The Tartan

This was supposed to be an EL essay.

For those who aren’t in “the know,” every undergrad in the College of Engineering must take three semesters of “Experiential Learning,” which we call “EL” when we’re busy, which is always. It’s a lightweight gen ed requirement in which we must attend two university lectures and write a page for each, reflecting on what we learned. We must do this during three separate semesters, so we can’t front-load our Learning Experiences.

I was lackadaisical in completing my three semesters of EL, and am therefore in the sad position of having to get them done during my seniormost semester. Desperate to get it out of the way as quickly as possible, I registered for the first lecture advertised to me in my inbox by my advisor. This would be a lecture from the “Scientists and Strategists Speaker Series”, an adorably alliterative lecture series created by CMIST, itself an institution with a pleasantly consonant name; “Sea mist,” like the ocean. Nice.

Formerly known as the “Institute for Politics and Strategy” (IPS), this college rebranded itself as the Carnegie Mellon Institute for Strategy and Technology, or CMIST, in 2023. The change is appropriate because, according to CMIST senior and friend of the paper, Emma Rogers, it reflects Carnegie Mellon’s strong ties to national security and defense tech. According to Rogers, the name signals how students can “benefit from the cutting-edge tech development out of the STEM side of CMU.” This means that when academics, authors, and advisors from the political realm knock at Carnegie’s door to learn about the gadgets in our basement, CMIST volunteers their services in facilitating the consequent conversations.

Thus, the “Scientists and Strategists Speaker Series” is born, creating a space in which all manner of politically inclined folks may “come together” with “scientists and engineers … for in-person discussions that enrich our understanding of their groundbreaking work,” as stated by Dr. Audrey Cronin, Director of CMIST, at the start of each talk. This is cool. Typically, the only people who care about my work are my professors, whom I assume have never met a member of Congress. So when I heard about these events I thought, “I’d love to chat up some G-men and G-gals about my favorite technology, and political implications thereof.”

So I went to some of the lectures and, as my EL assignment says, began to form my “personal thoughts and reflections about how the lecture has impacted [me].” I am encouraged to discuss how the talk affected my “thoughts on [my] engineering practice, approach to life or school, work, or [my] personal reactions, agreements or disagreements with the speaker’s perspective or talk.” So I can say, like, whatever basically. The College of Engineering just wants me to do something that’s not homework for a couple hours.

But as I tried to understand the world view of the speakers, I drew closer and closer to an unpleasant conclusion; I don’t agree with them. Actually, that’s a bit of an understatement. I don’t just disagree with them. I am completely repulsed by their political project and the implications it has for my own future career. Bold, I know, these speakers being important adults and all, but I have a point to make. So, let’s take a moment to unpack the humanitarian transgressions that are treated as collateral, unworthy of acknowledgement, and shrouded from criticism in the study and practice of engineering.

Civil Military Relations: Throughout History and in Modern Times

On Feb. 20, I listened to Dr. Kori Schake talk about her forthcoming book titled, “The State and the Soldier,” set to be published by Polity Press in Sep. 2025. Schake is a political advisor and strategist. Her extensive work history has taken her to the State Department, the Department of Defense under the Clinton, Bush, and Trump administrations, the McCain-Palin ’08 campaign, and before that, Rudy Giuliani’s campaign in ’08, as well as universities such as West Point, Johns Hopkins, and the National Defense University. It is not unreasonable to assume her familiarity with the nuts and bolts of our military-state apparatus supersedes that of anyone else I could meet at this school.

For the first half of the talk, she discussed her book, which focuses on the unique relationship between the U.S. government and its military. Consider that America, unlike many other former colonial states, has never experienced a military coup. Why is that? There are many historical circumstances that can explain this, and they are interesting to interrogate.

Later began the Q&A, in which a variety of topics were discussed between Dr. Schake, Dr. Cronin, and the audience. They began to talk about America’s all-volunteer military, and how we might remedy the fact that enlistment is slumping among young people. After all, how can we keep fighting our wars if the youth don’t want to fight?

