[laveer]

I participated in JROTC in high school decades ago, and although I didn’t go into the military, it was overall a positive experience. I learned skills (organization, discipline, project management, public speaking, planning) that helped me make the transition to college and adulthood.

That being said, the program definitely pushes young people toward military service. It wasn’t until I got into “real” ROTC in college that I learned I would be miserable in a military career. JROTC is unrealistically warm and fuzzy, and thus it does a poor job of preparing cadets, particularly women like me, for the realities of service. As an adult I’ve frequently heard accounts of female recruits being sexually harassed and assaulted. I also learned about the psychological toll of warfare and how many wars are profoundly unjust. None of these topics were so much as glanced at in JROTC. Later, as a freshman, I saw that the culture of college ROTC was arrogant and bro-ish, and thankfully that was enough to turn me away from the military and toward a rewarding career in the private sector.

JROTC was an optional program at my high school. Automatic enrollment of kids amounts to coercion and is a terrible idea. Even given the benefits I received as a teenager, I’m not sure I’d want a kid of my own to join that program. Character can be built without getting sucked into the military pipeline. But like many kids in poor areas, I signed up because my home environment sucked and I didn’t have money for other school activities.

I don’t despise JROTC, but it is (as the kids say) problematic.