ROTC: A Short History

Americans have long worried about the consequences of maintaining a large standing army, a suspicion we inherited from the British and because of the British. As Weigley (2001, 219) noted, “American colonists fully accepted the Whig antimilitary tradition and indeed integrated it into American political culture.” The colonists were also unhappy about the British troops garrisoned in the colonies after the French and Indian War and the taxes levied to support them. As a result, American armies and navies were traditionally small and underfunded except in times of war. Even during the Revolutionary War, “The Continental Congress supervised the Continental Army with irrational distrust of it” (Weigley 2001, 220). Our more recent experience of maintaining large standing armies during peacetime is quite different from the pattern prevailing from the independence of the United States until the beginning of World War II.

How, therefore, did a program begin that trained military officers on college campuses? Michael Neiberg (2000) has written the most comprehensive history of ROTC, from which the following account is largely drawn.²

He describes how ROTC officially started before the U.S. entry into World War I, but its roots are intertwined with those of the modern American university. While the Morrill Act of 1862 is best known for the creation of the land grant university system, it also required these institutions to offer military training.³ The act was unclear as to what this meant in practice, but by 1900, 42 colleges and universities offered training programs of varied quality with War Department support.

On the eve of World War I, the 1916 National Defense Act (NDA) organized the military into the force we largely know today, with active duty components, reserve components, and state National Guard units. It also created ROTC,⁴

which incorporated the various existing collegiate programs. ROTC was designed to provide officers for the reserve and National Guard, but it did not provide scholarships. It was also divided into a two-year program for freshmen and sophomores, which was mandatory at many schools, followed by a two-year “Advanced Course” leading to a reserve or Guard appointment. The NDA also attempted to establish a standard educational and training curriculum.

Despite relatively unenthusiastic military support, ROTC had produced 40% of reserve officers by 1940. While ROTC was suspended during World War II in favor of shorter officer training programs, the availability of ROTC-trained officers was credited with playing an important role in the mobilization of the military after Pearl Harbor. ROTC was reinstated in 1946, and the 1948 Gray Commission recommended keeping it for three reasons: it was cheap, it was in the best citizen-soldier tradition, and the military needed college-educated officers who could understand new technologies.

As the military expanded during the Cold War, ROTC transitioned from preparing reserve and Guard officers to commissioning active-duty officers. In the 1960s, colleges and universities that required compulsory ROTC began to abolish this requirement, and enrollments fell. In 1964, the ROTC Revitalization Act for the first time funded a large number of scholarships (5,500),⁵

allowed cross-enrollment by students at nearby universities, created a two-year program option, and dropped the number of “contact” hours with cadets. Enrollment increased, and while some students used ROTC to postpone being drafted, numbers substantially dropped after 1969 when the draft lottery made it clear who was likely to be called.

While a variety of alternatives to ROTC were debated during the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Department of Defense ultimately decided to keep ROTC as the primary means of commissioning young officers and “ROTC emerged from this crisis stronger in many respects than ever” (Coumbe 1999). The primary arguments in its favor included relatively low costs, the importance of a balanced officer corps, the need for capable, flexible, and independent officers, the value of an “intellectually capable” military leadership, and the contribution of ROTC to closing civil-military gaps (Coumbe 1999).

With the implementation of the All-Volunteer Force (AVF) in 1973, the challenge for the military was to attract students to ROTC without the motivation of the draft. Many units were initially placed on probation for having low numbers of cadets, but numbers were increased through (1) a recruiting campaign that focused on scholarships and opportunity, (2) the unrestricted admission of women to ROTC, beginning with the Air Force in 1970, (3) a focus on increased diversity recruitment, and (4) loosened hair, uniform, and drill regulations.

Numbers

Any discussion of the officer corps will probably call to mind a picture of the military service academics at West Point, Annapolis, and Colorado Springs. However, ROTC programs produce almost twice the number of officers as do these academies.⁶

ROTC units can be found at many colleges and universities. There are 273 campuses that sponsor Army ROTC units, 71 that sponsor Navy/Marine Corps NROTC units, and 144 that sponsor Air Force AFROTC units.⁷

For most service branches, the plurality of officers is commissioned through these ROTC programs. For example, in FY 2004, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point commissioned 976 men and women as active duty second lieutenants. By comparison, Army ROTC programs nationwide contributed over 3,300 active duty second lieutenants—2,285 were on scholarship and 1,077 were non-scholarship participants (more about this distinction later). In addition, another 858 active duty officers were produced by Officer Candidate/Training Schools (OCS/OTS), 724 by Direct Appointment, and 383 by other means. Of the total 6,303 new U.S. Army active duty commissions, then, over half were from Army ROTC. For the entire Department of Defense, of the 19,084 active duty officers commissioned in 2004, 6,866 were from Army, Navy, and Air Force ROTC units and 3,413 from the service academies.⁸ In addition, for the 2003–2004 academic year, Army ROTC produced an additional 554 reserve officers and 614 National Guard officers.

