No Child Left Undeployed

Not surprisingly, evidence-based arguments are often ignored by those blaming “wokeness” and DEI initiatives for declining interest in military service. Echoing a claim with a long history, educators have been cast as culprits in this crisis. Former secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth recently blamed public schools for recruiting shortfalls, asserting that education officials have erected too many barriers to recruiter access to US teenagers. In Senate testimony last year, former Navy secretary Carlos Del Toro noted that “the Navy’s recruiters have cited a lack of adequate access to high schools as one of their top challenges.” These assertions, coupled with the ongoing failure to improve military enlistment, suggest further changes to recruitment practices are imminent.

How will President Donald Trump address this situation? Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has promised to address what he calls the “recruiting, retention and readiness crisis in our ranks” as he brings a “warrior culture” to the US military. Project 2025, seen as a blueprint for the Trump administration, offers clues as to what this may look like. A key assumption of the Project 2025 plan is that educators are conspiring to keep students out of the military by locking schoolhouse doors whenever recruiters come around. Not surprisingly, the document advocates for greater military recruiter access to secondary schools, increasing the number of Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC) programs in secondary schools, and — remarkably — requiring completion of the military entrance examination by all students in schools that receive federal funding.

We suggest that expanding the military’s footprint in public schools — through testing, training and talking — are among the most likely responses of the Trump administration and dovetail neatly with a recent Trump executive order to “promote patriotic education.” These ideas raise serious questions about the further militarization of schools in the United States, already a global outlier in its acceptance of military personnel as instructors and recruiters in schools.

The Militarization of High School

Project 2025 recommends increasing the number of Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps programs in secondary schools. Today there are more than 500,000 student “cadets” enrolled in this military training program, which operates at more than 3,500 US high schools. Taught by retired military officers whose salary is split between the Pentagon and the local school district, the JROTC curriculum focuses on leadership development, military science, and citizenship. Many JROTC cadets use air rifles to practice marksmanship at in-school firing ranges.

Although JROTC has long been marketed to educators, parents, and the public as an innocuous “leadership education” program with an incidental military packaging, Project 2025 explicitly links it to military recruitment efforts. Public officials and other actors have also called for more JROTC units. Yet the market is already saturated — the program is present in one out of four urban high schools nationwide, with even higher rates in fifteen individual states.

In 2023, congressional hearings and the New York Times revealed that JROTC was desperately in need of reform, citing instructors who used their positions to groom cadets for sexual abuse and students who were forced to enroll in what is ostensibly a voluntary program. Equally troubling are oversight issues: JROTC textbooks are not subject to public review, and in sixteen states, instructors are not required to hold state teaching certification — some can even teach without a college degree.

Rather than embrace JROTC as a solution to the recruiting crisis, Congress should work to ensure greater oversight of this largely unregulated part of the American high-school experience.

Writing Exams for the Recruiter

Project 2025 also recommends a new mandate for schools that receive federal funding: require all graduating high-school students sit for the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB), the military’s entrance exam. As with Junior ROTC, the ASVAB is marketed to schools as a vocational guidance tool with no official recruiting purpose. In the 2022–23 school year, the most recent data available, 632,973 students in more than 13,000 schools took the test. Underresourced school districts often favor the ASVAB because it provides a helpful resource to their students.

However, the test is clearly designed to boost military recruiting: the Defense Department’s Office of People Analytics recently reported that testing during the 2022–23 school year provided more than a half-million “qualified leads” to military recruiters. Unless local school officials select privacy-protecting options for the test, their students’ ASVAB results are channeled directly to recruiters who then mine the data to create a customized sales pitch to teens and their parents.

Making the ASVAB mandatory for all students would mark a return to post-Vietnam-era tactics, when military enlistment fell precipitously and Pentagon planners sought ways to compensate for the loss of the draft. The 1970s was the last time states required all graduating high-school students to take the test. As we discuss in our book, the arrangement was a boon for military recruiters, but a nightmare for parents who had to field constant phone calls from recruiters.

