Some Comments on Militarism
and Miseducation
 

Emiliano Huet-Vaughn
 
1. In the words of the Oxford English Dictionary, militarism is
"the tendency to regard military efficiency as the paramount
interest of the state."  Whether or not the United States of
America is a militaristic country is a topic I'll address
shortly, but first allow me to give a more robust, working
definition of the term.  Militarism includes the boundless
accumulation of excessive stock piles of weaponry and military
technology; a bellicose policy in world and domestic affairs; and
the transmission of the military mind set to the general public. 
As for Oxford's definition, it goes without question that
military matters are indeed of paramount importance in our
government's rationale.  Truly, more than any other area, defense
spending has been a unifying factor for America's two dominant
political parties throughout the last century.  The military is
this country's sacred cow, and has been coddled by Democrats and
Republicans alike, with only voices on the fringe of the
political spectrum ever questioning its entitlement. 

2. The federal budget is divided into two categories: mandatory
and discretionary spending.  Mandatory spending consists of funds
for programs which have been mandated by existing law and which
Congress is not supposed to touch.  Discretionary spending is
that money which Congress has the power and flexibility to dole
out annually to those agencies and causes it deems worthy. 
Consistently, military matters take precedence over discretionary
spending on public programs.  Weapons contracts are passed
promptly, while federal monies for public domain programs, like
Head Start and the National Endowment for the Arts, are left to
battle it out for the remaining discretionary dollars.  Annual
current military expenditures in the United States hover around
three hundred billion dollars, not including veterans benefits or
the yearly interest on the national debt attributed to past
military bloat.  Military-associated debt falls somewhere between
fifty and eighty percent, depending on the source, of the 350
billion odd tax dollars spent annually on debt repayment.

3. Considering only current discretionary military funding, we
outspend the combined military budgets of the next twelve highest
spending nations in the world, many of whom are our military
allies.  The US military budget is five times larger than that of
present-day Russia, the world's next-largest defense spender.  We
are still spending 83% of Cold War defense averages, despite the
fact that we and our allies control 63% of the world military
expenditures.

4. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, credible threats to
national defense are comparatively minute.  The Defense Secretary
under Papa Bush, Dick Cheney, told the Senate Armed Services
Committee in 1992 that military threats to the US are "so remote
that they are difficult to discern."  For a while there was talk
of cutting the military budget and the prospects of a "peace
dividend" in the hundred billion dollar range.  However, the
"military-industrial complex," so aptly named by President
Eisenhower, found a decline in their power and profits
unacceptable.  Soon military threats were manufactured, in the
personae of rogue nations and, more  recently, so called "states
of concern": namely Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Libya, Syria, and
long-time nemesis Cuba.  Those countries, the biggest threats to
the world's only superpower, spend together on war preparations
one twentieth as much as the US does.

5. Clearly, the exorbitant amounts the US spends are not for
legitimate defense purposes.  That is, unless we decide that
legitimacy is defined by a Spartan devotion to war and a sort of
paranoid hypochondria.  In fact, much of the defense spending our
government now undertakes is done not out of verifiable defense
concerns but to line the pockets of defense contractors, and to
insure world domination by and the profitability of business
interests outside the military sphere.

6. The current missile defense program, or Star Wars, is a fine
example of both motives. 

7. Despite failing test after test as a defensive weapon and
criticism by a number of Nobel laureates and the scientific
community as an unworkable project, plans are still being made to
proceed with the boondoggle.  The so-called National Missile
Defense program may never protect the United States from nuclear
attack.  But it will generate huge profits, as military contractors 
are given full access to taxpayer dollars.  The NMD program 
will most likely spur an arms race by other nations. This 
build-up by other nations to counter NMD will conveniently
help justify larger military expenditures by American
militarists.

8. However, the main purpose of NMD is to fully militarize space,
so that the United States will be in a position to knock any
nation's satellites out of commission, completely dominate near
earth space, and deploy satellite weapons capable of striking
targets on earth as well.