ROTC is an important source of racial, ethnic, and gender diversity in the military. In 2004, the service academies graduated 528 female active component officers in comparison to 1,517 commissioned through ROTC. ROTC also commissioned 42.3% of new active component Latino officers and 39.5% of African-American officers in 2004 in comparison to 36.6% of Anglo officers.⁹

The most well-known African-American General, Colin Powell, was commissioned in 1958 through the ROTC program at the City College of New York. For many years, ROTC units were as segregated as the campuses themselves, but this began to change with desegregation. In addition, the military has operated units on the campuses of Historically Black Colleges and Universities.¹⁰

Responsibilities and Benefits

The basics of ROTC are well known. The obligation is that students take military science classes and participate in some military training during their collegiate years and accept commissions in the military after graduation. The benefit is that the military pays for tuition and some other expenses. However, there are a variety of complexities that are not well known but which make a significant difference to the ROTC participants.

The Civil-Military Gap and ROTC

Scholars have long been concerned about the relationships between militaries and the societies they are tasked to protect. The problem is that militaries may decide they should rule, or insert themselves inappropriately into the civilian decision-making process, or become estranged from civilian society. The most significant recent scholarship on the subject is Feaver and Kohn's volume (2001), which outlines the problems, investigates the realities, and discusses consequences and strategies for the future. They note that while a civil-military culture gap is longstanding and to some degree necessary, the relationship in the 1990s was more ominous and included a new element of negativity and bitterness. As observed by Gronke and Feaver (2001, 132), while public support for the military is strong in public opinion polls, this masks “an undercurrent of alienation in the relationship,” although it is unclear to what degree this applies today after the terrorist attacks of 9-11 and the Iraq War.

Feaver, Kohn, and Cohn (2001) noted that this is not a new subject of study and discussed three previous waves of literature.¹²

They concluded that while there was no immediate crisis, there were problems that should not be left unaddressed. Weigley (2001) similarly observed that these issues were old and recurring. Although civil-military relations went through several stages in American history, much of the problem was mitigated by the reality of a very small military or the presence of a war that smoothed over differences. At the end of the Cold War, America was faced with both a larger and more alienated military—which was unique in American history. While civilian control over the military is deeply embedded in American culture, it is risky to assume that the past is always prologue. And the concern is not necessarily a coup as much as a growing tension that impedes military and foreign policy effectiveness.

Evidence of a civil-military gap has been studied for some time. For example, some have studied differences between West Point cadets and other young people, and others have discussed elite civilian and military gaps across a number of cultural and political questions, particularly partisanship.¹³

Another issue is the shrinking number of personal connections between the military and both the civilian political leadership and the general public. With the end of the draft, the proportion of veterans in the population is shrinking. Bianco and Markham (2001) noted that in the 1990s the veteran percentage in Congress dropped below cohort averages for the first time.

What solutions did Feaver and Kohn (2001) propose for these civil-military gaps? They suggested (1) increasing the military presence in civilian society, (2) increasing civilian understanding of the military, and (3) improving instruction on civil-military relations in professional military education. One step forward is ROTC, which “provides a singular opportunity to increase contacts between the military and future civilian leaders” (470). However, they pointed out that opponents of ROTC include not only some academics but also “bean-counters and ‘culture-warriors’ in the Pentagon and Congress” (470). In addition, a recent article in the Wall Street Journal (Jaffe 2007) discussed the closure of many northeastern and urban ROTC units, and Desch (2001, 322) suggested that ROTC units should be better distributed across the nation and in “elite” universities.

One reason for this geographic change is cost; there may be pressure to support “efficient” programs at southern and western state universities that produce many officers rather than smaller units on elite and urban campuses that produce relatively few second lieutenants and ensigns.¹⁴

This trend might be accentuated in these times of tight resources as well as declining reenlistment rates of West Point graduates (Bender 2007). While the 2006 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Rumsfeld v. FAIR could lead to the return of ROTC units to some Ivy League (or other) campuses, it remains to be seen whether the Department of Defense will seek to reestablish programs that might generate relatively few—albeit well educated—new officers.¹⁵

Why is a regionally concentrated ROTC a problem? First, the Wall Street Journal article discussed how such urban closures negatively affect diversity, an issue of particular concern when “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.”

Second, an officer corps drawn disproportionately from particular regions only enhances the civil-military gap. Some Americans may begin to see the military as led by unusual others, not by people like themselves.

Third, military effectiveness is enhanced by well-educated officers, and many of the top-rated American universities are in the northeast and urban areas. As Eliot Cohen noted (2005), “it is education that provides the intellectual depth and breadth that allows soldiers to understand and succeed in America's wars.” Relatedly, in surveying centuries of military history, Kennedy and Neilson (2002, xi) concluded that “war fighting is the greatest challenge to a student's capacity for dealing with the unknown, and those trained, as opposed to educated, have seldom managed to muster the wherewithal to cope with that environment.”

In sum, the ROTC experience is long and complex and sometimes controversial—as in the 1960s because of the Vietnam War or today because of the “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” legislation¹⁶

—but the Ivory Tower has largely supported its mission.¹⁷ It not only provides scholarships for students and well-educated officers for the military, but it also helps to break down the walls between the civilian and military worlds, thereby reducing a civil-military gap that can endanger military effectiveness and democracy alike.