Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (COMD)

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From Draft NOtices, January-March 2023

- Rick Jahnkow

    Recently, COMD received a question about warning letters the government sends to young men who are suspected of failing to register with Selective Service. This is a brief explanation of the implications for those who receive such letters. (Note that SS sends mass mailings of postcard registration “reminders” to some lists of males who have not yet reached age 18. Those reminders are not the same as the warning letters discussed here.)

Who gets a warning letter?

Selective Service (SS)uses lists from various government agencies and other sources to identify individual males in the U.S. who may have reached the age of 18 and failed to register with Selective Service. SS will send them an initial letter urging them to complete the registration process or explain why they believe they are not required to do so. It’s been discovered that the lists used to send this letter can contain inaccuracies like a wrong address, age or gender.

This first letter warns them of potential penalties for failing to comply with the registration requirement, including the possible loss of eligibility for government jobs, federal job training programs, and citizenship. A 2022 version of this letter mentions the possibility of losing college financial aid; however, the law that made federal student aid conditioned on registration was actually repealed in December 2020. Regarding citizenship, the letter fails to explain that failure to register with SS does not make immigrants ineligible for citizenship once they have reached age 31.

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From Draft NOtices, January-March 2023

- Lauren Reyna Morales

    In July of 2022 the New York Times published an explosive exposé on sexual abuse in the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corp (JROTC). JROTC is a federal program sponsored by the United States Armed Forces that operates in at least 3,500 high schools with more than 500,000 students enrolled across the country. The U.S. Army JROTC website describes the program as “one of the largest character development and citizenship programs for youth in the world.” The NY Times investigation revealed that since 2017, there had been at least 33 JROTC instructors criminally charged with sexual misconduct against their students, and several other accusations. The report detailed that within the last five years, the Army decertified 24 instructors because of credible sexual abuse allegations. Other military branches also had to decertify several of their JROTC instructors for sexual misconduct: 15 instructors in the Marine Corps JROTC, 10 in the Navy, and seven in the Air Force. Two additional JROTC instructors accused of sexual abuse died by suicide before their cases could be settled. All of the programs’ instructors are retired military officers.

More recently, it was revealed that the number of substantiated allegations of sexual abuse from students against their JROTC instructors since 2017 is almost double what the NY Times initially reported. On November 16, 2022, Defense Department officials confirmed that the Pentagon had received credible reports of at least 58 cases in which JROTC instructors sexually abused or harassed students during the last five years. Several other instructors also have pending allegations. Military officials made these disclosures before a congressional subcommittee whose members had expressed concern at how the armed forces had apparently “failed to properly oversee the program.” At a November hearing, Defense Department officials stated that changes to the program were “already being implemented: more oversight of instructors, more opportunities for students and parents to file complaints, and more aggressive recruiting of women instructors.”

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From Draft NOtices, January-March 2023

- Rick Jahnkow

     A recent series of articles in the New York Times has drawn attention to some of the most egregious features of high school JROTC that are being protested by critics of militarism in the educational system. Included in the series is a December 11, 2022, front-page exposé of schools involuntarily enrolling students in the military training program, and then making it difficult for them to transfer out.

To write the article, journalist Mike Baker and other Times associates collected enrollment data using over 200 records requests sent to schools around the country. The data revealed the following:

[Dozens] of schools have made the program mandatory or steered more than 75% of students in a single grade into the classes, including schools in Detroit, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Oklahoma City and Mobile, Alabama.

It was also noted in the article that, “a vast majority of the schools with those high enrollment numbers were attended by a large proportion of nonwhite students and those from low-income households.”

In Chicago recently, the public school system acknowledged that automatic enrollment in JROTC was a significant issue. The school district’s inspector general issued a report concluding that it was a problem experienced disproportionately in lower-income neighborhoods. The report also revealed that over the past two years, nearly all ninth graders at 10 Chicago high schools were automatically enrolled in JROTC while procedures for opting out of the program were not clearly communicated with students and parents.

JROTC is in approximately 3500 high schools around the U.S. The military courses are taught by retired military officers hired by the schools, using textbooks produced by and for the various military branches (see past issues of Draft NOtices for textbook excerpts that were compiled in 2021 by Project YANO). Though the military claims it is not a recruiting program, advocates of the program have told Congress that it is the military’s best in-school recruiting program. In one recent example, during his 2019 congressional testimony, Secretary of the Army Mark Esper acknowledged that JROTC “tends to . . . encourage kids to join the military at higher rates than anywhere else.”

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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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