As of 2011, the number of countries with some form of US military presence was up to nearly 150. During peacetime, service members could apply to spend six months or one year working as instructors with Teach for America or builders with Habitat for Humanity, serving side-by-side with civic-minded civilians. At first glance, the idea may seem absurd. Within days of joining the Air Force, I learned that our favoured slogan is to "Fly, Fight, and Win." Those are perhaps three of the most common words associated with the millennial generation. Our first attempt to address the campus civil-military gap was leading a student-initiated course in 2012 on US military history and policy. by Paul Sikkema. These blithely stated virtues and vices, despite how much we like to talk about them, are not enough to explain millennial ambivalence toward military service. More Civilians Teaching at Military Institutions. It is a challenge uniquely suited to the virtues of the millennial generation. Democracy itself was at stake, but we were delivered by the sacrifice of our GI heroes. There are lessons to learn from clumsy interventions of the past, but that lesson should not be apathy. On factual questions, millennials are not much better: their mean estimate of the Marine Corps’ manpower was upwards of 3 million—off by a factor of twenty (CM1T 57). The word “millennial” conjures up images of skinny, jean-wearing, Tinder-swiping dandies. Another option would be to allow active-duty service members to participate in long-term civilian service programs while stationed stateside. Despite the furor over these topics and resistance to changes from within the military, though, only 41 percent of millennials believe the military’s treatment of women and homosexuals is unfair, lower than any other generation (CM1T 43). The terrorist organizations were on their heels, but the countries in which we fought were left in political disarray, and US presence was the only thing staving off anarchy, and thus terrorist resurgence. In this chapter, we will argue that this disconnect is largely a function of a lack of awareness and exposure. The proximate cause of this shift in campus opinion was the repeal of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) law, which barred homosexuals from serving in the military and was often invoked to justify excluding the military from college campuses on the grounds that DADT constituted illegal discrimination. The continued involvement of the military somewhere in some manner is not a result of its failure, but rather a grim necessity in this new, globalized age of digitally enabled extremism. Join the Hoover Institution’s Given the particular nature of the military profession, there will always be a gap between service members and civilians of every demographic, and this is not necessarily a bad thing. Just as our students at Stanford benefitted from a short period at the Naval Academy, so other college students would gain important insights by spending some time at one of the US military academies, and vice versa. Entitled. While the second portion of the trip exposed students to high-level thinking and discourse about civil-military relations, the first portion actually allowed them to live it on a personal level and, as we will describe below, turned out to be much more impactful for them. But it never ended. and Anna Ivey point out in their New York Times op-ed “Fix the New G.I. They’re less religious, less likely to have served in the military, and are on track to become the … But it is by no means clear to millennials exactly what military intervention should entail, or where, or for how long. We've been dropping bombs in the Middle East for fifteen years, and there's no end in sight. They are clear that something needs to be done about the atrocities committed by adherents of extremist ideology, and that that something very likely involves the military in some facet. According to The New York Post, millennials are a … If we were to say to millennials that they should serve in the military, many would respond with the signature question of their generation: "Why? In a period characterized by shockingly low levels of trust in our fundamental institutions, the military has consistently been the most trusted. This is not surprising, given their almost universal consensus that the war in Iraq was "a mistake and not worth fighting." Many of these guys enlisted because of 9/11 and fought during the early years of the Afghan/Iraq wars. In our review of the literature, there is a mixed finding. December 1 st 2016. Public Views of the Military. Rather, it is in enabling interpersonal connections between young people and their peers in the military—connections that can inspire interest and important discussions about military and civilian values and the differences and commonalities between both groups. Millennium Space Systems says an experiment launched to space on Nov. 19 will show that a small satellite with a deployable tether can safely deorbit in about 45 days. At civilian institutions of higher education, most courses on military strategy are in the context of ancient warfare, and discussion centers on strategic theory and accounts of battles long past. In 2006, there were only modest generational differences on whether good diplomacy or military strength is the best way to ensure peace. Considering topics here converge on its subject, I thought it would be good to reprint. So, even where the use of military force does not align with this jig, the tool is still useful for evaluating how the military should be used, and what a justifiable war looks like. Because of this, some do not identify with their generation; this coincides with most millennials having a lack of exposure and … These same Millennials with their personal views and spirituality join the U. S. Army and present new leadership challenges. Morris Fiorina is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wendt Family Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. Moreover, millennials tend to seek jobs in which they can identify with the end goal. The military is meeting its numbers—they always want a better quality recruit or cadet—but they consistently get the numbers they need. The research revealed that military millennials are much more likely to be married than their non-military peers. Ultimately, exchange programs of any length are an essential tool for exposing future military officers to the independent, innovative thinking taught at the best civilian schools and for exposing civilian students to some of their most disciplined, driven, and service-oriented peers in the country. Recruiting Veterans to Universities and Increased Funding for Veteran Scholarships. Active-Duty Officers Teach Full Time at Civilian Institutions. Adolescent millennials could eat their Fruit Loops in peace, ignorant of the decades of political and military manoeuvring that had brought it to them. Elizabeth Samet, a civilian English professor at West Point, has written about her experience helping cadets find meaning in literature and how the lessons they learned in her classroom stuck with them as they deployed and returned home. We're not even sure what "winning" would look like in this conflict. The current and future conflict is neither a cold nor hot war, but a conflict that always simmers. Yes, there are real problems, but the military is the wrong tool to reach for. Now, what does this have to do with millennials? The virtues of military might and service could once again be clearly understood in such a dangerous world. All the more surprising, then, that when the student body voted on whether to support the Faculty Senate’s decision to invite ROTC back, those in favor won a plurality of the vote. We need fresh minds to approach the world as it is today and discover how a smarter and savvier military can make it better. Additionally, as a few high-achieving academy graduates are already able to earn a graduate degree between receiving their commissions and continuing their training, there exists a model for reintegrating junior officers into the pipeline after a year or two away. In the end, how the military votes may have more to do with the more progressive social views of the Millennial generation now serving, and with their exhaustion over the … That is not okay.” She went on to argue that “military perspectives have been invisible on this campus” and that allowing ROTC back could “humanize the people who fight our wars.”