DLC: Gephardt is wrong ("Security Gap": enlist100,000 MORE troops!)

[gulfcoastliberal]

DLC | Blueprint Magazine | October 18, 2005
Security Gap
By Lt. Gen. Daniel W. Christman
Prohibitions on ROTC and recruitment at some colleges are worsening the Army's leadership gap. Democrats can close their own security gap by challenging those bans and embracing the military.

snip

Calls by leading Democrats (and by the Democratic Leadership Council) for an increase of 100,000 troops in the Army, and for termination of the senseless ban on recruiting on some college campuses, are vital to restoring strength to our Army and to its leadership cohort.

snip

Democrats should call for opening the doors to military recruiting at all U.S. colleges and universities. But ROTC programs, in particular, need to be highlighted. A list of universities that continue to ban such programs is a Who's Who of top-tier educational institutions in the United States: Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Rice, Northwestern, Washington and Lee, and Stanford, to name just a few. Each of those universities once hosted an ROTC unit, but expelled it during the mindless attacks on our military in the 1960s and 1970s. A notable exception among the prestigious institutions is Princeton, which offers a thriving and popular ROTC program.

Even today, the "no military on campus" mantra is repeated by those with no agenda but to reject any affiliation with our armed forces. To be sure, the Pentagon's "don't ask, don't tell" policy is most often cited as the rationale for the exclusion. But this is a charade. If that policy were changed tomorrow (and it will not be), other justifications -- an "unjust war," the military's "unfair burden on the poor" -- would conveniently take its place.

(sounds like something campus republicans would enjoy, eh?)

http://www.dlc.org/ndol_ci.cfm?kaid=124&subid=307&contentid=253557

Hope you're ready to enroll your kids in the Army should the DLC get its way and get their candidate in the WH.

[blm]

1. I prefer the liberal reasoning for military on campus.....so more liberal

leaning students enter the military and the officer corps and share THEIR values with others in the military.

I remember a recently retired Gen. Steve Chaney who headed Parris Island Marine Base....he was a proud liberal who introduced Max Cleland at Kerry's announcement event in South Carolina. The casual talk later included the absolute NEED for more intellectually driven and liberal-minded recruits as officer candidates. They WANT ROTC at liberal colleges.

[JHB]

2. The General defeats his own purpose

Gen. Christman might be more persuasive if he didn't roundly dismiss the opposition to ROTC units and general recruiting as "mindless attacks on our military" and "anti-military resentment". If you treat "unjust war" as just another smokescreen bullshit reason, you're just not bothering to "know thine enemy".

I actually agree with him that ROTC and recruiting bans be rescinded, for many of the "diversity in the military" reasons he gives. However, it's also typical of the DLC's posture that "the left" (which translates in normal English as "the rest of the Party") is not to be engaged and possibly persuaded, but is simply to be roundly dismissed and attacked.

Didn't they charge Hillary with some big "unity project"? Gee, I wonder how that's coming along.