Word: pentagons
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...theory, this should not seriously bother the Pentagon. "Rotsee," as collegians call it, remains highly popular. It supplies 50% of the Army's officers, 20% of the Navy's and 35% of the Air Force's. Army ROTC alone now enrolls 151,000 students on 268 campuses (v. 54 for the Navy and 208 for the Air Force). Many students are so eager for ROTC that next year the Army will add 16 more campuses. A student who signs up is committed to two years' active service as a second lieutenant. One attraction: he can boost...
Violence Y. Reason. All the same, the Pentagon is understandably alarmed by the anti-ROTC movement. Though ROTC is thriving at some state universities and Catholic colleges, it is simultaneously being banished from the Ivy League, a major source of precisely the kind of citizen-officers who might normally leaven the military with needed intellect and imagination. By faculty vote, ROTC will be stripped of academic credit and relegated to an extracurricular activity at Yale and Harvard. Dartmouth is considering whether to reduce the number of ROTC courses that qualify for credit or to drop credit altogether if ROTC...
Many critics fault ROTC on strictly academic grounds. As they see it, such boring trade-school courses as "military staff operations" have no more business being part of the college curriculum than the officer-instructors sent by the Pentagon-who must be accorded the rank and privileges of a full professor-have being part of the faculty. While overlooking the presence of similar non-military courses (accounting, physical education), the critics also tend to forget that universities themselves approve the ROTC instructors, many of whom are rising young officers who take graduate courses on the side. At Columbia, for example...
...concerned that any hold-down on Government spending should not be at the expense of social-welfare efforts. There is apprehension about being drawn into a project of questionable military value that may end up costing ten times the initial estimates, or even more. The fact that the Pentagon organized a promotion program to create pro-Sentinel sentiment raises the old fears of the military-industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower once warned against. With the Russians now pressing for arms-control talks, the hope exists that a possible agreement would make ABM unnecessary. Finally, there is widespread opposition by voters...
Many experts remain convinced that, in nuclear war, the offense would always have the advantage-that any new defensive device could easily be neutralized by improvements in attack missiles. Contending that the Pentagon's review was inadequate, Kennedy announced that he was organizing an independent study by outside experts. This week the Senate Disarmament Subcommittee will begin hearings on ABM. Both inquiries can be counted on to generate still more controversy in what has already become one of the most heated-and most crucial-defense disputes in many years...