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Ann Marlowe, a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute, has a provocative op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today debunking common myths about military demographics. In an attention-grabbing lead, she writes:

It should no more be necessary to write this article than to prove that there were Jews killed in the World Trade Center on 9/11. And yet the mythology refuses to die. Just last week, two well-educated and well-known writer acquaintances of mine remarked in passing on the “fact” that those who serve in the U.S. military typically have no other career options. America’s soldiers, they said, were poor and black.

Marlowe proceeds to rip apart these assumptions, relying on data collected by the Heritage Foundation. (For those skeptical about Heritage’s findings, take a look at this column by Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell, this study by military scholars David and Mady Segal [p. 24], this study by RAND researcher Beth Asch [p. 10], or DOD’s own numbers. They all tell the same story.) So why do these myths persist? Marlowe suggests one explanation:

One reason is lack of firsthand exposure to the military: Doing a journalistic embed with American troops or visiting a U.S. military base—or simply having some friends in the military—would disabuse my acquaintances of their beliefs.

This detachment is the result of a withdrawal of our urban elites from military service. And it suits the interests of many members of the urban elite to believe that the military they do not join is composed of poor, uneducated victims of an unfair society.

Marlowe is right that urbanites have little contact with the military, but that detachment is as much a result of the withdrawal of the military from urban areas and the Northeast. As my colleague Gary Schmitt and I noted in another WSJ op-ed, current recruiting policy means that military service is essentially left to the imaginations of city youths. It shouldn’t surprise us that what they imagine is so far from the truth.

The Yale University faculty votes today on a committee’s recommendation that the school again recognize ROTC. Assuming a successful outcome—which seems likely—Yale will join Harvard, Columbia, and Stanford in rescinding its Vietnam-era ban on the program.

However, the ROTC homecoming is not complete. Even as elite schools reestablish ties, the ROTC program has largely lost its “national” character, becoming increasingly Southern and rural. Its critical civic function—ensuring that the officer corps reflects the nation as a whole—has been forgotten.

Nowhere is this clearer than in New York City, America’s largest and most diverse metropolis. For the past 20 years, New York has been served by just four ROTC programs within its five boroughs—programs that are insufficiently resourced and not centrally located. In a report for the AEI Program on American Citizenship, I consider the consequences of this neglect not only for the city and its students (many of whom are eager to serve), but for military effectiveness and the health of civil-military relations, more generally.

The young men and women of New York City represent a huge untapped pool of talent that could help the military meet the challenges of the post-9/11 security environment. However, expanding the ROTC footprint would have a more significant impact than just improving military effectiveness. An essential aspect of a healthy citizenry, especially in a republic such as ours, is the will and capacity to perform some form of public service—with none being more fundamental than that of putting one’s life on the line as a member of the armed forces. With an all-volunteer force whose members are increasingly drawn from a narrower segment of the American public, that choice is no longer fully available to the whole country, making it less likely that the public can truly appreciate the sacrifices made by those who do serve. These are trend lines that can, and should, be reversed. Reversing the downward turn of ROTC programs in New York City would be an important first step.

Over at The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf has linked to my response to President Obama’s recent remarks on the ROTC (provoked by this Andrew Exum post). Reading his summary of our discussion, I’m afraid I came off as unduly pessimistic. While the challenges for an expanded ROTC are great—and will require real leadership from the president, the military, and universities—we have an incredible opportunity right now to restore ROTC to some of the nation’s most prestigious campuses. Indeed, the current moment likely represents the best opportunity advocates for ROTC and better civil-military relations have had in decades.

Top leadership, both civilian and military, are speaking out about the costs of current policy—first, Secretary Gates, then Admiral Mullen, and now President Obama. With the repeal of DADT, Harvard and Yale—students, faculty, and administrators—have expressed their strong support for restoring ROTC. Columbia has a group of committed advocates among its student body, and more than 300 undergraduates who are veterans, which can only help ROTC’s cause when hearings start next month. Even Brown University, with just one student in ROTC, is reconsidering its stance. In short, while there are many factors working against ROTC (perhaps, primarily, plain old inertia), even more are working in its favor.

Cheryl Miller is manager of AEI’s Program on American Citizenship.

With this weekend’s repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” elite colleges now have a chance to make good on their promises and bring ROTC back to campus. Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust has already made a strong statement in support of ROTC’s return, while both Columbia and Stanford Universities have formed task forces to review their policies. Likewise, student representatives at Yale University plan to meet next year with administrators to discuss an on-campus ROTC program. No word yet from Brown, Tufts, or the University of Chicago.

