NANGAN
Readers write pro ROTC
To the Editor:
Many of the recently published articles and letters dealing with ROTC at KU have been attempts to justify or attack the existence and/or accreditation of collegiate military training. Generally the issues considered have been moral, academic or theoretical rather than practical. Only rarely can we completely deny or even temporally ignore reality, however unpleasant, to pursue our utopia.
Let me pose some questions about military training and higher education after making certain initial postulates: 1. This country will maintain a military force with a significant manpower requirement into the forseable future whether some of us like it or not. 2. By nature and design this force will require a hierarchy of administrators presently called officers. 3. It is and will be desirable that these officers possess greater knowledge (and hopefully greater intelligence) than the men they command. (I consider these statements of reality as far as present planning goes.
Someday, hopefully, it may be otherwise.)
One must ask what kind of men do we want as officers and how should they be educated? As a matter of occupational necessity an officer must possess the knowledge requisite to perform his narrow military function. In these days of cold war, limited war, pacification and technological advancement, however, that function is becoming increasingly less narrow. A knowledge of close order drill and infantry squad tactics that might have been
May 7
1969 KANSAN 5
sufficient during WW II is scant preparation for directing a community development team which uses non-combative methods in achieving a largely political goal among foreign and partially hostile people. The ability and inclination to use brute force as a disciplinary means is not sufficient guidance in containing but not inflaming a riot. In other words the more and the more diverse knowledge an officer has the more able he will be to give his men some appropriate order besides "open fire."
If we do indeed want officers who can do more than kill the most the fastest and the cheapest, what is the best way to educate them?
U. S. military officers have been trained by 1. intra-service officer training programs 2. military academies 3. ROTC prgrams. I do not believe the service officer training programs (e.g. Army OCS) make more than a token effort toward training officers beyond the minimal military rudiments of their intended task. They cannot, really, working within their requirements of budget, time, rapid turnover and training staff. The military academies do much better at liberal education but they produce relatively few officers and the academy graduate, moreover, tends to be more of a professional career militarist which many of us seem wary of.
The college graduate who has attended ROTC is generally, I believe, the most liberally educated, the best rounded, the least dogmatic and the least militaristic officer we have presently. Do we really want to remove these college educated people from our officer corps merely because the principles of the military are largely incompatible with the ideals of a
university? That is no way to make the military more humane and reasonable. Is it wise to deny the ROTC student credit for his courses so long as they make some contribution to his knowledge and some demand on his time? I don't think most men take ROTC because they consider it a pud course(s). If ROTC is made strictly extracurricular I suspect the enrollment will drop significantly. Result: fewer well educated officers. (We will soon be able to observe the results at those schools where credit has been removed.)
The military will obtain officers somehow. If ROTC is removed as an avenue the slack will probably be made up via OCS-OTS. I think those who object most and loudest about ROTC would be those least pleased with the educational and motivational flavor of the resultant officer corps.
Ellis V. Couch Prairie Village graduate student—chemistry
To the editor:
In the past twelve months the University has witnessed a seriously contested campaign between those advocates for the Reserve Officers Training Program and those who are opposed to such a course of study. Mike Shearer, Robert Cherry, Mike Gravitt and others have vigorously participated in the campaign, yet I feel that somehow we have let the real essence of this controversy slip away unnoticed, as we frantically reach for new type, more paper and better verbage. Somehow every new endeavor contains the words Vietnam, kill or peace, and it is because of these words that every opinion becomes completely unsuitable for intelligent debate. Especially I have found those articles
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written by anti-ROTC essayists as having the peculiar characteristic of attempting to equate the war in Vietnam with the ROTC establishment, and thereby, making innocent cadets and cadres the scapegoat for a Southeast Asia conflict. Now isn't that a farce?
In my years as a cadet I have been taught map reading,
I am a junior, and have been a ROTC cadet for three school years, and I know the program well. In those three years I have not been taught how to more efficiently kill, why we must fight, why the military is good or any of the other evil practices non-ROTC men claim. From this I can only conclude that a prerequisite to knowing about the ROTC program is not to be a part of it.
religion, economics, history, geography, military structure, the names of weapons, leadership and pedagogy. Even if I crammed for weeks, stayed up all night, and drank the Union's terrible coffee twenty times a day to stay awake, I don't really think I could become a more proficient killer from the subjects I've learned in ROTC, because ROTC purpose is not to teach killing or foreign policy but to produce able leaders for the armed service. Whether we support or disapprove of the program let us now become issue oriented and not ornament oriented. Thank you.
ACROSS FROM LINDLEY
ON THE HILL
Sincerely,
Sincerely,
Charles Edward Falk
Junior, Keansburg, New Jersey.