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<p><span style="font-size: x-large;"><strong>America’s Child Soldiers
</strong></span><br>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><strong>JROTC and the Militarizing
of America</strong></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b><small><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175784/tomgram%3A_ann_jones%2C_suffer_the_children/#more">http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175784/tomgram%3A_ann_jones%2C_suffer_the_children/#more</a></small></small></small></b><br>
<br>
</span>By <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/authors/annjones">Ann Jones</a></p>
<p>Congress surely meant to do the right thing when, in the fall of
2008, it passed the <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/135981.pdf">Child
Soldiers Prevention Act</a> (CSPA). The law was designed to protect
kids worldwide from being forced to fight the wars of Big Men. From
then on, any country that coerced children into becoming soldiers was
supposed to lose all U.S. military aid.</p>
<p>It turned out, however, that Congress -- in its rare moment of
concern for the next generation -- had it all wrong. In its greater
wisdom, the <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/09/28/presidential-memorandum-presidential-determination-respect-child-soldier">White
House</a> found countries like Chad and Yemen so vital to the national
interest of the United States that it preferred to overlook what
happened to the children in their midst.</p>
<p>As required by CSPA, this year the State Department once again <a
target="_blank"
href="http://antiwar.com/blog/2013/10/01/obama-waives-ban-on-sending-military-aid-to-countries-with-child-soldiers/">listed</a>
10 countries that use child soldiers: Burma (Myanmar), the Central
African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda,
Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Seven of them were
scheduled to receive millions of dollars in U.S. military aid as well
as what’s <a target="_blank" href="http://www.state.gov/t/pm/65531.htm">called</a>
“U.S. Foreign Military Financing.” That’s a shell game aimed at
supporting the Pentagon and American weapons makers by handing millions
of taxpayer dollars over to such dodgy “allies,” who must then turn
around and buy “services” from the Pentagon or “materiel” from the
usual merchants of death. You know the crowd: Lockheed Martin,
McDonnell Douglas, Northrop Grumman, and so on.</p>
<p>Here was a chance for Washington to teach a set of countries to
cherish their young people, not lead them to the slaughter. But in
October, as it has done every year since CSPA became law, the White
House again <a target="_blank"
href="http://washingtonexaminer.com/obama-waives-ban-on-aiding-regimes-that-use-child-soldiers/article/2536609">granted</a>
whole or partial “waivers” to five countries on the State Department’s
“do not aid” list: Chad, South Sudan, Yemen, the Democratic Republic of
the Congo, and Somalia.</p>
<p>Too bad for the young -- and the future -- of those countries.
But look at it this way: Why should Washington help the children of
Sudan or Yemen escape war when it spares no expense right here at home
to press our own impressionable, idealistic, ambitious American kids
into military “service”?</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>It should be no secret that the United States has the
biggest, most efficiently organized, most effective system for
recruiting child soldiers in the world. With uncharacteristic modesty,
however, the Pentagon doesn’t call it that. Its term is “youth
development program.” </blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>Pushed by multiple high-powered, highly paid public relations and
advertising firms under contract to the Department of Defense, the
program is a many splendored thing. Its major public face is the Junior
Reserve Officers Training Corps or JROTC. </p>
<p>What makes this child-soldier recruiting program so striking is
that the Pentagon carries it out in plain sight in hundreds and
hundreds of private, military, and public high schools across the U.S.</p>
<p>Unlike the notorious West African warlords <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1437579/Foday-Sankoh.html">Foday
Sankoh</a> and <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/27/world/africa/charles-taylor-sierra-leone-war-crimes-case.html">Charles
Taylor</a> (both brought before international tribunals on charges of
war crimes), the Pentagon doesn’t actually kidnap children and drag
them bodily into battle. It seeks instead to make its young “cadets”
what John Stuart Mill once termed “willing slaves,” so taken in by the
master’s script that they accept their parts with a gusto that passes
for personal choice. To that end, JROTC works on their
not-yet-fully-developed minds, instilling what the program’s textbooks
call “patriotism” and “leadership,” as well as a reflexive attention to
authoritarian commands.</p>
<p>The scheme is much more sophisticated -- so much more "civilized"
-- than any ever devised in Liberia or Sierra Leone, and it works. The
