Making Citizen-Soldiers Rotc And The Ideology Of American Military Service [Paperback]

This book examines the Reserve Officers Training Corps program as a distinctively American expression of the social, cultural, and political meanings of military service. Since 1950, ROTC has produced nearly two out of three American active duty officers, yet there has been no comprehensive scholarly look at civilian officer education programs in nearly forty years.

While most modern military systems educate and train junior officers at insular academies like West Point, only the United States has relied heavily on the active cooperation of its civilian colleges. Michael Neiberg argues that the creation of officer education programs on civilian campuses emanates from a traditional American belief (which he traces to the colonial period) in the active participation of civilians in military affairs. Although this ideology changed shape through the twentieth century, it never disappeared. During the Cold War military buildup, ROTC came to fill two roles: it provided the military with large numbers of well-educated officers, and it provided the nation with a military comprised of citizen-soldiers. Even during the Vietnam era, officers, university administrators, and most students understood ROTC's dual role. The Vietnam War thus led to reform, not abandonment, of ROTC.

Mining diverse sources, including military and university archives,Making Citizen-Soldiersprovides an in-depth look at an important, but often overlooked, connection between the civilian and military spheres.

Who is in charge of our military? Where did they come from? While these questions may not press daily on the minds of most Americans,Making Citizen-Soldiersdoes not merely ask and answer them--it convinces us that these questions are critical to American democracy. In a focused, well-researched history of the Reserve Officer's Training Corps (ROTC), Michael Neiberg discusses the development of this program from 1950 to 1980. More importantly, he sets forth a convincingl39