Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (COMD)

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From Draft NOtices, October-December 2023

— Lauren Reyna Morales

   The 6-3 conservative majority U.S. Supreme Court has delivered another catastrophic decision. On June 29, 2023, in the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard case, the Court ruled that the race-conscious admission programs of Harvard University and the University of North Carolina violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. In an instant, the court ended nearly fifty years of affirmative action, “declaring that race cannot be a factor” (Associated Press) in procuring diversity in higher education settings because it violates a bedrock constitutional law. Chief Justice John Roberts stated that for too long universities have “concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin. Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.” Roberts and the other conservative judges position justice as “color-blind” to willfully ignore the sociological truths that are a consequence of the United States’ woefully inequitable past and present. Ending affirmative action will certainly result in reducing access to higher education for countless Black and brown students.

Roberts’ decision to kill race-based considerations for college admissions included an insidious caveat to continue the practice for U.S. military academies. The rationale offered to support this exemption is that military colleges and services academies have more “potentially distinct interests” (The Nation) than traditional universities and that continuing race-conscious admissions for these institutions is integral to maintaining national security. In other words, the Court ruled that actively promoting racial diversity is valuable to maintaining the U.S. military but not within academia and society itself. It is glaringly obvious that this caveat is another manipulative tactic to divert Black and brown youth from a path of their own choosing and into the armed forces (all military academy graduates are required to serve for at least five years upon graduating). Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson blasted this inconsistency in her dissenting opinion, explaining that the Court has “come to rest on the bottom-line conclusion that racial diversity in higher education is only worth potentially preserving insofar as it might be needed to prepare Black Americans and other underrepresented minorities for success in the bunker, not the boardroom” (The Nation).

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From Draft NOtices, July-September 2023

— Rick Jahnkow

A bill has been introduced in the U.S. Senate that, if passed, would impose significant new restrictions on the military’s high school Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC) program.

 The idea for the legislation (S.B. 1966) gained traction following the publication of several exposés of JROTC that appeared in The New York Times, beginning in July 2022.

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From Draft NOtices, July-September 2023

— Lauren Reyna Morales

[Note: Fort Hood was built in 1942 near the town of Killeen, Texas. The infamous post was named after Confederate General John Bell Hood and is the third largest military base in the United States. On May 23rd, 2023, Fort Hood was renamed Fort Cavazos after Gen. Richard E. Cavazos, the Army’s first Hispanic four-star general. This article will use the name Fort Hood when describing the various incidents that occurred at this Army base.]

Private Ana Basaldua Ruiz of Long Beach, California, was found dead at Fort Hood on March 13, 2023. Basaldua was 20 years old and had served the 15 months prior to her death as a combat engineer with the 1st Cavalry Division. She joined the Army in 2021. Basaldua’s family insists that in the weeks leading up to her death, their daughter had confided in them that she was the victim of inappropriate sexual behavior. Alejandra Ruiz Zarco, Basaldua’s mother, told Telemundo News “her daughter had told her . . . that an Army superior was ‘harassing her’ and that she was the target of repeated sexual advances on the base” (The New York Times).

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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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