result is the same, however: kids get swept into soldiering, a job they
will not be free to leave, and in the course of which they may be
forced to commit spirit-breaking atrocities. When they start to
complain or crack under pressure, in the U.S. as in West Africa, out
come the drugs.</p>
<p>The JROTC program, still spreading in high schools across the
country, <a target="_blank"
href="http://cyberspacei.com/jesusi/focus/co/cows/afsc/youthmill/jrotc/jrotcost.htm">costs</a>
U.S. taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars annually. It has cost
some unknown number of taxpayers their children.</p>
<p><strong>The Acne and Braces Brigades</strong></p>
<p>I first stumbled upon JROTC kids a few years ago at a Veterans Day
parade in Boston. Before it got underway, I wandered among the
uniformed groups taking their places along the Boston Common. There
were some old geezers sporting the banners of their American Legion
posts, a few high school bands, and some sharp young men in smart dress
uniforms: greater Boston’s military recruiters.</p>
<p>Then there were the kids. The acne and braces brigades, 14- and
15-year-olds in military uniforms carrying rifles against their
shoulders. Some of the girl groups sported snazzy white gloves.</p>
<p>Far too many such groups, with far too many underage children,
stretched the length of Boston Common. They represented all branches
of the military and many different local communities, though almost all
of them were brown or black in hue: African Americans, Hispanics, the
children of immigrants from Vietnam and other points South. Just last
month in New York City, I watched similarly color-coded JROTC squads
march up Fifth Avenue on Veterans’ Day. One thing JROTC is not is a
rainbow coalition.</p>
<p>In Boston, I asked a 14-year-old boy why he had joined JROTC. He
wore a junior Army uniform and toted a rifle nearly as big as himself.
He said, “My dad, he left us, and my mom, she works two jobs, and when
she gets home, well, she’s not big on structure. But they told us at
school you gotta have a lot of structure if you want to get somewhere.
So I guess you could say I joined up for that.”</p>
<p>A group of girls, all Army JROTC members, told me they took
classes with the boys but had their own all-girl (all-black) drill team
that competed against others as far away as New Jersey. They showed me
their medals and invited me to their high school to see their
trophies. They, too, were 14 or 15. They jumped up and down like the
enthusiastic young teens they were as we talked. One said, “I never got
no prizes before.”</p>
<p>Their excitement took me back. When I was their age, growing up in
the Midwest, I rose before daybreak to march around a football field
and practice close formation maneuvers in the dark before the school
day began. Nothing would have kept me from that “structure,” that
“drill,” that “team,” but I was in a marching band and the weapon I
carried was a clarinet. JROTC has entrapped that eternal youthful
yearning to be part of something bigger and more important than one’s
own pitiful, neglected, acne-spattered self. JROTC captures youthful
idealism and ambition, twists it, trains it, arms it, and sets it on
the path to war.</p>
<p><strong>A Little History</strong></p>
<p>The U.S. Army Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps was
conceived as part of the National Defense Act of 1916 in the midst of
World War I. In the aftermath of that war, however, only six high
schools took up the military's offer of equipment and instructors. A <a
target="_blank" href="http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/ROTC.aspx">senior
version</a> of ROTC, was made compulsory on many state college and
university campuses, despite the then-controversial question of whether
the government could compel students to take military training.</p>
<p>By 1961, ROTC had become an optional program, popular at some
schools, but unwelcome on others. It soon <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.legion.org/magazine/213230/return-rotc">disappeared
altogether</a> from the campuses of many elite colleges and progressive
state universities, pushed out by protest against the war in Vietnam
and pulled out by the Pentagon, which insisted on maintaining
discriminatory policies (especially regarding sexual preference and
gender) outlawed in university codes of conduct. When it gave up “<a
target="_blank"
href="http://www.defense.gov/home/features/2010/0610_dadt/">Don’t Ask,
Don’t Tell</a>” in 2011 and offered a menu of substantial research
grants for such institutions, elite universities like Harvard and Yale
welcomed the military back with unbecoming deference.</p>
<p>During ROTC’s exile from such institutions, however, it put down
roots on college campuses in states that made no fuss about
discrimination, while the Pentagon expanded its recruitment program in
high schools. Almost half a century after Army JROTC was established,
the Reserve Officers Training Corps Vitalization Act of 1964 <a
target="_blank" href="http://www.usarmyjrotc.com/jrotc-history">opened</a>
such junior training to all branches of the military. What’s more, the
