to train new officers: if more are needed, the service academies should be expanded.
ROTC is orthogonal to actual education and exists merely as a means of exploiting of the failure of the US to provide its children a reasonable pathway to obtaining a meaningful post-high-school education.
That is not to say that the military does not need quality officers, but actual colleges and universities should be kept separated from the military. The study of humanist traditions and of the mathematico-philosophical traditions that eventually gave rise to the sciences is fundamentally different in both character and objective from the study of the massing and application of force (along with the accompanying and necessary indoctrination into military culture that ROTC offers).
What Was Defense Secretary Nominee Pete Hegseth ’03 Like at Princeton?
Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for defense secretary, was a basketball player, a politics major, and a brash publisher of
The Princeton Tory
By Hope Perry ’24 and Elisabeth Hulette Daugherty
Published Nov. 13, 2024
. . .
Hegseth played varsity basketball and served as a company commander for the ROTC. On the basketball team he “patiently toiled in obscurity” for four years, according to The Daily Princetonian, which also described Hegseth as “a recruiting afterthought.” When he was called off the bench in March of his senior year and made two 3-pointers that allowed the Tigers to best Columbia, he “beamed as he reflected on taking a leading role.”
. . .
https://paw.princeton.edu/article/what-was-defense-secretary-nominee-pete-hegseth-03-princeton
It seems with Hegseth that the education did not take, and that none of the ideas related to actual honor sank in either. So, both
the university and ROTC failed him. Sadly, he did not even have the NBA as a fall-back option. Were it only that Hegseth were merely the point guard for the Boston Celtics now!
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