Not to worry, Schake has already considered this problem. “[Former Secretary of Defense] Jim Mattis and I just wrote a chapter for a book … on how to recruit the force that we need …We need a bigger Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, if we are going to continue to do the things we are doing.”

But, as Cronin points out, increasing the size of our military might require lowering the bar for military service, or even instituting a draft. Schake, however, again assures us that this problem will pass. “I’ve been persuaded by the folks doing the recruiting that the biggest [impediment is] 3.2 percent unemployment. You can always see an inverse relationship between recruitment and the unemployment statistics.” 

There you have it; The military just needs to sit tight until the next recession, and then the recruits will come flooding in. As history has shown us time and time again, nothing fuels the fire of nationalism quite like economic desperation.

Schake also identifies widespread physical unfitness as a cause for lower recruitment figures. The kids just aren’t built for war anymore. According to her, 25 percent of Army recruits and 20 percent of Navy recruits must go through a “remedial training program” to reach the mental and physical standards necessary for enlistment. She finds the lowering of standards, “worrisome”, but an unfortunate necessity given that “only 9 percent of young Americans meet the qualifications to enlist in the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps and have a proclivity to do so.” 

She followed this up by stating, “I’m only half kidding when I say the solution to this problem is that the next Democratic President is going to make Ozempic and other weight loss drugs part of the remedial training program, and we’ll get through it just fine.”

Between giggling at her own cleverness, Schake failed to clarify what she meant by “only half kidding.” Given the conversation, this could mean either ‘kidding’ or ‘not kidding.’ In either case, the tone in which Schake raised the idea of employing a pharmaceutical intervention originally intended for diabetics and medically necessitated weight loss as a solution for the U.S. military’s recruits came off tacky at best and alarmingly out of touch at worst.

Schake’s cheap shot at obesity, a very complex issue that intersects physical and mental health, income and food availability, agricultural practices, cultural tastes, and our relationship to physical activity spotlights her troubling perspective. Throwing the word “youth” in front of obesity demands considering the role of education, family structures, and our cultural attitudes toward child-rearing. I find it telling that Schake tapped on a real problem for roughly 40 percent of American adults, and almost 20 percent of American children but only seems concerned with it insofar as this health crisis is relevant to the U.S. military. Personally, I’m a bit affronted that she finds this funny. I am barely an adult, but I feel enough sense of protection toward children that, for me, youth obesity being laughed at by a political strategist who probably hasn’t seen the inside of a public school for 40 years triggers some defensiveness in me. In fact, I rather wanted to tell Dr. Schake she would do well to back off. Children should be allowed to eat good food, and they should exercise. And they should do it because it’s good for them, not because it makes them more fit to fight in your never-ending wars. Please, Kori, point to the funny, because quite frankly I can’t find it.

It is some solace that Dr. Cronin’s reaction to this suggestion was, “well, that’s shocking,” before moving onto another topic. 

Earlier in the conversation, Dr. Cronin had mentioned that many military recruitment centers are in the South, because that’s where the “bulk” of recruits come from. This surprised me, given that most of the males who I knew in my 400-student high school graduating class, myself included, were contacted over social media upon our graduation by a Marine recruiter who operates exclusively in my hometown in New York.

In a town where more than 60 percent  of students qualify for free or reduced lunch, many of my peers were acutely aware that, unless they were offered scholarships large enough to cover tuition and housing, they would likely never be able to attend college. Military service, therefore, was and continues to be a genuinely important option for them. I know of a couple people who went into the service, and of course, I don’t want them to die or be injured. I want them to be well, and if military service is the best way for them to achieve that, I hope they achieve it quickly and safely. (The existence of homeless veterans and the general dysfunctionality of the VA do not bode well for their lives post-service, but that’s a separate conversation.)

I am not opposed to the existence of options for people to improve their lives. Life’s tough. Do what you gotta do. I just wish my peers and everyone else in similar circumstances were offered something other than the choice between never going to college or picking up a gun. Even without commenting on the morality of choosing to soldier for a country like the U.S., I want to make it clear that a lot of these recruits are just kids in tough situations, and a future saddled by huge amounts of debt is a damn powerful tool of coercion.

