As Arthur Coumbe conducted a top-down analysis of Junior ROTC, the former U.S. Army Cadet Command historian found several key takeaways about the history and impact of the program.

“Most studies of the JROTC are either from an educational perspective or from a social policy perspective. They do things like measure outcomes, graduation rates, GPAs, enlistment rates … but they all start at the low level, at the classroom level, and then work up,” Coumbe said Nov. 19 during a Noon Report webinar hosted by the Association of the U.S. Army. “I flipped the script on that, and I started at the top, at the national policy level, asking military and civilian leaders how they’ve used JROTC to accomplish national priorities.”

Coumbe, who served as the Cadet Command historian from 1992 to 2010, is the author of Soldiers in the Schoolhouse: A Military History of the Junior ROTC, which offers a comprehensive history of Junior ROTC from the perspective of the military services.

Established in 1916, Junior ROTC has training programs in over 3,000 high schools and is the largest military public outreach program in the U.S., with more than half a million cadets across the country, according to Coumbe's work. 

After accounting for economic disadvantages schools and students face, cadets in the Army’s Junior ROTC program are more likely to graduate and have higher attendance and lower suspension rates compared to their peers, according to a Rand Corp. report from 2023.

The kind of lessons in character Junior ROTC offers students makes them better citizens and better potential troops, Coumbe said. “The traits and characteristics that make a good soldier also make a good citizen—personal responsibility, discipline, punctuality, service, ethos, all of those things cement character, but they also are military traits,” he said. “Character training and military preparedness are just different sides of the same coin.”

Junior ROTC also is directly affected when the nation goes to war, Coumbe said. “JROTC has expanded after every major crisis, after every major period of national attention, either during it and after it,” he said. “No. 1, standards change, and so more of them would qualify for enlistment back then. In times of retrenchment, again, standards change, and that would disqualify fewer of them for enlistment, so there is a relationship between the two.”

A strong military is more essential than ever, Coumbe said. “National security involves military readiness, but it also involves everything else, from STEM education to social cohesion to national resilience,” he said. “Without a strong society, you can’t have a strong military. It’s always been relevant, but maybe now that we’re going back to near-peer conflict, it might be more relevant than ever.”