9. If the United States were interested in promoting peace and
actual defense, military spending could be dramatically
curtailed.  Lawrence Korb, Reagan's Assistant Secretary of
Defense, pinpointed 62 billion dollars in defense cuts (largely
corporate welfare and handouts) that could be made immediately
without jeopardizing national security.  Robert McNamara, a
former Secretary of Defense, is calling for a reduction of the
military budget by a hundred billion.  Many others have joined in
demanding that military spending be brought down to a reasonable
level.  However, every year Congress grants billions more for
military spending than even the Pentagon asks for. 

10. That these billions of dollars are wasted only adds to the
injustice of our federal priorities.  However, the general
precept of spending monies on bombs rather than for affordable
housing or books for public schools is one that should cause a
revaluation of our society.  A deteriorating social infrastructure 
cries out for help, but is thrown only scraps.  Proven programs 
such as Head Start, Health outreach, subsidized housing, Aid to Families with Dependant Children, school lunch, and Women, 
Infants and Children Nutrition programs go underfunded
or in some cases are cut.  The poverty rate in the US is twice
that of other industrial societies.  The child poverty rate, one
out of every five kids, is three to five times that of Western
Europe.  Nearly fifty million people in the US have no access to
health care.

11. More devastatingly, on a world scale sixty million people
starve to death a year according to the United Nations.  UNICEF
estimates that universal access to basic social services
(sanitation, clean drinking water, basic nutritional needs,
healthcare, and significant education) could be achieved with ten
percent of the annual US military budget.  That the cash goes to
Boeing and Lockheed-Martin instead is a sobering, damning
reality.  We worship the god of War.  A more accurate
understanding of Bush's slogan would be, "leave no defense
contractor behind."  Millions of children are not only being left
behind, they are being buried, because of a crazy militarized
planet pretty much owned and operated by the greatest military
power the world has ever seen. 

12. While opportunities for reorganization of the military budget
abound, I will now turn to the military connection with one area
of neglected social spending: America's public education. 
Federal monies devoted to education seem pitifully small when
compared with public education needs and the military budget. 
Discretionary military funds are nine times greater than the
education budget.  According to a 1999 study done by the federal
government's General Accounting Office, one out of every three
school buildings in the country need extensive repair and
replacement, at a total cost of 112 billion dollars.  That's only
for actual physical repairs to deteriorating school buildings and
infrastructure.  Additional sums are needed to bring American
education up to par with other industrialized nations.  However,
since 1980 education spending for elementary, secondary, adult,
and higher education has actually been cut by a third in terms of
its share of total budget monies.  As a consequence, the high
school graduation rate in America is one of the worst among
industrialized countries, and time and time again our school
system ranks in the middle and lower range.

13. Money is not always the answer, as the heedless wastefulness
of the Osprey helicopter and missile defense system have shown. 
However, while money cannot solve some problems, the youth of
this country are far from hopeless causes.  Low matriculation
rates correspond to areas of increased poverty.  Given the
quality of facilities and education in some impoverished areas,
it is not hard to see how school becomes an undesirable and even
unhealthy place to be.  Schools lack books, full-time teachers,
classroom resources, working facilities--all things which money
can supply, if only it were made available.  The drive to learn
must come from the student, but that drive can be fostered or
broken by the conditions of a student's life.  A life of dreary
conditions and little opportunity leaves a defeated spirit.  More
than a few social commentators have noted that some public
schools seem to be preparing America's youth, particularly black
youth, for life in prisons.  They are also preparing youth for
military service.

14. In comes the Pentagon, with the one form of education subsidy
that has grown exponentially over this last decade: JROTC (Junior
Reserve Officer Training Corps), the high school version of the
college recruiting program, brought straight into thousands of
public schools throughout America.  It targets low income areas
in particular, where the military knows it will have more success
pitching its "I get eight years of your life" contract with those
youth who have fewer opportunities.  In some 3,000 public high
schools, military advertising has become a mainstay of school
life and one of the most prevalent intrusions of advertising into
the school setting.  Just as soft drink companies now contract
with different schools to be the sole supplier for the student
body, the branches of the military divide up the education
landscape amongst themselves. 

