I’ve mentioned a few times that I split my time between Princeton and West Orange, New Jersey, which is why some of my activism focuses on the one place, and some on the other. West Orange High School has a JROTC Air Force program which it never tires of advertising. The High School recently advertised its Student Life Expo for Incoming Freshmen, to take place April 22. High school freshmen are typically students entering ninth grade, i.e., 14 or 15 years old. Among the student groups advertised for such students, under the rubric of “Honor Societies,” is “Kitty Hawk Air Honor Society (JROTC).”

Like all such programs, West Orange High School’s JROTC program is–whatever its contrary protestations–a feeder into the United States military. Here is how they describe their goals:

Welcome to Air Force JROTC, unit FL-802. The mission of AFJROTC is to “Develop citizens of character”. In no way is AFJROTC a recruiting tool for the USAF, and there is no obligation for cadets to join the military after high school. AFJROTC is a citizenship training program that is designed to educate and train high school cadets in citizenship, promote community service, and instill personal responsibility, character, and self-discipline. The program achieves this through classroom education in aerospace fundamentals and hands on learning opportunities in a number of fun and challenging extra-curricular activities. The AFJROTC program is grounded in the Air Force core values of “integrity first, service before self, and excellence in all we do.” AFJROTC has a huge positive impact on cadets, schools, communities, and our nation.​

They’re lying. JROTC is obviously a recruiting tool for the United States military. To deny this, by whatever pro forma legalistic expedient, is to gaslight the public and practically spit falsehood directly at their faces. It doesn’t matter whether there is a legal obligation or not for cadets to join the military after high school. The point is that the program sells the virtues of military life to young and impressionable students who are vulnerable to indoctrination, but too uneducated (or ill-educated) to know better, or to know what questions to ask of their mentors. Whatever its narrow legal obligations, JROTC sells the virtues of military service and waves the blandishments of service before students’ eyes. That’s all they need to recruit students into the service. There’s no other plausible reason for the students to be there.

Here is a generic template for a JROTC Curriculum. Scroll to the bottom and click the Word document for the JROTC Curriculum Guide, Version 12. The document in question is obviously a training manual for future military officers. For equally transparent reasons, no part of this curriculum acquaints students with the military’s frankly imperial mission, or with any of the factual or conceptual tools required to understand imperialism. The one fact that must be concealed is precisely that students are being groomed into service for an empire.

Contrary to the military’s propaganda, no human being needs military training to develop moral character; the pretense that they do is a lie of its own. And the euphemistically-described “aerospace fundamentals” to which the preceding passage alludes are only too obviously the fundamentals required to kill people en masse from above without worrying too much about who they are or why they’re to be killed. Students are to have no inkling that the Air Force into whose service they’re being trained is simply an imperial killing machine desperately in need of warm bodies to do its dirty work.

For all the loose and empty talk one hears about “indoctrination” and “grooming” in our schools, we hear nothing about this blatantly obvious instance of it–the military’s unashamed, unapologetic exploitation of our high schools and of the students in them for purposes of conquest, destruction, and mass death. We put our children in the care of war criminals and their willing, mendacious accomplices, then wring our hands over the dangers of drag queens. How many drag queens are committed to mutually assured destruction or nuclear counter-value theory or counter-insurgency theory, and how many have the capacity to indoctrinate young people in them, and/or enact them themselves? You want danger? These people are the danger we face. These are the people who should be thrown out of our schools, and out of our society:

I wrote a comment on West Orange Public School’s Facebook page. To no one’s surprise, my comment was taken down about a minute after it was posted. The school then deleted its own post, only to re-post it a few hours later with the comments turned off. That’s how committed to “our freedoms” they are: challenge their JROTC program, and the only thing these “educators” know how to do is to circle the wagons and shut down dissent. How is that freedom, education, or courage?

This is what I wrote:

JROTC is not an Honor Society. It’s a death cult. It has no place in a school, and basically turns the students of WOHS into human shields. The people of West Orange, who sit around complaining about their property taxes, and are presiding over a fiscal crisis at WOHS, need to ask whether they want to continue paying for the privilege of sending their kids to mass slaughter. But as long as they do, expect some of us to vote down any policy or budget that promotes JROTC, however indirectly, and whatever the collateral damage to any other program. If you’re OK with blowing up schools, I’m OK with slashing your budget and putting you out of work.

After they took that comment down, I wrote another one:

You can take down my comments as much as you like, but the issue is not going to go away: why is JROTC a student group? Why are you so eager to train students who can’t vote or drive or rent a car or sign contracts to fight and die in imperial wars of aggression? You can’t balance your own budget, but you’re making a financial contribution to the Pentagon. Why?

Here’s a piece from NJ.com on the West Orange Public Schools’ fiscal crisis: they’re facing a $14-15 million dollar deficit that (supposedly) requires them to lay off 70 teachers and staff. Meanwhile, 50% of JROTC instructor salaries are funded through municipal tax revenue, but there’s no suggestion anywhere (besides here) that the Board of Education ought to consider resolving its budget woes by eliminating JROTC. On the contrary, most people in town seem to regard the military’s presence in the schools as a selling point.

This link on the national JROTC website gives a list, updated as of 2024, of all of the JROTC programs spread across the United States. There are 1,782 of them; New Jersey alone has 26. These 1,782 programs are staffed by 4,000 military officers, and host some 314,000 cadets. In other words, public high schools, like universities, are a gravy train for the military, which is only too happy to colonize them and settle there. (The first figure comes from the spreadsheet in the hyperlink at the head of this paragraph; the second and third figures come from p. 4 of the JROTC Curriculum Guide, which gives figures for the Army, not for the other services, e.g., the Air Force. So 314,000 and 4,000 are likely understatements.)

I’ve argued at PoT that the anti-war movement needs to get people out onto the streets. But if you’re averse to marching and chanting in the streets, feel free to join the anti-war movement from the comfort of your computer. Carve out a swatch of those 1,782 programs, and/or the high schools that host them, and tell them that it’s time to stop turning our educational system into a production line for mass killing. While you’re at it, tell them that it’s time to stop indoctrinating adolescents into military life under the anodyne but fundamentally mendacious guise of “civic education.”

And don’t forget to underscore the hypocrisy and bullshit artistry of a military establishment that can’t stop accusing Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran of using civilians as “human shields”–or of relying on “child soldiers”–while it does its best to normalize precisely those things in our lives. A high school with a JROTC program is basically a tax-funded institution playing host to an officer training and recruitment program for the United States military. It turns a corner of the school into the functional equivalent of a military facility while pretending to inculcate students, innocently, in “civic virtue.” This is the same Air Force that walks blithely away from the carnage it’s produced across the Middle East while regarding any attacks on it as “terrorism.” There is in fact no difference between “civic virtue” as these people conceive it and terrorism; the one is merely the psychological pre-condition for the other.

Lines can only be drawn by people willing to draw them. If people won’t march in the streets, they can at least clack away at the empire with their computers. There’s no guarantee that any effort will stop the imperial juggernaut. But every effort is like the advent of spring after a bitter winter: whether it succeeds at its ultimate object or not, it brings warmth, color, and life into the world, which is more than can be said of the United States military, and of the self-made moral zombies who march under its command.