The National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth (NNOMY)

Featured

What I Discovered in the JROTC Curriculum

Parent Category: NNOMY Articles Hits: 269

July-September 2022 / Lauren Reyna Morales / Draft NOtices - In the summer of 2020, I was recruited by the non-profit Project on Youth and Non-Military Opportunities (Project YANO) to review core textbooks used by the U.S. military in the high school Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps (JROTC) program. Project YANO organized a team of 15 reviewers that consisted of individuals with backgrounds in either classroom teaching or education activism, or with special knowledge of subjects that JROTC claims to address in its curriculum (e.g., U.S. and world history, geography, leadership methods, etc.).

In total, eleven Army, Navy, and Marine Corps JROTC texts were reviewed. The reviewers included current and retired teachers, military veterans, and several educators with post baccalaureate credentials. I myself have been a classroom teacher for five years. I’m credentialed to teach English and Social Sciences in the state of California, and I also earned an M.A. in education from the University of Colorado, Denver. I personally reviewed an Army JROTC textbook titled, Leadership Education and Training (LET 3). I was eager to investigate the kind of curriculum JROTC utilizes to influence over 550,000 students at approximately 3,400 high schools. What, I wondered, is the U.S. military teaching to youth in their places of learning?

Featured

GOP congressman says student loan forgiveness will hurt military recruitment

Parent Category: NNOMY Articles Hits: 355

August 25, 2022 / Christopher Wilson / Yahoo News - Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., said Thursday that President Biden's student loan forgiveness plan will hurt the U.S. military's ability to recruit.

"Student loan forgiveness undermines one of our military's greatest recruitment tools at a time of dangerously low enlistments," Banks wrote in a tweet as Republicans continue to attack the White House for the announcement that it would be canceling $10,000 in student loan debt for millions of Americans.

Though the White House is limiting forgiveness to those making under $125,000 per year, conservatives have attempted to paint the plan as a handout to the rich. Banks's comment appears to undercut that message, implying that lower-income Americans might no longer see joining the military as a path to a college education that wealthier families can typically afford without volunteering for service.

Featured

The US Military’s JROTC Program Is Even Worse Than You Thought

Parent Category: NNOMY Articles Hits: 305

Army JROTC cadets participate in a wreath-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery on June 21, 2022, in Arlington, Virginia. (US Army Cadet Command / Flickr)August 23 2022 / Steve Early / Suzanne Gordon / Jacobin - We’ve long known that the US armed forces target poor and working-class students to meet their enlistment goals. But according to a recent report, the military’s JROTC program is also rife with sexual misconduct and outright abuse of young women.

Fifty years ago, no symbol of university complicity with the military angered more students than the on-campus presence of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC). The manpower requirements of the Vietnam era could not be met by conscription, draft-driven enlistments, and the graduating classes of military service academies alone. The Department of Defense also needed commissioned officers trained in DOD-funded military science departments at private and state universities.

Anti-ROTC campaigning became a major focus of the campus-based movement against the Vietnam War. Critics demanded everything from stripping ROTC courses of academic credit to, more popularly, kicking the program off campus. Foot-dragging by college trustees, administrators, and faculty members reluctant to cut ties with the military sparked an escalation of protest activity, from peaceful picketing to more aggressive action. ROTC buildings were trashed, bombed, or set on fire — most famously at Kent State University. There, a May 1970 arson attempt triggered a National Guard occupation that led to the fatal shooting of four students (one of them a ROTC cadet) and then the largest student strike in US history.

Featured

Lawmakers to Investigate Sexual Abuse in Junior R.O.T.C. Programs

New York Times JROTC Series 2022 Hits: 206

The House oversight committee wants the Pentagon to report on sexual misconduct in the high school programs and how it holds instructors accountable.

Lawmakers requested that the Department of Defense provide a briefing to the committee’s staff by the end of this month.
Credit...Mary F. Calvert for The New York Times

Aug. 15, 2022 / Mike Baker /  New York Times - Congressional investigators have opened a review of sexual misconduct in the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program of the U.S. military in the wake of reports that dozens of teenage girls had been abused at the hands of their instructors.

In a letter sent on Monday to military leaders, including Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III, the lawmakers said they were seeking information on how many misconduct reports had been received, how they had been investigated and how often the military inspected school J.R.O.T.C. programs.

They said that instructors in the J.R.O.T.C. program, which provides training in leadership, marksmanship and civic responsibility in about 3,500 high schools around the country, served as trusted representatives of the military in their local communities.

“Every incident of sexual abuse or harassment committed by a J.R.O.T.C. instructor is a betrayal of that trust,” wrote Representative Carolyn Maloney, the chairwoman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, and Representative Stephen Lynch, who chairs the panel’s subcommittee on national security.

The New York Times reported last month that J.R.O.T.C. programs had repeatedly become a place where decorated veterans — retired as officers or noncommissioned officers — preyed on teenage students. The Times identified, over a five-year period, at least 33 J.R.O.T.C. instructors who had been criminally charged with sexual misconduct involving students, along with many others who were accused of misconduct but never charged.

Many victims said they had turned to J.R.O.T.C. in high school for stability in their lives or as a pathway to military service, only to find that instructors exploited their position to take advantage of the students.

Featured

Sexual Abuse of Teens in the Military’s J.R.O.T.C. Program

New York Times JROTC Series 2022 Hits: 202
Former students say military veterans who led J.R.O.T.C. classes in U.S. high schools fashioned themselves as mentors, then used their power to manipulate and abuse.

