Customer Reviews

Making Citizen-Soldiers: ROTC and the Ideology of American Military Service

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_Making Citizen-Soldiers_ is a very readable study of a unique American institution, the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC). No other country trains the majority of its military officers on civilian college campuses; Neiberg's work explains how that unique situation came about, and why it remains the mainstay of military officer training in America.

Neiberg traces two threads in the American military tradition: professionalism and the citizen-soldier ideal, the latter embodied in the Minuteman of Revolutionary days. Neiberg shows a tradition of distrust of professional soldiers in the United States, stretching back to the Colonial period. This distrust is focused especially on professional officers who graduate from one of the service academies.

The tension between the need for a military strong enough to defend the nation's interests and the distrust of a professional military leads to the creation of ROTC. Neiberg shows how the program's creation and development have continued to reflect the tension between the professional and citizen-soldier ideals.

Neiberg's work is insightful, well-researched, and of great value to those with an interest in civil-military relations, past, present, or future; in short - well worth one's time.

As an ROTC cadet and a former enlisted soldier, I am very pleased with the book. It provides an excellent look of the origin and development of ROTC in the United States. I am giving four stars instead of five because the book ends in the 1980s, and some significant changes have happened since then. Still, I highly recommend "Making Citizen-Soldiers..." for understanding not just ROTC, but also US military culture...