Word: civilianizes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Lyndon Johnson last week pondered one of the most critical decisions of his presidency-and he pondered it almost entirely alone. The question was how many more U.S. fighting men will be needed for the Viet Nam war. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, civilian policymakers at the Pentagon and State Department functionaries mulled over more than half a dozen plans, probably one from General William C. West moreland, the U.S. commander in Viet Nam, calling for 206,000 troops beyond the 525,000 already authorized. But there was a feeling that the debate was being conducted in a vacuum...
...universities have trained men for war since 1819, when a former West Pointer went up to Vermont to found a college (now Norwich University) where military instruction would be part of the curriculum. The idea gained popularity. During the Civil War, Congress voted to provide free land for civilian colleges that agreed to offer military instruction to their students. In 1916, this "land-grant" system of military training was transformed into the present-day Reserve Officer Training Corps...
Until recently, the function of ROTC remained similar to what it was in 1916. The Corps was created in the spirit of the civilian army; it has long reflected the view that a nation's best defense is a prepared citizenry. As its name suggests, the military training that ROTC brought to the college campus was designed to create a vast body of reserve officers. The Regular Army could use these reserve officers to provide additional leadership in times of national peril. Congress assumed that the military academies could provide the officers for the small peacetime army...
Between the wars, the United States kept the ROTC-trained reservist as the key figure in the nation's defenses, maintaining the tradition of the civilian soldier dating back to the Minutemen of 1775. But the ROTC system was not merely romantic; it was also reasonably successful. When war came in 1941, a reserve of over 56,000 ROTC graduates was available for active duty to permit a more rapid mobilization of the nation...
...fact behind the growing opposition to ROTC is the increasingly inescapable realization that ROTC now wants to recruit college students for mainly military careers. The implication of this is that the presence of ROTC can no longer be justified by the old arguments about the need to maintain a civilian army. As the emphasis of ROTC shifts from training reserves to recruiting career officers, the view that ROTC "civilianizes" the military--the rationale by which educators have long justified their uneasy relationship with the armed services--becomes untenable...