July 9, 2022 / Mike Baker, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Ilana Marcus, Mary F. Calvert / New York Times - With the rifle skills she honed in the Mississippi backwoods, Victoria Bauer had a path to escape the trap of drugs and dead-end jobs she saw most everywhere around her. Her future was in the Marines, she decided, and she had an idea about how to get there.

Across the way from her freshman algebra class, Ms. Bauer approached Steve Hardin, the retired Navy intelligence officer who guided the high school’s Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, a leadership program sponsored by the U.S. military at high schools across the country. He welcomed her into the fold, she said, and seemed interested in how her family, which traced roots back to the Four Winds Cherokee of Louisiana, had been displaced by Hurricane Katrina.

Soon, her 45-year-old J.R.O.T.C. instructor was messaging her on Snapchat late into the night, telling her that it would “drive the guys crazy” if she wore a “small bikini” during the trip to their next out-of-state shooting competition. Then one night in 2015 as he drove her home from rifle practice, she told investigators, Mr. Hardin pushed his hand into her pants and penetrated her with his fingers — the start of what she said was months of sexual assaults. Ms. Bauer, who was 15 at the time, feared that resisting him would jeopardize her shot at advancement through the J.R.O.T.C. ranks or a military career.

“I gave all the body-language signals that I didn’t want it,” Ms. Bauer said in an interview. “I didn’t feel like I had a choice.”

Featured

Military Recruiters Should Have No Place in Our Schools

Parent Category: NNOMY Articles Hits: 180

Federal legislation enforces the militarization of schools, giving recruiters easy access to teenagers vulnerable to persuasion. An outlier among other nations for this method of recruitment, the U.S. should end this harmful practice.

 

June 22, 2022 / Alex Skopic / Current Affairs - Today’s conservatives, to hear them tell it, are deeply concerned with the safety of children in schools. After all, anything from a gender-neutral toilet, which could invite sexual predators, to a Toni Morrison novel, which might cause a reader “discomfort” about their race, could be lurking. One has to be vigilant. So you might assume that if a group of specially-trained adults started hanging around schools, trying to lure minors into dangerous situations under false pretenses, the political Right would be up in arms about it, demanding an influx of police and private security guards to deal with the menace. Unless, of course, these duplicitous strangers are with the military—and then, somehow, the impulse to ‘think of the children’ disappears.

Featured

Navy desertions have more than doubled amid suicide concerns, as sailors feel trapped by contracts

Parent Category: NNOMY Articles Hits: 362

The number of sailors who deserted the Navy more than doubled from 2019 to 2021, highlighting the lack of options contract-bound sailors face when they’re desperate to leave.

A uniform hat at a Naval Academy graduation in Annapolis, Md., in 2008.Chip Somodevilla /May 18, 2022 / Melissa Chan / NBC News - The number of sailors who deserted the Navy more than doubled from 2019 to 2021, while desertions in other military branches dropped or stayed flat, pointing to a potential Navy-wide mental health crisis amid a spate of recent suicides, according to experts and federal statistics obtained by NBC News.

Among a fleet of more than 342,000 active sailors, there were 157 new Navy deserters in 2021, compared with 63 in 2019 and 98 in 2020, Navy data shows. The total number of deserters who were still at large in 2021 grew to 166 from 119 in 2019. Most of them were 25 and younger.

“That’s staggering,” said Benjamin Gold, a defense attorney for U.S. service members.

In the wake of several suicides among sailors assigned to the warship the USS George Washington, the new desertion figures highlight the lack of options for sailors when they’re desperate to leave the military but are bound to multiyear contracts that many of them signed just out of high school.

Military law experts said the nearly unbreakable contracts — which can require up to six years of active duty — leave sailors with extreme alternatives: die by suicide or flee and face harsh consequences, including spending years behind bars as patriots-turned-pariahs.

“They feel trapped,” said Lenore Yarger, a resource counselor with the GI Rights Hotline, a nonprofit nongovernmental group that specializes in military discharges.

  1. Young America's Dilemma: The Predatory Choice Between Student Loan Debt and Military Enlistment
  2. Marginalized students pay the price of military recruitment efforts
  3. Recruitment, counter-recruitment and critical military studies
  4. Ethnic Studies Take 2: The Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum
  5. Venezuelan journalist reflects on pivotal life moments deciding whether to join U.S. military
  6. ‘America’s Army’, the Pentagon’s Video Game, Shuts Down After 20 Years
  7. Military Recruiters Don’t Belong in High Schools
  8. US Senate Prepares To Expand Selective Service to Women as Well as Men
  9. An Undiscussed Consequence of Expanded Draft Registration
  10. House and Senate Armed Services Committees vote to make women register for the draft
  11. Profiles for People of Color in the U.S. Military 2020-2021
  12. Too Fat To Fight? Obesity, Bio-Politics and the Militarization of Children’s Bodies

Subscribe to NNOMY Newsletter

NNOMYnews reports on the growing intrusions by the Department of Defense into our public schools in a campaign to normalize perpetual wars with our youth and to promote the recruitment efforts of the Pentagon.

CLICK HERE

Search Articles

Language

FAIR USE NOTICE

This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of issues connected with militarism and resistance. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

Donate to NNOMY

Your donation to NNOMY works to balance the military's message in our public schools. Our national network of activists go into schools and inform youth considering military service the risks about military service that recruiters leave out.

CONTRIBUTE