The U.S. military is becoming too dependent on a small, battle-weary segment of the population to fight the nation’s battles, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said on Wednesday in a speech at Duke University. More than 1 million ground troops have been put into the fight since the invasion of Iraq, Gates said, and the strain is starting to show.
“There is a risk over time of developing a cadre of military leaders that politically, culturally and geographically have less and less in common with the people they have sworn to defend,” Gates warned.
Gates compared the case of Alabama, a state of less than 5 million, that has 10 Army ROTC host programs, with cities like Los Angeles, where 12 million Americans live, that only has four host ROTC programs.
But, around the country, military bases are relocating regionally, compounding the problem.
“Many military facilities in the northeast and on the west coast have been shut down,” Gates said, “leaving a void of relationships and understanding of the armed forces in their wake.”
According to Gates, there is now a heavy concentration of Army bases in just five states — Texas, Washington, Georgia, Kentucky and North Carolina.
Today, Gates said, fewer Americans know someone who has served in the military: In 1988, 40 percent of 18-year-olds had a veteran parent, but now that number is a mere 18 percent.
Because of this, according to Gates, increasingly, the burden of defending our country is falling to a tight-knit group of military families. The children of senior officers often choose to follow their parents into the military, Gates said. As an example, he pointed to the son of the former commander of all U.S. forces in Iraq. The commander’s son was badly wounded in the early part of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
An influx of new officers would broaden the military’s recruiting base and correct some of these disparities, according to Gates, but lingering anti-military sentiments on elite campuses have prevented that.
“Institutions that used to send hundreds of graduates into the armed forces, but now struggle to commission a handful of officers every year,” Gates said. “University faculty and administrators banned ROTC from many elite campuses during the Vietnam War and continued to bar the military based on the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell law.”
Gates singled out and praised Duke as a notable exception to that trend.
The issue of ROTC at the Ivies has made headlines since the failed repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell last week. Sen. Scott Brown released a statement blasting Harvard for blocking ROTC’s return on campus, and has now put together a petition to return the officer program to campus.
Gates emphasized that for the volunteer force to continue to successful it needs to come from more than just a handful of state schools and smaller institutions.
“The fears expressed when the all-volunteer force was first instituted – that the only people left willing to serve would be the poorest, the worst educated, the least able to get any other job – simply did not come to pass,” Gates said.
The volunteer force today is more educated than the average American population: 15 percent more of enlisted service members have high school diplomas than do their civilian counterparts, and almost all officers have bachelors’ degrees.
Still, too many students at elite institutions see the military as a burden rather than an opportunity — a falsehood, according to Gates.
“Our young military leaders in Iraq and Afghanistan, have to one degree or another found themselves dealing with development, governance, agriculture, health, and diplomacy,” he said. “They’ve done all this at an age when many of their peers are reading spreadsheets and making photocopies.”
Zach Dexter is the editor-in-chief of the Carolina Review and a student at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. He is a member of the Student Free Press Association.
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