Making Citizen Soldiers: ROTC and the Ideology of American Military Service

Making Citizen Soldiers: ROTC and the Ideology of American Military Service by Michael S. Neiberg. Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000 (pp. 264 - $39.95).

By the autumn 1946, the United States had nearly completed the downsizing of its military forces following World War II and at that point this reviewer joined the NROTC Program at Cornell University as a Midshipman. Returning veterans nearly swamped us few non-veteran males on that campus; we alone were required to participate in a mandatory ROTC program. Four years later, those finishing four years in either Navy, Air Force or Army ROTC were graduated just in time for the Korean War where we joined the World War II veterans recalled to active duty. By 1965-- 70, I was a faculty member and again the ROTC programs at the University of Massachusetts and elsewhere were producing second lieutenants needed for an increasingly unpopular war. In 1990 as my teaching career was ending, ROTC programs were once again supplying ensigns and second lieutenants, this time for Desert Storm. Although ROTC programs colored much of my own academic experiences, until I read Making Citizen Soldiers, the vital role played by ROTC programs in the American military culture had not jelled in my own mind. Our Armed Forces are fundamentally different from those of other nations because so many of our officers, both Regular and Reserve, have been educated at civilian universities with civilian instructors in civilian courses, and Professor Neiberg has done an excellent job of bringing this role into focus.

During the 1970s, I served on a University of Massachusetts committee responsible to the Faculty Senate for oversight of their two ROTC units (ROTC and AFROTC). These programs had barely survived Vietnam unrest on that campus and yet, as Neiberg documents from his study of other campuses, the problems facing most of our faculty centered on whether colonels (and Navy captains) were qualified to serve as Professors and/or Department Heads and whether an afternoon spent marching under arms justified university credit. Earlier, rioting undergraduates had almost destroyed the ROTC building, but only several years later, a new generation of undergraduates were again seeking ROTC scholarships and Reserve commissions at graduation. By 1980, both programs were alive and well at U. Mass. while our faculty committee continued to worry about military course content and the quality of instruction. Many civilian faculty members could not easily equate the 25 years of military existence leading to a colonelcy with the 25 years of preand post-tenure life leading to a professorship in humanities. For those still struggling to understand these two cultures, I would place this book high on their reading list and then require it not only of any officer joining an ROTC staff but also of any university administrator newly charged with ROTC program management.

As World War II passed into history, something further happened on campuses. In 1957, when I entered the academy as an instructor, only one male colleague in my department had not served in the war. When I retired in 1993 from a forty-person faculty, only two of us were veterans and both had served during Korea. Now the impact of student deferments during Korea and Vietnam and the all-volunteer concept that followed has largely removed the veteran from university faculties and yet the ROTC programs are as important adjuncts, at least to land grant universities, as they ever have been. Near parity exists between Annapolis and NROTC in the yearly production of regular active duty officers and the Army and Air Force have profited in like fashion. Both the military science curricula and the officers serving as instructors have also profited from the intellectual and sometimes rancorous interactions with non-military faculty. ROTC programs have improved. Neiberg has done an excellent job in describing the evolution of these three programs from their early post-war form to their nearly modern form. Although his analysis stops in 1980, by then the current system was largely in place.

For faculty and administrators currently concerned about ROTC programs on their own campuses, this book will provide an excellent historical perspective on the forces that shaped these programs, a process which began following the end of the Civil War. It will also provide a detailed review of ROTC programs at quite a few institutions as they passed through the travails of Vietnam and on into the present. For me, Professor Neiberg has effectively covered many of the problems I personally experienced. This book will stand as a solid and well-researched review of the roles played on campuses by the three ROTC programs and their roles in providing our armed services with officers in time of peace and war who are intellectually different from the graduates of our Military Academies. Such graduates have provided a welcome and necessary balance to our armed services and this role needs to be fully understood by the current staff and faculty of our universities.

Reviewed by Charles F. Cole**

**Charles F. Cole is a Commander, U.S. Naval Reserve (Ret.) and Professor Emeritus, Ohio State University.

Copyright Dr. George Kourvetaris Winter 2001
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