Schake’s tone when poking fun at a public health crisis suggested that she had said this before, possibly to her colleagues. Maybe even General Jim Mattis. I reckon that a lot of top brass thinks this way. To Schake, the children coming out of our broken and underfunded public schools who lack university or employment prospects are not people; they are bodies to be fed into the machinery of war. So of course the best solution is Ozempic, because we must “continue to do the things we are doing.” Not a sliver of that $872 billion for our military should go to helping children from poor families, because that’s not how this works. In fact it can’t be how this works. It is necessary to maintain a population of the disadvantaged and underemployed, otherwise, who’s going to fight the wars? I don’t think Uncle Sam is eager to give up such a compelling bargaining chip.

Schake’s general lack of interest in the economic coercion imposed on the people who fight the wars of her political ideology permeated her entire talk. And it wasn’t lost on others.

A theme from early in the talk centered around the idea of “lawfully awful” actions, in which the U.S. Military is compelled to do something that might be considered wrong or unethical. The example, prompted by recent events, was the use of the military in the deportation of immigrants. The sentiment from Schake and Cronin is that using the military for this purpose is wrong, and that the responsibility for mediating such behavior falls to Congress.

An audience member asked Schake to consider the perspective of service members. Those who must carry out orders don’t have the benefit of waiting for Congress to intervene; when presented with an order they personally object to, their only alternative is to resign. They asked Schake what she had to say on this matter.

What an interesting point, which succinctly demanded recognition that this conversation about civil-military relations largely failed to consider the internal emotional worlds of service members. “Oh, that’s interesting”, said Schake. “I don’t doubt that it’s tugging on the consciousness of a lot of folks.” What follows were some platitudes from Schake about how being a service member requires a lot of hard choices, as do a variety of other roles in government. When asked to follow-up, the audience member simply added that those who resign are at risk of losing pension benefits, which can negatively impact them and their families.

Which brings us neatly back to our point again. Economic coercion. Uncle Sam dangles the carrot in front of us because he knows we’re starving, and we can’t grow our own carrots anymore because our gardens were turned into parking lots and the rainwater is full of PFAS.

Then I remember why Dr. Schake came to campus. To talk to the engineers and scientists at Carnegie Mellon. That’s me! ‘How goes the engineering, young man?’, they say. ‘So good of you to lend your mind to the war effort.’ They want to know about the latest breakthroughs in physics and computers so I can help them win the wars they started when I was a child. And the wars to come, because of course we can’t stop those from happening.

Schake knows that wars need a lot more than people holding guns. We need brainiacs, nerds, and dweebs to build the guns, too. “For a lot of the kind of technological expertise that modern warfare is going to require, we need to think about specialized tracks for that. And some of the current restrictions, like restrictions on body art or on having smoked dope when you were in high school, are so common in the tech community we want to recruit into the force that it’s prejudicial.”

You catch that? “The tech community we want to recruit into the force.” That’s you and me, partner. Fresh-faced and ready to start our valiant careers building weapons worth more than we earn in a year, for soldiers who aren’t paid that much in their entire service period, to fire at enemy combatants who will never see that much money in a lifetime.

Four years ago, I ignored a Marine recruiter’s message on Instagram because I had already gotten into Carnegie Mellon. I can’t believe I have to say it twice, but no, I’m not interested in exploring my future with the U.S. armed forces. I made it onto the same side of the battlefield as Dr. Kori Schake, and as much as I might want to disavow and distance myself from her, I have to remember that I was only in that room because someone offered me a seat. I am a student of Carnegie. I am one of the deserving, according to the current way of things.

I want to continue listening and speaking to political theorists and academics like Schake, because I want to know how the system works. I want to learn how the violent, antisocial goals of these people become my political reality. It’s a matter of keeping myself and those around me safe, no matter how much the information upsets me. I’m grateful for the education I received at this school because now I have learned to say: no, Kori Schake, I’m not interested in your project. My life is more valuable than something as small as nationalism.