Quote from UTNE, on military-civilian relations in universities etc.

I have been reading the latest edition of UTNE Reader, of which has a number of interesting points and articles, one of those which I found particularly interesting was the article "Civic Casualties, Better military policy starts with educating civilians." In particular the following quotes. (pg 8-9)

"Unlike in decades past, few politicians have served in military combat. Meanwhile, the citizenry empowered with electing these leaders knows little of its military's history or the challenges soldiers face on the contemporary battlefield."

"David A. Bell, a history professor at John Hopkins University, writes in the New Republic (May 7, 2007) that military history is all but absent from todays college curricula. Harvards History department, for instance, has no military specialists; of the 85 history courses on its roster last spring, only 2 focused on war."

"University of Texas professor David L. Leal pointed out that a number of Ivy League schools have eliminated their Reserve Officer's Training Corps (ROTC)"

"Historically ROTC brought civilians and officers-in-training closer together- or at least exposed the two groups to one another."

Along with a collection of surprising military statistics, this article was really an interesting read for me. Why not display our soldiers to our citizens more freely? Why not allow us to become more educated on their lives and circumstances etc?And these are major universities! After all, our citizens vote for the politicians who largely control the military, whilst we do not really have much knowledge on their history etc. A relevant subject to know about certainly, but then we would think differently and might not elect the people who focus so much on war, military, weapons etc, which they would certainly not want, as it would drastically change our opinions and decisions. (UTNE Reader is an american magazine.)

I like UTNE Reader, many of its issues contain a variety of interesting points on various subjects, and a large amount of informative articles. I do not read it as regularly as some magazines, rather only occasionally, when there are articles that I think are worth reading, and are of interest to me.