. emerging adult life stage. Our work on this issue has done much to shape our sense of what it means to be a young person in the United States and our understanding of what opportunities and responsibilities our citizenship entails. Career for them is less a pragmatic opportunity to succeed and more an idealistic opportunity to be a force for progress. ivAbstractDefined as those adults born from 1981 to 1997, the Millennial generation now represents the largest generation in the American military and civilian workforce. Here are 10 characteristics of military millennials that leaders need to understand as they engage and lead them: They are mostly in the rank window of E5-E6 and O2-O3. 6. They proved on 9/11 that they posed a legitimate threat to the lives of American citizens, and we, in accordance with the jig that had applied for generations, mobilized our military. Not only did the number of applications for the course and trip far exceed the resources we had at our disposal, but there were also no other structured courses or programs on Stanford’s campus to which we could point where students so unfamiliar with the military could learn and engage on these issues. Understanding Sept. 11 and its cultural impact is crucial to understanding almost every foreign policy and military decision that has happened since. Today, thanks to such rejigging, personal debt loads are a reality unthinkable to our forebears. Matthew Crawford's notion of "cultural jigs" provides a helpful entryway into this current conundrum. With respect to overall military pay, 33 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds favor increasing military pay, while only 6 percent favor decreasing it (57 percent believe it should be kept the same). Convinced that there was a market for studying military issues, we started organizing. Editor's note: This essay is excerpted from the new Hoover Press book, Warriors and Citizens: American Views of Our Military. After ten weeks in the classroom, the course culminated in a one-week trip to the Washington DC area. Considering the vehemence of the antiwar protesters, who torched both the Naval ROTC building and the university president’s office in 1969, it would have been shocking if the university had maintained its support for the program. The second explanation is that millennials, even those who are curious about the military, do not have enough opportunities to learn about it. Using software that generated a virtual landscape of Wanat, complete with virtual trees and army positions, we were able to move through the battlefield as the presenter explained the situation on the ground and what decisions were being made. We do not purport to have all of the answers as to why the civil-military divide exists, nor a silver bullet to achieve perfect understanding between millennials and the military. [Morten G Ender; David E Rohall; Michael D Matthews] -- Captures the views, values, and attitudes of today's youth -- the Millennial generation -- towards the military, war, national defense and foreign policy matters. Regardless of your take on young millennials in the military, all sides can agree on one point: The issue's about to become moot. 5. Within the military, the Millennial Generation as well as the latter half of Gen X have only seen war. The result of the 1970 vote to remove ROTC from Stanford was ostensibly due to concerns over whether the academic rigor of ROTC’s military science classes was sufficient to merit the granting of university credit, but it came in the larger context of the Vietnam War and the broad antimilitary sentiment it inspired amongst the students and many faculty members. The shorthand understanding, or jig, that military service is an effective tool of foreign policy, wielded for the defence of the nation and the security of its citizens, still seemed durable enough, but the stamina (and rationale) for these proxy wars was already beginning to erode confidence that this tool still fit a changing world order. Using survey data collected for this volume by YouGov for James Mattis and Kori Schake, we will outline and analyze the statistics that underlie this dynamic. 7. Added to the core concepts of selfdefence and national security are the assumptions that we resort to armed conflict against political adversaries, often nation-states, in regions limited by political boundaries for a limited period of time. No generation asks for or deserves the problems left to it by its parents, but every generation is marked by its willingness and ability to overcome them. We are at odds with the paradox that adherents to this ideology can bomb us, but we can't seem to bomb them back. Against the traditional jig that the purpose of a military is to achieve national defence and security, millennials have developed a counter-jig which assumes that the military is ill-suited to meet that purpose. Furthermore, there are several for-profit universities that can only be described as predatory in their targeting of veterans. Use of the military is emphatically not an impotent effort doomed for quagmire. So how do you keep millennials loyal and what does millennial … How many Millennial vets? Nine-in-ten Americans (91%) say they have felt proud of the soldiers serving in the military since those two wars began. This paper addressed the Millennials’ shaping factors, trends, spirituality, unique military issues, and concluded with eight Department We need to look at the cultural rejigging about what war and the military entail in the unique contexts of the twenty-first century. This finding could be interpreted in many ways, especially when juxtaposed with the responses of other generations, all of which were even higher than those of millennials. We watched year after year as the United States continued to send billions of dollars and thousands of volunteer lives across the globe to fight this nebulous force. Today, Millennials are by far the most likely among the four generations to express the view that good diplomacy is the best way to ensure peace (77% say this), while Silents are the least likely to say this (43%). In the throes of total war, the service of the Greatest Generation saved the Western world from the ambitions of conquering tyrants on either side of the globe. Through a variety of media, from guest lectures to film screenings to a poetry performance by student veterans, the course exposed the students to basic facts about the US military and a variety of issues in civil-military relations. We can trace the development of the traditional, inherited jig through past generations by considering the political atmosphere in which each generation came of age. 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