Quote Originally Posted by Patriot View Post
The problem in my initial posting was not how to attack ivy league types (who will never elect to enter military service). My objective was to discuss the problem of keeping company and field grade officers in the Army.
That this is assumed to be fact is a problem in and of itself. I was answering marct's question, but the tie-in is that the shift in recruiting in the past decades away from the west and northeast and towards the south is hurting the diversity and quality of the officer pool - with the result that you have more poor performers demotivating everyone else and competing for the same slots come promotion time.

For example, compare the city of New York with Alabama. NYC has twice as many occupants and four times as many college students as the state of Alabama. But we have just 2 AROTC programs vice 10 in Alabama, producing 1/5th as many officers.
http://online.wsj.com/public/resourc...bk0702-14.html
The Army blames this on the difficulty of recruiting Northeast and urban students. But it's become a self-perpetuating prophecy. The closure and consolidation of urban ROTC units and the consequent shift in recruiting funds have dwindled the ROTC presence in major college towns like Boston and New York to a wisp - ROTC recruiting is practically nonexistent outside of the two home campuses.

The distribution of funding and programs makes sense from a numbers perspective to go after easier markets, but only under the dangerous assumption that every student is interchangeable - that the 200th student you add here is just as good as the 10th student elsewhere. When you're digging 20x as deep in one student pool vice another, don't be surprised at the results.

I find it ironic that we'll praise civilian graduate liberal arts education on one hand, holding up Petraeus' Princeton doctorate as an example, and then so quickly write off undergraduates from the same elite institutions as not worth the effort to recruit.

Public service will always have trouble competing with the private sector in terms of monetary compensation - and I worry about the day that the federal government becomes the most lucrative employer. But the problem today is that to many Americans, military service is considered distinct and inferior to other forms of public service.