15. No one outside of JROTC seriously believes that the military
is in the schools to help students better themselves or to save
troubled kids, as its hucksters have claimed.  Many students who
enroll in the JROTC program recognize its disingenuous purpose as
well (they're often the ones who drop out of the program). 
However, stalwart JROTC supporters, including some JROTC cadets,
refuse to admit that the program is simply a low cost recruiting
tool.

16. Adults who deny JROTC's recruiting nature generally tend to
fall into one (or both) of two categories: either parents of
JROTC students, who are unaware or don't like to think that they
allow their kids to be subjected to a form of brainwashing; or
school officials, who hesitate to admit the extent to which they
have already allowed advertisement to be substituted for
education. 

17. But the evidence that the JROTC program is a tax-funded sales
pitch is overwhelming.  In a statement made early in 2000 by then
Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, the Secretary asserted that
JROTC is "one of the best recruiting devices that we could
have."  No matter how much we would like JROTC to be something
else, when the man who pulls the military's strings (exceeded in
authority only by the President) readily admits that JROTC is a
first rate recruiting tool, it is difficult to claim otherwise. 
Remarkably many JROTC instructors are able to make this assertion
in calm defiance of such bothersome facts.

18. Mr. Cohen's statement was made to the House Armed Services
Committee. It seems to think JROTC works so well it is currently
petitioning Congress to funnel even more tax dollars to the JROTC
program in order to create hundreds of more JROTC units (i.e.
recruitment outposts) in public schools across America.  JROTC
has already drastically expanded by over twelve hundred new
programs since 1992.  Most Americans are not keen to join the
military, and JROTC plays an integral part in the Pentagon's
desperate efforts to lure youth into dangerous and undesirable
military jobs. 

19. Despite spending record amounts per enlistee and over $1.8
billion on recruiting in 1999, the military, for yet another
year, fell short of its recruiting goals by thousands of
soldiers.  Perhaps they lost the market to the prison industry,
the other prime dead end opportunity presented to the poor and
people of color.  In fact, enlistment rates have continually been
so low that the military is calling on JROTC to step up its
recruiting functions.  In a recent order to all Army JROTC
instructors, one that destroys any argument that JROTC is not a
recruiting tool, the instructors were commanded to do more to
"facilitate recruiter access to cadets in the JROTC program and
the entire student body."  The military is calling on JROTC
because it knows the program can deliver, and for that reason the
Defense Department and members of Congress want to expand the
JROTC presence in public high schools.  This planned expansion,
which will bring the annual JROTC budget well over the 400
million mark, is being pushed at the same time that traditional
military recruiters (the kind that don't teach JROTC) recently
won a legal challenge to a law allowing schools to deny
recruiters access to the campus grounds.  Now schools that seek
to prohibit Pentagon access will face punitive action for
resisting military recruitment.

20. Bob Goldich, a specialist in national defense issues for the
Congressional Research Service, confirms the point that JROTC is
a superlative recruiting device: "I have told a good many people
that if you wanted to create a long-term recruiting mechanism,
give [a JROTC unit to] every high school in the country that
wants one."

21. The attraction of the program lies in the results it obtains.  According to the Department of Defense, those who take
JROTC and graduate from high school are five times more likely 
to join the military than those who don't take the class.  Such
numbers provide compelling evidence, suggesting that JROTC is
indeed a top-notch marketing tool.  In addition, the cost sharing
aspects of JROTC allow the Pentagon to saddle local school
districts with more than half the costs for funding the program,
thus saving the military a couple hundred million dollars.  The
program is effective, cheap, and, as Maryland JROTC instructor,
Maj. Geoff Liddle, puts it, "this [JROTC] is more productive
clearly because you have a multi-year opportunity to influence
[the students]."

22. Given JROTC's recruiting and propaganda functions
acknowledged by its own officials and instructors, it is not hard
to imagine what the military has in mind when it describes
"career and educational planning" as part of the class syllabus. 
Additionally, JROTC instructors are not held to the same teaching
standards as other teachers.  They are not required to have a
teaching degree (and in fact many do not), which is mandatory for
most other permanent teachers in school districts across the
country.  Their substandard training raises the question whether
they are there to teach, or instead to play a role similar to the
traditional military recruiter.

