DLC | Blueprint Magazine | October 18, 2005
Security Gap
By Lt. Gen. Daniel W. Christman
Prohibitions on ROTC and recruitment at some colleges are worsening the Army's leadership gap. Democrats can close their own security gap by challenging those bans and embracing the military.
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Calls by leading Democrats (and by the Democratic Leadership Council) for an increase of 100,000 troops in the Army, and for termination of the senseless ban on recruiting on some college campuses, are vital to restoring strength to our Army and to its leadership cohort.snip
Democrats should call for opening the doors to military recruiting at all U.S. colleges and universities. But ROTC programs, in particular, need to be highlighted. A list of universities that continue to ban such programs is a Who's Who of top-tier educational institutions in the United States: Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Rice, Northwestern, Washington and Lee, and Stanford, to name just a few. Each of those universities once hosted an ROTC unit, but expelled it during the mindless attacks on our military in the 1960s and 1970s. A notable exception among the prestigious institutions is Princeton, which offers a thriving and popular ROTC program.
Even today, the "no military on campus" mantra is repeated by those with no agenda but to reject any affiliation with our armed forces. To be sure, the Pentagon's "don't ask, don't tell" policy is most often cited as the rationale for the exclusion. But this is a charade. If that policy were changed tomorrow (and it will not be), other justifications -- an "unjust war," the military's "unfair burden on the poor" -- would conveniently take its place.(sounds like something campus republicans would enjoy, eh?)
http://www.dlc.org/ndol_ci.cfm?kaid=124&subid=307&contentid=253557Hope you're ready to enroll your kids in the Army should the DLC get its way and get their candidate in the WH.