These are good first steps, but advocates for ROTC should not fool themselves into believing the fight is over. Instead, they should prepare for the numerous administrative and academic challenges to reintroducing a robust and successful ROTC program on campus. Fortunately, Michael Segal at Secure Nation has some great suggestions as to how universities and the military can work together to enhance the ROTC curriculum, providing high-quality courses worthy of academic credit. Advocates should also work for closer ties at those universities that currently host ROTC units, but hold them at arm’s length: Princeton, Dartmouth, and the University of Pennsylvania. Much more can (and should) be done to integrate ROTC into mainstream campus life than merely hosting a program.

Finally, even with the return of ROTC to elite schools, there remains the larger issue of the geographic dispersion of ROTC units. The revival of Columbia’s Naval ROTC program would be a huge boon for students in New York City, the majority of which are prohibited from participating in the city’s only NROTC program. But what of the students in New Jersey, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island who also lack the opportunity to participate in NROTC? The return of ROTC to top-tier schools will help to redress the current geographic and social imbalance, but it alone cannot solve the growing civil-military divide.

Renny McPherson, a former Marine officer now at Harvard Business School, considers an important challenge for the military in this weekend’s Boston Globe: Why are there so few David Petraeuses?

This isn’t an academic question. As McPherson notes, the demand for innovative and adaptive leadership is greater than ever before (a need also recognized by the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review) thanks to a shift in war-fighting strategy and tactics:

Over the course of the 20th century, the United States became the dominant world power by advancing the technology of warfare. Now the information revolution, recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and global counter-terrorism have shown that an expanded set of skills is required of our top officers. Today we need military leaders who can process the ever-larger amounts of information coming at them and who can communicate more dexterously up, down, and across; they also must be adept at dealing with nonmilitary institutions and quick to learn foreign cultures.

How do we get more officers with the necessary skill sets to succeed? McPherson interviewed “37 top military leaders” to learn what experiences best equipped them for the battlefields of tomorrow.

What’s interesting is that all the queried leaders emphasized experiences that got them outside the military “comfort zone,” whether it be civilian graduate school, study abroad programs, or serving with NATO or at the United Nations. The key here, McPherson writes, is regular interaction “with others who have different values. This does not simply mean fellow service members with dissimilar political views but repeated, regular contact with an array of leaders and everyday citizens from different cultures.”

All these experiences are no doubt valuable, but might there be a cheaper, more readily available alternative closer to home? That’s right—it’s the ROTC. McPherson describes a heightened need for officers with cultural competency, regional knowledge, expertise in conflict resolution, and language and computer skills. Fortunately, America’s universities offer excellent programs in all those areas. And given the diversity of those campuses, ROTC cadets are very used to working with people who hold values different from their own.

The military needs to rethink how it develops future leaders. But in its quest for innovation, it shouldn’t overlook older programs, like the ROTC, that can get the job done.

Cheryl Miller is manager of AEI’s Program on American Citizenship.

Image by Aaron McDowell.

More news on the ROTC front. According to Time magazine, Harvard University’s ROTC program commissioned 11 officers this May. This is no small achievement. Since Harvard does not officially recognize ROTC, cadets must travel to nearby MIT to participate and receive no-course credit for ROTC classes. (Generous alumni help cover commuting costs and cross-registration fees—or else, cadets would be paying out of their own pockets for the opportunity to serve their country.) Here’s how Time describes the hectic schedule of one Navy cadet:

Shawna Sinnott spent the last four years performing a balancing act: she took courses for her self-designed major at Harvard, practiced her jazz number for the Miss Massachusetts Pageant, and woke up at 4:30 a.m. three days a week for Navy ROTC training across town at MIT …

… “I was very surprised, some people [on campus] have never met anyone in uniform,” says Sinnott, who is now a Second Lieutenant in the Marine Corp. “That was shocking for me growing up in a military family.”

Until the status quo changes, there are at least some undergraduates at elite institutions who will continue to travel to ROTC programs on other campuses. “It’s about the same time commitment as a varsity sport,” Sinnott says of her years in ROTC. “But the stakes are higher because what you’re doing determines if people are going to live or die.”

As they say, read the whole thing.

Cheryl Miller is manager of AEI’s Program on American Citizenship.

Image by the U.S. Army.