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from the they-have-to-come-from-somewhere dept.
VICE News reports
An information and intelligence shift has emerged in America's national security state over the last two decades, and that change has been reflected in the country's educational institutions as they have become increasingly tied to the military, intelligence, and law enforcement worlds. This is why VICE News has analyzed and ranked the 100 most militarized universities in America.
Initially, we hesitated to use the term militarized to describe these schools. The term was not meant to simply evoke robust campus police forces or ROTC drills held on a campus quad. It was also a measure of university labs funded by US intelligence agencies, administrators with strong ties to those same agencies, and, most importantly, the educational backgrounds of the approximately 1.4 million people who hold Top Secret clearance in the United States.
But ultimately, we came to believe that no term sums up all of those elements better than militarized. Today's national security state includes a growing cadre of technicians and security professionals who sit at computers and manage vast amounts of data; they far outnumber conventional soldiers and spies. And as the skills demanded from these digital warriors have evolved, higher education has evolved with them.
The 100 schools named in the VICE News rankings produce the greatest number of students who are employed by the Intelligence Community (IC), have the closest relationships with the national security state, and profit the most from American war-waging.
[...] Twenty of the top 100 schools that instruct people working in intelligence agencies, the military, and the worlds of law enforcement and homeland security--including their private contractor counterparts--are effectively online diploma mills. Twelve are for-profit companies; several didn't exist before 9/11. The schools have become so important that two of them, American Military University (No. 2) and the University of Phoenix (No. 3), rank near the top of the list based on the sheer number of their graduates working in the Top Secret world.
Seventeen of the 100 top schools are in the Washington, DC area, reflecting the concentration of all things national security around the nation's capital. The University of Maryland handily outranks all other schools at number one, while Georgetown University (No. 10), George Washington University (No. 4), and American University (No. 20)--all considered among the country's 10 best schools for the study of international relations--rank among the top 25 most militarized schools.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday November 12 2015, @07:00PM
The military was important to Britain to keep others from taking their stuff. But they more often used it to take other people's stuff. Ask China about the Boxer Rebellion. "The sun never sets on the British Empire" can also be said "We steal all the way around the world".
Perhaps it was necessary. Perhaps it actually did, eventually, help the people they stole from. But I'm going to take a bit of convincing.
The problems with having a strong military are:
1) It's expensive, and
2) When you've got this big, fancy, expensive tool, those in charge want to use it.
Defense is necessary. Agression is evil. A strong military enables both.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 13 2015, @01:29PM
But how strong? We should slice the military budget in half, at the very least. The defense budget needs to go down significantly as well. Which doesn't mean no defense at all, since we'd still be spending more than any other country in the world. All of this nonsense is pure paranoia and wasteful. And I think that in many cases, a lack of resources breeds innovation. When you have lots and lots of money, you tend to be more wasteful with it.