 

According to a 2017 Rand study,

Urban areas (particularly, large and midsize cities) have higher-than-expected representation, and JROTC is less prevalent in areas that are classified as “rural, distant” and “rural, remote.” JROTC is well represented among high schools that serve economically disadvantaged communities.  JROTC is well represented among public high schools with larger-than-average minority populations.

I attended three different, mostly white high schools in three different states—Virginia, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia—but none of them had JROTC. My children attended school in a small, upper-middle-class, mostly white college town in Ohio and there was no JROTC unit in the single high school.  The only people I know who had JROTC at their high schools are people of color from inner-city Chicago, students I knew well as a college professor.  To me, these students were exceptional in all respects.  But because they are from the city, these are the students allegedly needing training in “character development and citizenship,” according to the “Mandate for Leadership.” 

Breaking the War Habit points out that opposition to militarism in education began in our nation’s foundations.  The early-nineteenth-century American educational reformer and “Father of the Common [public] School,” Horace Mann, saw the infusion of militarism in American schools as contrary to the educational mission. According to PBS, “Mann believed that public schooling was central to good citizenship, democratic participation and societal well-being. He observed, ‘A republican form of government, without intelligence in the people, must be, on a vast scale, what a mad-house, without superintendent or keepers, would be on a small one’.”

One way Mann thought a “mad-house” was being built was through militarism in schools.  He:

insisted that schoolchildren learn that war is not heroic and demanded that history textbooks devote less attention to the subject.  “What can save us, and our children after us, from eternal, implacable, universal war,” Mann wondered, “but the greatest of all human powers—the power of impartial thought?” The issue of war, he strongly believed, “will never be settled, until we have a generation of men who are educated, from childhood, to seek for truth and to revere justice.” In numerous lectures and essays, Mann, who later represented Massachusetts in Congress, condemned the art of war and questioned the need for huge military expenditures. He advocated that future generations be “educated to that strength of intellect which shall dispel the insane illusions of martial glory” (Breaking the War Habit 4-5).

This vehemence against using the poor and uneducated to fight one’s wars was made by Shakespeare in 1597 in Henry IV, Part I.   In the play, Falstaff has assembled a batch of ragged men for Prince Hal’s army and Hal is not at all impressed with the quality of the recruits.  But Falstaff, who has benefited financially by taking bribes from wealthier men who are better prepared for war, to take in their stead these poor and poorly-prepared men, answers Hal’s criticism with:

“Tut, tut! Good enough to toss; food for powder, food for powder. They’ll fill a pit as well as better.” (Henry IV, Part 1, Act 4 Scene 2)