Posted on 02/21/2007 9:58:51 PM PST by MinorityRepublican
QUEENS, N.Y. -- The ROTC program at St. John's University here seems perfectly placed for an Army that's desperate for officers who are bilingual and comfortable in foreign lands. About 40 of the 120 students speak second languages, including Turkish, Korean, Mandarin, Hindi, Albanian, and Gujarati.
"I had never even heard of Gujarati until I learned I had a cadet who spoke it," says Lt. Col. Timothy Walter, who heads the program.
But instead of being hailed as a model for the Army's future, the St. John's Reserve Officer Training Corps program is a lonely outpost of diversity. In the past few decades, the Army has pulled its officer training and recruiting programs out of the Northeast and big, ethnically diverse urban centers, choosing to concentrate on campuses in the South and Midwest. [go to charts]
There is no Army ROTC program in the Detroit area, with its large middle-class Muslim population, and only one in Miami and Chicago. In New York City, which produced more than 500 military officers a year in the 1950s and early 1960s, the two remaining ROTC programs last year yielded 34 Army officers.
In contrast, Alabama, which has a student population that is about one-fourth the size of the state of New York, has 10 ROTC programs that last year produced 174 Army officers. The South generates about 40% of all Army officers, according to Pentagon statistics.
An officer's background didn't matter so much when the U.S. was focused on fighting big armies in large conventional battles. These days, though, U.S. success in places like Iraq and Afghanistan hinges on the ability of Army officers to win the trust of a suspicious and often culturally alien population. Officers must court sheiks and warlords and work closely with indigenous security forces.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
"Though Army Seeks More Ethnic Officers, It Shuns Northeast"
Hmmmm. Maybe the South will rise again.
It's sort of like in the American Civil War where the South had the most well-trained troops and the all the officers from West Point were from Dixie.
No doubt about it, the South makes more Officers than any other part of the country.
It seems the reporter may have forgetten to mention that ROTC programs and their students in liberal urban areas are greeted with deep hostility and out right attempts to boot them from campus. Things have gotten much worse in the last couple of years.
LA times had an article on this last week.
Like I believe this article. The fact is, cities like San Francisco have kicked the recruiters out, making it illegal for recruiters to approach young men in high schools or colleges throughout the city.
San Francisco politicians and most of the people hate the military. They've kicked the military recruiters out of the city, not the other way around.
bttt
Boston maintains three; Northeastern, BU and MIT. Additionally there are two programs in Rhode Island (a suburb of Massachusetts) and programs at UMass and WPI. Why New York is having tough times is a good question.
NYC, Upstate, or both?
You go where the market is.
Plug in New York state. There are still some being offered, though mostly Upstate.
The city primarily. I believe upstate and LI is OK. Hofstra is hanging in anyway. The same is true of recruiting for all services.
Bump!
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