Charles Moskos

Moskos was born May 20, 1934, in Chicago, Illinois, to ethnic Greek parents who migrated to the U.S. from the Greek-inhabited village of Çatistë, Ottoman Empire (modern-day Albania).

He attended Princeton University, where he graduated cum laude in 1956, on tuition scholarship and waited tables to pay for room and board.

[3] "Students rush to his classes to hear enthralling lectures peppered with cheesy jokes and anecdotes," the Daily Northwestern recalled in a May 2008 editorial, written the month before his death.

"They may be drawn by his famed don't-ask-don't-tell military policy, but they stick around to experience his grandfather-like interactions that make every student feel personally addressed."

Along with a number of other notable Greek Americans, he was a founding member of the Next Generation Initiative, a leadership program aimed at getting students involved in public affairs.

He insisted that enforcing a shared military experience for Americans of different classes, races and economic backgrounds forged a sense of common purpose.

"This shared experience helped instill in those who served, as in the national culture generally, a sense of unity and moral seriousness that we would not see again -- until after September 11, 2001," he wrote in a November 2001 article in Washington Monthly (with Paul Glastris).

In addition, he published well over one hundred articles in scholarly journals and news publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Atlantic Monthly, and the New Republic.

Underlying his position was Moskos's strong conviction that all Americans should serve their country equally, including politicians' offspring and practitioners of alternative lifestyles.

He criticized the unit cohesion argument, the most frequent rationale for the continued exclusion of gay and lesbian service members from the U.S. military.

Moskos showed how the armed forces was losing its institutional characteristics and moving toward an occupational or marketplace oriented model (soldier residence and workplace separation, increased reliance on contractors, and recruitment based on appeals to pay and benefits are examples).

Moskos and colleagues noted that as this shift occurs, it brings changes to a military's force structure, personnel, and it's relationship to society.

[21] The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan changed the threat environment yet again, leading to the emergence of a "hybrid" model beyond the post-modern era.

[19][23][24][25][26] He met his German wife Ilca, a foreign language teacher, while studying at the University of California, Los Angeles.

They had two sons, Peter, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Andrew, co-founder of Boom Chicago in Amsterdam.

[28] His wife wrote: "Charles C. Moskos, of Santa Monica, Calif, formerly of Evanston, Ill, draftee of U.S. Army, died peacefully in his sleep after a struggle with prostate cancer.