The Military Ambivalence

There is a misconception that only people with no viable alternative join the military. Frank Shaeffer, the co-author of AWOL: The Unexcused Absence of America’s Upper Classes from Military Service, speaks in his book of a culture of snobbery in which many citizens exclude themselves from service. Schaeffer admits that he himself was guilty of this mindset—he thought his son was too good for the Marines—but soon rethought his decision: “I started to understand that it was degrading to have to justify John’s being a Marine to people who struck me as snobs—in other words, to people like me, people who never lifted a finger for anybody…It began to occur to me that maybe something was wrong with me and not with [my son] John,” concludes Schaeffer.

What can explain the reluctance of many citizens, especially those from the upper classes, to join the armed forces? Perhaps it is due to a misguided perception of those who do volunteer. Sean O’Keefe (GS ’10) who served with the 10th Special Forces, explains that in his experience, the oversimplified picture of a recruit bullied into military service could not be farther from the truth. “The kind of individuals motivated to join the military are looking to defend their country,” he says. During five years of wearing the uniform, he encountered many soldiers with college degrees who had left jobs with a six-figure income; put simply, they were there because they wanted to be there.

Unfortunately, at America’s elite universities, students exhibiting the same drive to join the nation’s armed forces are often few and far between. Upon entering college, students find themselves with seemingly infinite options. They can choose classes that cater to their idiosyncratic interests and dream of a myriad of future careers—biomedical engineer, journalist, lawyer— but amid all these options, the military alternative tends to be overlooked. At a university where the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) has been banned for 40 years, Columbia students are not directly exposed to the varied careers in national defense and security that military service has to offer.

The problem with such an atmosphere of insulation from the military is that the individuals who avoid military training are the same people who will one day lead our country. Without a proper understanding of the historical background, intellectual thought, and underlying policies that drive the modern American armed forces, we will be left with people in charge who lack the ability to prescribe reasonable military action and who may instead blindly accept policy proposals.

Jason Lemieux (GS ’10), who served almost five years with the Marine Corps infantry, agrees that “the less educated the military, the more destructive it will be.” He comments that one of the main problems he witnessed in Iraq was that “Marines simply didn’t understand the value of critical, big-picture thinking…We were really in a very nuanced, many-sided struggle in which creativity and intelligence usually overcame violence in the long term.” To Lemieux, the presence of a reserve officer training corps program at Columbia and its peer institutions is crucial to the success of future military leadership. “If officers don’t enter the Naval Service through NROTC at Columbia,” he explains, “they’ll enter through schools of lesser standards and everyone who comes in contact with the US Naval Service will suffer as a result… NROTC belongs at an elite university like Columbia.”

But a fundamental understanding of how war is conducted is useful to a larger subset of individuals than those who will choose to become senators or join the military. After all, according to Marine Corps veteran Benjamin Feibleman (GS ’11), the decision to go to war is a burden of the general populace as much as it is the elected officials. “Fighting a frivolous war,” he explains, “is symptomatic of a culture that allows a president to declare war.” He argues, further, that it is the responsibility of each citizen to be knowledgeable of warfare’s discrete facets.

For those students interested in joining the Peace Corps or NGOs after college, knowledge of the conceptions of warfare may prove useful if they end up serving in a conflict-ridden region. Anyone who wants to have a social impact in developing countries or even embark upon an academic career cannot ignore warfare as a basic tenet of existence. For example, a finance student should understand the influence that conflicts can have on global markets. A civil war in a poor, but oil-rich, country thousands of miles away can have far-reaching impacts on trading floors in New York, as energy traders learned after a terrorist strike near a Nigerian pipeline last year. Future entrepreneurs should have a basic understanding of the military-industrial complex, and private contractors could use their knowledge of warfare to produce the most appropriate defensive gear. Undeniably, understanding conflict and its underlying mechanisms have widespread applications beyond a military career.

War is a fundamental part of society, and professors should not shy away from the subject because “war is bad.” The philosophy behind Columbia’s Core Curriculum is an attempt to produce well-rounded adults with a broad knowledge base. However, military strategy is excluded from requisite subjects. Even in classes in which military strategy is relevant, the subject is often overlooked: in Literary Humanities, a required course, Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War is taught as a literary text rather than an exegesis of competition in an international system; In history classes, war is often reduced to a series of dates in which one state is the victor, obscuring the hows and whys and ultimately doing the students a disservice. Professors should not avoid the subject of warfare or dismiss it as an obscure subfield. Rather, students should receive a proper grounding in the motivations of conflict.

As long as the military remains a distant idea to which students cannot relate, graduates will continue to overlook the military in favor of alternative routes for their career. For many Columbians, fleeting references to Sparta are the extent of their contact with the nuances of warfare or the military. Students’ parents were not likely combatants in Vietnam, and the on-campus schism between civilians and veterans does nothing to alleviate prejudices. O’Keefe, a veteran, suggests that the stigma that grew out of Vietnam and the unpopular draft of that war depresses the pro-military attitude that encouraged him and others to enlist after 9/11.

There need not have to be an anti-military mood on campus for there to exist a tangible gap between “the veterans” and “everybody else.” College Republican Alexandria Ross (BC ’11) agrees: “Even someone who is in awe of the military, like I am, definitely feels unsure of how to go about connecting with them.” There is a schism, she admits, but it isn’t necessarily a negative one. There are simply logistical barriers that block frequent communication between vets and awed onlookers. The debate over NROTC presence that came to the forefront at the end of last semester did nothing to diminish the us-and-them division.

O’Keefe points out that the GI Bill passed in May of last year grants veterans a larger stipend to pay for higher education, which will create a new class of student veterans who will then enter the workforce. As more veterans matriculate through the system, hopefully the culture of indifference towards the military will dissipate. O’Keefe says, “I think that this will be a very positive thing for America.”

There are several options open to Columbia to address such indifference and ultimately unite the civilian and military factions on campus. One step of such a multi-tiered solution would be revision of the Core Curriculum to include texts that focus on military strategy and history, such as Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Secondly, bringing NROTC to Columbia would be a great incentive for undergraduates to consider military service, while simultaneously offering students the chance to acquire a new knowledge base, since NROTC classes are available to everyone—not just those in the program. However, last semester, students sent in their votes to the administration and opted to keep NROTC off campus. Professors can also do their part by, at the very least, incorporating an understanding of the military into their class structures, as this is crucial to understanding the global political and social climate.

Riaz Zaidi (CC ’08) is currently preparing to leave for Iraq in April as a Cavalry platoon leader. He agrees that “military history is too often overlooked or minimized in importance” in classes. He adds that “part of the responsibility falls on the Columbia community to accept ROTC and the military on campus, but I also believe that [the] military is sometimes too narrowly focused on its recruiting bottom line… It doesn't make enough of an effort to raise its profile at elite schools like Columbia.” For Zaidi, a political atmosphere that emphasizes national service would help to change students’ views of the armed forces: “One of the best long-term solutions that I see is to raise the profile of national service in general—of which the military is obviously a, if not the, most important part.”

While no single act will transform a culture of lukewarm opinions into one of enthusiasm, offering classes with more of a military focus would help bridge the culture gap between civilians and veterans and increase awareness within the student community of this important group. A greater academic emphasis on war’s genesis will give students the tools to parse propaganda from facts, allowing them to vote and think responsibly about a topic that is so defining for our generation.