The Pentagon's Long-Term Plan to Get Back on Campus

If the wrestling entertainment conglomerate, WWE, tried to set up a "wrestling" curriculum on a college campus, replete with course credit, training in how to become a professional wrestler, special graduation ceremonies, with Hall of Fame wrestlers Bobo Brazil and "Stone Cold" Steve Austin as featured faculty teaching the history and strategy of the sport, it would be hilarious. But when the military says it wants to purchase a piece of the university and use it to recruit and train its officers, with full certification as a legitimate university curriculum, we are expected (even by the New York Times) to speak with reverence about how honored we are to host them.

A recent and chilling article in the New York Times spoke hopefully about the possibility that ROTC may return to campuses that banned it in the 1970s and/or have never before allowed it. According to Times reporter Michael Winerip the "attitude toward the military began to shift after the 9/11 attacks," especially in elite schools like Harvard, with administration, faculty and students lined up in favor ROTC. The article reads like an advocacy document, resting on the unexplored assumption that there are no negative consequences to the Department of Defense setting up shop on a university campus. The sole remaining barrier, according to the article, is the unfortunate (and hopefully soon-to-be ended) "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, which violates academic values.

The article is distorted on so many levels that it is hard to catalogue them all. The most profound distortion is that it fails to mention that the pressure for new ROTC chapters originates in the military itself, a part of their extremely expensive and not-very-successful campaign to overcome the chronic shortages of soldiers.

Moreover, like so many articles in the Times these days, reporter Winerup failed to undertake even rudimentary investigative reporting, which would have revealed this larger context. Like partisan advocate, Winerup made sure to interview military leaders, college administrators, faculty who support ROTC, ROTC members, veterans who support ROTC, and other students who support ROTC. But he failed to interview faculty who oppose ROTC, students who oppose ROTC, and veterans who oppose ROTC. What kind of reporting is that?

One tell-tale sign of how shallow the research was is that article offers only one reason why ROTC is not already re-ensconced in campuses that earlier banned it: the statement by President Drew Faust of Harvard that she might invite ROTC back if the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy were repealed. Later, Winerip hints that this statement might conceal other reasons, but never explores what they might be. It is clear to the careful reader, however, that Faust offered "DADT" because it was an easy reason to offer without arousing controversy. (Her statement is reminiscent of Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz telling Vanity Fair back in 2004 that that the there were many reasons for invading Iraq, but WMDs became the public justification because they were "the one issue that everyone could agree upon." ) So the article's optimism about the return of ROTC is certainly misplaced: at Harvard and elsewhere, if "DADT" is repealed, the ten or so other reasons why it ROTC might not be welcome on campus would rear their ugly heads.

Here are a few of them.

The real energy behind this push for ROTC is that the military is suffering from an ongoing inability to fill its ranks. (The problem has been temporarily eased by the economic crisis, but it is still there and will return with a vengeance if and when the recession ends). The military leadership thinks that placing ROTC on high profile campuses will ease the recruitment crisis by sanitizing the image of the military. Since the endless war began in late 2001, the military budget for recruitment has more than doubled (from the already inflated $3.4 billion in 2004 to $7.7 billion in 2008), and many service branches still cannot meet their quotas. So the $263 million cost of the 30,000 ROTC scholarships is chump change. Moreover ROTC registers about the same cost per-recruit as the rest of the effort), so it is a cost-efficient system.