The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) will begin a new Air Force Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (AFROTC) program with the fall 2024 semester. The program will be available to freshmen and sophomores.

Air Force ROTC allows scholarship and non-scholarship cadets to live as regular college students while pursuing their degrees. Once they graduate, they will be commissioned in the U.S. Air Force or U.S. Space Force.

UAH is working with Samford University in Birmingham and Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery to develop its AFROTC. UAH’s program will be an independent detachment that uses Samford’s existing detachment in an administrative sense as a “parent” AFROTC for the first couple of years while UAH’s AFROTC is being developed. UAH’s program is the first AFROTC program of its kind in the U.S.

“If this detachment is successful, it will change the way the AFROTC program is implemented throughout the nation, which would allow the Air Force to develop more Air Force and Space Force officers and address the recruitment concerns in the military,” says Nicholas Anderson, associate director, Office of Military and Veteran Programs (MVP) at UAH.

Brig. Gen. Houston R. Cantwell, commander, Jeanne M. Holm Center for Officer Accessions and Citizen Development at Maxwell Air Force Base, visited UAH in January to meet with UAH President Dr. Charles L. Karr and tour the campus. Cantwell also spoke with Air Force and Space Force Junior ROTC cadets from Bob Jones and Huntsville high schools.

Maj. Matthew Spinks and Capt. Brett Collins have been selected to serve as UAH’s first AFROTC cadre and will arrive on campus in May. Spinks will come to UAH from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, and Collins will transfer from Samford.

This is a contributing post from UAH’s newsroom. For more information, please visit www.uah.edu/news.