The Army’s venerable Reserve Officer Training Corps program is finally getting rebooted.

Some 78 percent of the officers commissioned by the Army last year came through the ROTC program, but in recent years the program has been shrinking. The number of ROTC host universities with a Professor of Military Science has dropped from about 450 to 273 (though ROTC programs draw from students at an additional 1,300 schools). This has resulted in new officers coming from a narrowing cross section of America. “Nearly half of all Army recruits come from military families,” observed the American Enterprise Institute’s (AEI) Gary Schmitt and Cheryl Miller in the Wall Street Journal in 2010. “Southerners disproportionately populate all branches, while the middle-class suburbs surrounding the nation’s largest cities—New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia—produce relatively few service members.”