number of JROTC units nationwide, previously <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.legion.org/magazine/213230/return-rotc">capped</a> at
1,200, climbed rapidly until 2001, when the very idea of imposing
limits on the program disappeared.</p>
<p>The reason was clear enough. In 1973, the Nixon administration
discarded the draft in favor of a standing professional “all-volunteer”
army. But where were those professionals to be found? And how exactly
were they to be persuaded to “volunteer”? Since World War II, ROTC
programs at institutions of higher education had provided about 60% of
commissioned officers. But an army needs foot soldiers.</p>
<p>Officially, the Pentagon claims that JROTC is not a recruiting
program. Privately, it never considered it to be anything else. Army
JROTC now <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.usarmyjrotc.com/jrotc-history">describes itself</a>
as having “evolved from a source of enlisted recruits and officer
candidates to a citizenship program devoted to the moral, physical, and
educational uplift of American youth.” Yet former Defense Secretary
William Cohen, testifying before the House Armed Services Committee in
2000, <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.experts123.com/q/is-there-a-link-between-jrotc-and-military-recruiting.html">named
JROTC</a> “one of the best recruiting devices that we could have.” </p>
<p>With that unacknowledged mission in hand, the Pentagon pushed for
a goal first advanced in 1991 by Colin Powell, then chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff: the establishment of 3,500 JROTC units to
“uplift” students in high schools nationwide. The plan was to <a
target="_blank"
href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/assets/omb/expectmore/detail/10003233.2006.html">expand</a>
into "educationally and economically deprived areas.” The shoddy
schools of the inner cities, the rust belt, the deep South, and Texas
became rich hunting grounds. By the start of 2013, the Army alone was
recycling 4,000 retired officers to run its programs in 1,731 high
schools. All together, Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine JROTC units
now flourish in 3,402 high schools nationwide -- 65% of them in the
South -- with a total enrollment of 557,129 kids.</p>
<p><strong>Getting With the Program</strong></p>
<p>Here’s how the program works. The Department of Defense spends
several hundred million dollars -- $365 million in 2013 -- to provide
uniforms, Pentagon-approved textbooks, and equipment to JROTC, as well
as part of the instructors’ salaries. Those instructors, assigned by
the military (not the schools), are retired officers. They continue to
collect federal retirement pay, even though the schools are required to
cover their salaries at levels they would receive on active duty. The
military then reimburses the school for about half of that hefty pay,
but the school is still out a bundle.</p>
<p>Ten years ago, the American Friends Service Committee <a
target="_blank"
href="http://www.peaceworkmagazine.org/pwork/0410/041021.htm">found</a>
that the true cost of JROTC programs to local school districts was
“often much higher -- in some cases more than double -- the cost
claimed by the Department of Defense.” In 2004, local school districts
were shelling out “more than $222 million in personnel costs alone.”</p>
<p>Several principals who spoke to me about the program praised the
Pentagon for subsidizing the school budget, but in this matter they
evidently don’t grasp their own school finances. The fact is that
public schools offering JROTC programs actually subsidize the
Pentagon’s recruitment drive. In fact, a JROTC class costs schools (and
taxpayers) significantly more than would a regular physical education
or American history course -- for both of which it is often considered
a suitable substitute.</p>
<p>Local schools have no control over the Pentagon’s prescribed JROTC
curricula, which are inherently biased toward militarism. Many school
systems simply adopt JROTC programs without so much as a peek at what
the students will be taught. The American Friends Service Committee,
Veterans for Peace, and other civic groups have compiled evidence that
these classes are not only more costly than regular school courses, but
also inferior in quality.</p>
<p>What else but inferior quality might be expected from self-serving
textbooks written by competing branches of the military and used by
retired military men with no teaching qualifications or experience?
For one thing, neither the texts nor the instructors teach the sort of
critical thinking central to the best school curricula today. Instead,
they inculcate obedience to authority, inspire fear of “enemies,” and
advance the primacy of military might in American foreign policy.</p>
<p>Civic groups have raised a number of other <a target="_blank"
href="http://peaceworker.org/2009/09/jrotc-to-target-many-more-schools/">objections</a>
to JROTC, ranging from discriminatory practices -- against gays,
immigrants, and Muslims, for example -- to dangerous ones, such as
bringing guns into schools (of all places). Some units even set up
shooting ranges where automatic rifles and live ammunition are used.