23. At an early age, as young as fourteen, hundreds of thousands
of kids across the country are being militarized.  An obedient,
hierarchal, conformist mind set is being reinforced.  A
mini-militarized zone is being cultivated, with child soldiers
decked out weekly in complete military uniforms, insignia,
military rank, marching drills, and guns.

24. In fact, a new push is being made by the Pentagon.  Instead
of just an hour of access to our children's minds a day, the
military wants a full school year.  The first two all-JROTC
public high schools have been created, one already up and running
in Chicago and one just founded in Oakland, despite vociferous
public protest against its inception from the Oakland community. 
In these schools, all students are JROTC cadets and all staff is
military personnel.  Once again, public funds go to funding
advertising in what's supposed to be a school.

25. However, JROTC supporters claim that JROTC is not there to
beguile students.  Instead, they assert that it exists to provide
kids with an opportunity to learn more about the military as a
possible career.  Yet, this seemingly benign function is revealed
as something more sinister when one notices the bias with which
JROTC texts are saturated.  Certainly most educators would agree
that if a student is interested in military service, then
information about that career choice should be made available. 
However, most teachers would also agree that this information
should not be presented in such a way that fundamental facts,
which would heavily influence a student's decision to enlist, are
left out of what is taught.  JROTC, however, does just that, and
here is where the central objections to program reside.  By
bringing a sales mentality into the classroom and misrepresenting
our military's past and present, JROTC does not provide students
with the full picture of what the military is like.  It conveniently 
chooses not to mention many of the nastier aspects of being in 
the armed forces.  Discussion of war crimes and civilian 
massacres committed by our military and the Pentagon's
promotion of torture is nonexistent in JROTC texts.  The past and
present problems with racism, sexism, and homophobia find little
criticism in JROTC books, and the government's mistreatment of
veterans goes unmentioned.

26. This deception is an inherent part of our military's
character.  Instead of devoting time and money to improving our
schools, the military has spent increasingly larger sums on
expensive, misleading ad campaigns and glossy, ingratiating
commercials.  Military advertising in many ways resembles an
unscrupulous sales pitch.  After all, recruitment is but a more
aggressive form of advertising, where the salesman is not just
after one's money but, in the case of the military, in pursuit of
the possession of years and years of one's life.  Our modern
military bears some resemblance to the modern corporation, since
both have a product to sell.  While the GAP, for example, may be
selling a sweater, the Defense Department sells a false image
that the military is a heroic, infallible organization that is,
and has always been concerned only with defending democracy,
liberty and justice.  For both the GAP and the military, the
target audience is the same: the coveted teen demographic over
whom advertisers drool.  While the GAP tries to make its clothing
look sleek, fashionable, and cutting-edge, the military does the
same thing with its commodity, doing everything possible to make
joining the service seem like the most alluring decision in the
world.  Such tactics stand out in JROTC texts.  Just as the GAP
doesn't make ads depicting their brutal use of sweatshop
laborers, the military is not going to spend money mentioning its
oppression of peoples abroad.

27. I'd like to pause for a moment to read an often quoted
statement by Major General Smedley Butler of the US Marine Corps
in a speech delivered in 1933.  While I have no exact citation, I
believe the quotation to be accurately attributed to him.  You
will never find these words in a JROTC textbook.

War is just a racket.  A racket is best described, I believe, as
something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about.  It is conducted for the benefit of the very few and the expense of the masses. 

I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight.  The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent.  Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiersfollow the flag.

I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers.  There are only two things we should fight for.  One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights.  War for any other reason is simply a racket. 

There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military
gang is blind to.  It has its "finger men" to point out enemies, its "muscle men" to destroy enemies, its "brain men" to plan war preparations, and a "Big Boss," Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism. 

It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a
comparison.  Truthfulness compels me to.  I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps.  I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General.  And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the Bankers.  In short I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time.  Now I am
sure of it.  Like all the members of the military profession, I
never had a thought of my own until I left the service.  My
mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups.  This is typical with everyone in the military service.

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914.  I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in.  I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street.  The record of racketeering is long.  I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name
before?).  I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916.  In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

During those years I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket.  Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints.  The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts.  I operated on three continents.