Some of those parents reached out to a Republican congressman from Ohio, Charles Mosher, prompting him to initiate an alliance with Quaker peace activists and the American Civil Liberties Union. As a result of their advocacy — and a threatened lawsuit over student privacy issues — the military services allowed local schools to decide how to administer the test so that students could receive the benefit of vocational guidance without automatically sending their test results to the military.

Math, Gym, and a Visit From the Army

A recent report from the RAND Corporation noted that “access to high schools is among the most effective methods available to military recruiters to reach potential recruits.” Since 2002, federal law has required that high schools share students’ contact information with military recruiters and allow them to visit campus on an equal basis with other types of recruiters. Years worth of survey data collected by RAND show that schools generally comply with this law and erect few barriers to military recruiters. In a report last year, RAND found that only 5.3 percent of high schools failed to provide what recruiters “considered to be adequate access” — a term with no clear federal definition.

Despite this, Project 2025 and others also regularly call for greater recruiter presence in secondary schools. The Pentagon has lobbied Congress for the same, describing current access standards for all services as “suboptimal.” As Ashish Vazirani, the former acting undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, told Congress last year, “We’re getting the required level of access, not necessarily the desired level of access” (emphasis added) to high schools.

Vazirani’s statement is telling. Schools are not flouting the law and limiting recruiter access, as is often alleged. Yet it is easy for the military to promote the myth of no school access, since it controls the data. As Brian Lagotte noted in one of the few studies of the topic, “Very few people know the actual practices of recruiters in schools.” In fact, schools are arguably more open to the military than ever before and in many cases provide the military with much greater access than other types of recruiters.

Using the Freedom of Information Act, we recently acquired documents from the US Army Recruiting Command that reveal the actual scope and scale of Army recruiting activities in one state: Massachusetts. Overall, this data confirms that most recruiters have easy access to their teenage market. In a report from 2015, an Army recruiter wrote of trying to find ways to build a “permanent military presence” at Fitchburg High School. Subsequent entries show that they have largely succeeded. In the 2019 school year, recruiters logged more than ninety visits to the school — located in an economically depressed area near Boston — out of 185 school days. Post-COVID, by the 2022–23 school year recruiters maintained a weekly presence at Fitchburg High, teaching classes to teenagers through the Army’s little-known Students Taking Active Roles (STAR) program, a Junior ROTC–style initiative that requires no school board approval.

While some Massachusetts schools have imposed modest restrictions — such as requiring students to make appointments in advance, most, like Fitchburg High, offer recruiters nearly unrestricted access. As a result, they are free to walk around the school’s cafeteria chatting up kids as young as fourteen or fifteen years old. At Athol High School, located in a former mill town that is one of the state’s poorest communities, a recruiter described “grooming” freshmen and sophomores to set up future appointments once they turned seventeen, the minimum age of enlistment.

Blaming Schools, Dodging Facts

Like many proposals promoted by President Trump and his supporters, their plans to address the recruiting crisis ignore a substantial body of contrary evidence. Schools are not the source of the military’s recruiting problem — indeed, it is difficult to imagine how they could be more open to the military than they are today. Simply put, the United States is virtually alone among Western democracies when it comes to the scope and scale of what we call “school militarism” as described above. One would have to look toward Russia and Turkey — states with authoritarian leaders and poor human rights records — to find schools similarly suffused with patriotic lessons and a military presence.

Yet the image of woke, out-of-touch liberal educators banning school access to America’s military is an easy sell.

Recruiting issues are nothing new. Over the last fifty years, the military has faced recurring recruiting crises, often caused by external factors such as the rate of youth unemployment — conditions largely outside its control. Yet rather than accept this situation, we believe the Trump administration will seek to lean hard on the one thing they can and do control: the amount of marketing and physical presence directed at their target audience, young people.

Parents, educators, activists, and others concerned about creeping militarism in education settings — and the prospect of future US wars — can learn from the fifty-year history of the little-known “counterrecruitment” movement. Though modest in size and mostly local in scope, this grassroots effort has had notable successes in limiting the Pentagon’s presence in public schools and protecting parental rights. As the Pentagon seeks even more access and as false narratives continue to circulate, there remains a critical opportunity to challenge the pervasive ways the military already interacts with American teens.