Today's U.S. Army is the most professional and competent force we've ever had. It is bearing the brunt of the overseas campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan with distinction.
And yet, our Army faces a serious crisis, both in numbers and in leadership. Not only is the Army's recruiting in serious decline, but the outstanding junior leaders who are executing the war on terror are leaving by the thousands. In virtually every instance, these
officers have served combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, then have turned around to repeat their deployments in less than a year.
This highly trained officer corps, and the Army it serves, has been stretched beyond the breaking point. Even with more than 500,000 personnel under arms, our active-duty Army is simply too small to handle the missions entrusted to it.
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.
But restoring our Army is more than a numbers game. It's also about the quality of its uniformed leadership. In my nearly four decades in uniform, I learned that a well-educated, technologically savvy, culturally aware officer corps is an indispensable prerequisite for military success in the global security environment we face -- especially
since 9/11.
Traditionally, two sources have contributed more than 90 percent of the
officers for America's Army: the Reserve Officers Training Corps and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Yet both commissioning sources are constrained in fulfilling
"mission success" by policies that Democrats should be clamoring to change: the closed door to ROTC programs on many prestigious campuses and the shameful unwillingness
of certain members of Congress to nominate cadets for admission to the academies.
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.
I learned while serving on an ROTC advisory board at an Ivy League school that these excuses often mask deep-seated, anti-military resentment among many faculty members at top-tier universities. It's time for this attitude to change, and Democrats can be the agent of change.
Our Army is an army of a democracy. Its leaders must reflect America and be drawn from all elements of society. Elite university ROTC bans are a negative double-whammy: They not only deny opportunities to hear alternative voices on college campuses,
but they also muffle the academic voice in our armed forces.
The mantra should not be to question the presence of the military on campus. Instead, it should urge the presence of the campus in the military. If Democrats want to bridge a
security gap, they can start here.
We should also correct another problem too often laid at the Democrats' doorstep: unfilled nominations for our national service academies. In the 1990s, I served as West Point superintendent for five years. Each year a dozen or more members of Congress failed to nominate a single candidate for the "plebe" or freshmen classes. In nearly every case, the members were Democrats.
The reasons given then continue to this day: "Nobody qualified in my urban district"; "procedures too cumbersome"; "interest flagging." But, like the "don't ask, don't tell" veneer proffered by the elite universities to bar ROTC programs, these excuses obscure far deeper anti-military sentiment.
More than one member of Congress confided to me that their reluctance to even appear to be cooperating with the military sprang from lingering anti-Vietnam War feelings or from disenchantment with the Iraq war. In both cases, the results are the same: Talented
young people are denied the opportunity to serve as leaders of character in the army of a democracy, or to impart the diverse values they represent to its officer corps.
Again, Democrats should lead in ensuring the tightest possible bonds between the Army and the American people. Democrats must be seen to embrace a philosophy of uniformed
leadership as old as our republic: leaders who are part of the society they serve, not separated from it. Few perceptions of a Democrat security gap are more important to address than this one.
