A Retreat From Big Cities Hurts ROTC Recruiting

The Wall Street Journal

A Retreat From Big Cities Hurts ROTC Recruiting
Though Army Seeks More Ethnic Officers, It Shuns Northeast
By GREG JAFFE
February 22, 2007; Page A1

QUEENS, N.Y. -- The ROTC program at St. John's University here seems perfectly placed for an Army that's desperate for officers who are bilingual and comfortable in foreign lands. About 40 of the 120 students speak second languages, including Turkish, Korean, Mandarin, Hindi, Albanian, and Gujarati. But instead of being hailed as a model for the Army's future, the St. John's Reserve Officer Training Corps program is a lonely outpost of diversity. In the past few decades, the Army has pulled its officer training and recruiting programs out of the Northeast and big, ethnically diverse urban centers, choosing to concentrate on campuses in the South and Midwest.

There is no Army ROTC program in the Detroit area, with its large middle-class Muslim population, and only one in Miami and Chicago. In New York City, which produced more than 500 military officers a year in the 1950s and early 1960s, the two remaining ROTC programs last year yielded 34 Army officers. In contrast, Alabama, which has a student population that is about one-fourth the size of the state of New York, has 10 ROTC programs that last year produced 174 Army officers. The South generates about 40% of all Army officers, according to Pentagon statistics.

An officer's background didn't matter so much when the U.S. was focused on fighting big armies in large conventional battles. These days, though, U.S. success in places like Iraq and Afghanistan hinges on the ability of Army officers to win the trust of a suspicious and often culturally alien population. Officers must court sheiks and warlords and work closely with indigenous security forces. At a time when the country is growing more and more diverse, the Army is struggling to build an officer corps that takes full advantage of America's multiethnic society. There are only about 1,500 Muslims in a force of about 500,000 soldiers. Arabic speakers are in critically short supply throughout the force, say senior Army officials. Even in those cities, like New York, where the Army maintains ROTC, it is undermanned and culturally out-of-synch with the people it is trying to recruit.

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The Army's shift South began in the late 1960s at a time when anger over the war in Vietnam was prevalent on many Northeastern campuses. At some high-profile schools, like Harvard, Yale and Columbia, disagreements between the military and school administrators drove ROTC off campus. Many small Southern schools actively courted the military by setting aside new buildings for ROTC programs. As the Army shrunk after the Cold War, it also shuttered large numbers of bases in the Northeast and relocated troops to sprawling facilities in the South and Midwest which were far from population centers and offered big training ranges. As a result, urban students today have far less exposure to the military, making them harder and more costly to recruit and retain in ROTC programs.

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The old white men in charge only want recruits who are likely to resemble them in a few years. It's the pattern at the CIA and it's the pattern at the FBI and it's why this country, so rich in diversity, has a government that doesn't know shit about what's going on in the rest of the world.

I don't know what we can do about the intolerant redneckery* at the top except hope Democratic leadership manages to encourage all the old boys to take early retirement so they can change the culture and recruitment for all government agencies. They started the job back in the 60s and were blown backwards by 38 years of constantly conservative administrations. It's high time to finish the job.



*It's a mindset, not an ethnic minority or place of origin.

As American as apple pie.