Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (COMD)

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From Draft NOtices, October-December 2023

- Seth Kershner

  The U.S. military, spurred by a worsening recruiting crisis, is testing new programs that present unique challenges to counter-recruiters.

Recruiters haven’t had it this bad since 1973, when the all-volunteer force made its shaky transition away from the draft. In fiscal year 23, the Army is on track to come up 10,000 short of its goal of 65,000 new recruits. A defense official told the Wall Street Journal over the summer that in fifteen years of tracking the recruiting market they had never seen a situation quite so serious.

Experts cite a variety of reasons for the recruiting shortfalls. First, there appears to be declining support for the military as a career path. In recent years, the media has spotlighted stories about women military members facing sexual harassment and the difficulty veterans face in accessing health services. When asked to explain the recruiting crisis, Army Secretary Christine Wormuth recently cited parental worries about whether their children are “going to be sexually harassed or are they going to be more prone to suicidal ideations” by serving in the military.

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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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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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