JROTC embellishes the dangerous mystique of such weapons, making them
objects to covet, embrace, and jump at the chance to use.</p>
<p>In its own defense, the program publicizes a selling point widely
accepted across the United States: that it provides "structure," keeps
kids from dropping out of school, and turns boys (and now girls) of
"troubled" background into "men" who, without JROTC to save them (and
the rest of us <em>from </em>them), would become junkies or criminals
or worse. Colin Powell, the first ROTC grad ever to rise to the
military’s top job, peddled just this line in his memoir <em>My
American Journey</em>. "Inner-city kids," he wrote, "many from broken
homes, [find] stability and role models in Junior ROTC."</p>
<p>No evidence exists to prove these claims, however, apart from
student testimonials like that offered by the 14-year-old who told me
he joined up for “structure.” That kids (and their parents) fall for
this sales pitch is a measure of their own limited options. The great
majority of students find better, more life-affirming “structure” in
school itself through academic courses, sports, choirs, bands, science
or language clubs, internships -- you name it -- in schools where such
opportunities exist. Yet it is precisely in schools with such programs
that administrators, teachers, parents, and kids working together are
most likely to succeed in keeping JROTC out. It is left to the
“economically and educationally deprived” school systems targeted by
the Pentagon to cut such “frills” and blow their budgets on a colonel
or two who can offer students in need of “stability and role models” a
promising, though perhaps very short, future as soldiers.</p>
<p><strong>School Days</strong></p>
<p>In one such Boston inner city school, predominantly black, I sat
in on JROTC classes where kids watched endless films of soldiers on
parade, then had a go at it themselves in the school gym, rifles in
hand. (I have to admit that they could march far better than squads of
the Afghan National Army, which I’ve also <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175128/tomgram%3A_ann_jones,_us_or_them_in_afghanistan">observed</a>,
but is that something to be proud of?) Since those classes often seemed
to consist of hanging out, students had lots of time to chat with the
Army recruiter whose desk was conveniently located in the JROTC
classroom.</p>
<p>They chatted with me, too. A 16-year-old African American girl,
who was first in her class and had already signed up for the Army, told
me she would make the military her career. Her instructor -- a white
colonel she regarded as the father she never had at home -- had led the
class to believe that “our war” would go on for a very long time, or as
he put it, “until we’ve killed every last Muslim on Earth.” She wanted
to help save America by devoting her life to that “big job ahead.”</p>
<p>Stunned, I blurted out, “But what about Malcolm X?” He grew up in
Boston and a boulevard not far from the school was named in his honor.
“Wasn’t he a Muslim?” I asked.</p>
<p>“Oh no, ma’am,” she said. “Malcolm X was an American.”</p>
<p>A senior boy, who had also signed up with the recruiter, wanted to
escape the violence of city streets. He joined up shortly after one of
his best friends, caught in the crossfire of somebody else’s fight, was
killed in a convenience store just down the block from the school. He
told me, “I’ve got no future here. I might as well be in
Afghanistan.” He thought his chances of survival would be better
there, but he worried about the fact that he had to finish high school
before reporting for “duty.” He said, “I just hope I can make it to
the war.”</p>
<p>What kind of school system gives boys and girls such “choices”?
What kind of country?</p>
<p>What goes on in schools in your town? Isn’t it time you found out?</p>
<p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175769/"><em>TomDispatch
regular</em></a><em> Ann Jones is the author of a new book, </em><a
target="_blank"
href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608463710/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20">They
Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars -- the Untold
Story</a><em>, a Dispatch Books project in cooperation with Haymarket
Books. (Jeremy Scahill just </em><a target="_blank"
href="http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/profiles/article/60307-pw-s-top-10-authors-on-their-favorite-books-of-2013.html"><em>chose
it</em></a><em> as his favorite book of 2013.) Jones, who has reported
from Afghanistan since 2002, is also the author of two books about the
impact of war on civilians: </em>Kabul in Winter<em> and </em>War Is
Not Over When It’s Over<em>. Her website is <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.annjonesonline.com">annjonesonline.com</a>.<br>
</em></p>
<p>Copyright 2013 Ann Jones</p>
</blockquote>
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