28. Smedley Butler's remarks are dated in terms of the individual
actors.  However the roles of finance capital and oil interests
and the drive to superexploit foreign workers are comparable to
the situation today.  The GAP in 2001 pays workers 12 cents to
make a shirt they sell for twenty dollars.  The Reagan
administration and Ollie North made certain Central America was
safe for the GAP.  Things haven't changed much, except that more
Americans than ever before may be cultivating a more spacious gap
between their ears, since they believe the militaristic propaganda funneled to them through means inconceivable in Smedley's era. 
Of course, as educators we ought to be doing something to counter these distortions, myths, and lies. 

29. A chapter or two of basic facts, such as those enunciated by
General Butler, would be necessary to balance the fairy tales in
JROTC texts, as well as in most political science and history
courses not run by the Pentagon.  Educators may ask themselves if
their profession has or is becoming a "racket" serving, in
Butler's words, "Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism".  If so, then
what excuse can they make?  Will educators be forced to recognize
that their mental faculties, despite the nature of their profession, likewise remain "in suspended animation"?

30. What are some of the facts that conveniently disappear from
JROTC texts and the halls of higher education as well? 
Documented by the US government, from 1798-1895 our military
intervened in the affairs of other nations 103 times to put down
popular revolts that threatened American economic interests.  In
the following 106 years the numbers have multiplied and
documentation has grown more abundant.  Our nation is most
certainly a militaristic one.  But its militarism is a vehicle
for a culture that makes economic gain, exploitation, and
subjugation the paramount interest of the state.  It is the
muscle that imposes the economic stranglehold. 

31. I do not ask that JROTC texts advance such a view, since it
is only an interpretation, although one based on facts.  What I
do demand is that they present existing documentation of
US-funded genocide in the recent and distant past.  That they
present the stories of 2-3 million Indochinese firebombed and
engulfed by US napalm, or the four hundred Iraqi civilians
incinerated in a bomb shelter one February evening by
smart-bombs, or the Nicaraguan farmers executed with US weapons
and by US-trained, aided, and financed Contras.  They need make
no moral commentaries or suggest right or wrong, since the
evidence speaks for itself.

32. It must be understood that JROTC exists to recruit, not to
teach.  However, realization of the deceptive, opportunistic
nature of the program should not excuse JROTC from meeting
fundamental academic standards.  While we may not expect the
military to be truthful voluntarily, we have a right to demand
that our school boards require that truth and provide a balanced,
honest, unbiased, and objective education in every subject taught
in school.  Dangerous in all cases, the distortion of truth
should particularly be guarded against in the public school,
where education should be inviolate and truth should not be
sacrificed.  As in all things, there is both good and bad in our
military, but JROTC repeatedly censors the negative, and
therefore hides the full picture from students.

33. To believe that JROTC represents the military's altruistic
attempts to help the youth of America is extremely naive.  As
former Secretary of Defense Cheney put it, "the military is not a
social welfare agency, it's not a jobs program."  By the same
logic, neither is the military a decent teacher nor a valid
educational provider.  JROTC was designed to recruit students
into the military, not to enhance their minds or improve their
character.  This conclusion is evident from the unfalteringly
biased and militaristic viewpoint the JROTC curriculum espouses. 
Written by the military, it provides students with a superficial
understanding of our armed forces.  Such is the travesty that
results when advertisements are substituted for education and
militarism invades our budgets, our minds, and our schools.

34. If educators allow the military to utilize educational
institutions as organs of military indoctrination, the
educational mission of a democratic society is thereby
abandoned.  If educators remain silent and quiescent about the
economic interests that define the military mission, and allow
the military to miseducate students into believing myths that
obscure this mission and its foundation in the drive for profits,
then they turn their backs on the truth and are partners in that
militarized indoctrination process themselves.
 

Emiliano Huet-Vaughn (erhuetva@artsci.wustl.edu), an
undergraduate at Washington University, St. Louis, wrote this
paper in his senior year at Shawnee Mission North High School in
Overland Park, Kansas.


 
 
 
 
 
 

 


 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 


 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 


 
 

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