Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (COMD)

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From Draft NOtices, April-June 2023

- Lauren Reyna Morales

   Fiscal year 2022 marked a period of record low recruitment levels for the United States Armed Forces. All military branches struggled to reach their benchmarks. The Army alone missed recruiting goals by about 15,000 new soldiers, coming up 25 percent short for the fiscal year. To put the recruitment “crisis” into perspective, the military has not experienced such a problem enrolling new members since 1973, when the draft officially ended. So, why isn’t Generation Z interested in joining the military? The answer to that question depends on whom you ask.

 Many conservative officials and veterans have claimed the military going “woke” has turned today’s youth off from enlisting. Proponents of this rationale blame diversity, inclusion, and racial bias trainings adopted by the armed forces as a cause for declining recruitment numbers. According to Military Times, Thomas Spoehr, director of the conservative Heritage Foundation, lamented, “Is anyone surprised that potential recruits -- many of whom come from rural or poor areas of the country -- don’t want to spend their time being lectured about white privilege?” And former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo echoed this viewpoint in an opinion column for Fox News last September. He asked, “How can we ask young men and women who have decided to risk their lives for America, even die for America, to affirm that our country is inherently racist?”

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From Draft NOtices, April-June 2023

- Davíd Morales

  On February 9, 2023, the Project on Youth and Non-Military Opportunities (Project YANO) sent a letter to the trustees of the San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD) calling on them to halt the involuntary enrollment of students in the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps Program (JROTC).

  Project YANO felt compelled to write the letter because of a recent New York Times investigation that revealed thousands of high school students were being involuntarily enrolled in JROTC at schools across the country. San Diego Unified was specifically mentioned in the Times report as one of the districts where data suggest that this practice has been occurring, particularly at high schools in which the majority of students are students of color.

 Project YANO’s letter follows a similar expression of concern sent to the district by members of the Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers Guild. In their letter to the district, Task Force attorneys cited section 51750 of the California Education Code, which states:

The governing board of any school district maintaining a secondary school may establish in the school classes in military science and tactics complying with the laws of the United States made and provided with reference to Reserve Officer Training units in educational institutions.

No student enrolled in any such school shall be required to enroll in any course in military science and tactics.

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From Draft NOtices, April-June 2023

- Rick Jahnkow

   

 For the first time in decades, the military’s high school Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps has become the subject of a national debate, the impetus for which has been a series of critical articles on the program published by the New York Times in July and December of 2022.

 The Times investigations brought to light a large number of sexual assault complaints lodged against JROTC instructors, as well as the existence of misleading content on historical events in the textbooks. Furthermore, an article on the front page of the December 2022 Times revealed that thousands of students were being involuntarily enrolled in the program at high schools around the country, particularly at schools where students are disproportionately youth of color.

 Not only did the various articles stimulate widespread national media coverage of the issue, they also led some members of Congress to call for scrutiny of the program in general and a Congressional demand for the Department of Defense to answer critical questions about JROTC oversight. One such demand, issued on February 1, 2023, was signed by U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren, Mazie K. Hirono, Ron Wyden and Bernard Sanders. 

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Ninth CIRCUIT COURT RULING: CONFRONTING MILITARISM BY USING EQUAL ACCESS TO HIGH SCHOOLS

When the military comes to your local high school, you have a legal right to give students an opposing view. This has been the position taken by federal district courts in Florida, Pennsylvania and Illinois and two federal appellate courts. The most broadly-worded decision came from a case that COMD took to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in the 1980s. Here is the background:

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