Hegseth's Headlong Pursuit of Academic Mediocrity

The Atlantic

14 hours ago

The Trump administration is right about many of the failures of elite universities, particularly when compared with character-oriented institutions such as the United States Army. Consider the case of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who was admitted to and graduated from prestigious degree programs at top universities but resigned from the Army National Guard at the lowly rank of major. The Army, unlike Princeton and Harvard, knew a petulant, insecure mediocrity when it saw one.
For whatever reason—perhaps Hegseth had a rough time in freshman calculus or was embarrassed while parsing a difficult passage of Plato—he seems determined to bar academics or anyone who faintly resembles one from contact with the armed forces. He has prohibited officers from attending the Aspen Security Forum, presided over by well-known radicals such as my former boss Condoleezza Rice. He has extended this ban to participation in think-tank events where officers might meet and even get into arguments with retired generals and admirals, not to mention former ambassadors, undersecretaries of defense, retired spies, and, worst of all, people with Ph.D.s who know foreign languages or operations research.
The latest spasm of Pentagon anti-intellectualism has come in the shape of efforts to remold the military educational system. To its shame, and apparently just because Laura Loomer said it should, the Army has meekly fired Jen Easterly from her position on the faculty at West Point, even though she is a graduate, a Rhodes Scholar, a three-tour Afghan War veteran, and a bona fide cybersecurity expert. In this case, at least, Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll seems to have given up on the honor part of West Point's motto, 'Duty, honor, country.'
From the February 1907 issue: The spirit of old West Point
Secretary of the Navy John Phelan—whose nautical and military experience is admittedly nil — has directed his acting assistant secretary to purge 60 civilian professors from the U.S. Naval Academy, Fox News reported, and to replace them with military faculty to 'promote fitness standards, maritime skills and marksmanship as essential component of the warrior ethos.' (Note: That should be components —plural—but lethal guys don't need no grammar.) The humanities, he ordered, should be particularly targeted. The U.S. Air Force Academy is headed in the same direction.
Perhaps this order results from Phelan having read too much C. S. Forester and Patrick O'Brian and believing that the key to naval leadership is ordering your gallant tars to back topsails, giving the enemy frigate two broadsides at point-blank range, and boarding it in the smoke with cutlass in hand. In that case, he may wish to read up on advances in naval technology and tactics since 1800.
More likely, Phelan is toadying to his boss, who likes to huff and puff about warrior virtues as a way of avoiding the hard work of fixing the backlog in ship maintenance that is wearing the Navy out, or plunging deeply into the complexities of integrating missiles, cyberattacks, space reconnaissance, mines, manned aircraft, and subsurface drones in an extended campaign near Taiwan. Like other formerly respectable officials such as National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett, last seen justifying with a feeble grin the firing of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for producing inconvenient numbers, Phelan may be going along with something he knows is stupid to appease his ignorant and dyspeptic boss. Not quite warrior virtue, in that case.
Most officers—roughly 80 percent—are commissioned through ROTC and direct-commissioning programs, not the military academies. If being educated by civilian faculty is incompatible with the warrior ethos, then the implication is that the Pentagon's leaders believe that four out of five commissioned officers are unfit for service. To their shame, the generals seem not to have risked their careers by vigorously protesting these measures—servility, apparently, not being confined in the Pentagon to civilian leaders.
If the Pentagon does assign more military faculty to the service academies, it may eventually wake up to the fact that its uniformed professors will obtain their advanced degrees mostly from the same educational institutions that are in the grip of identity-mad globalists. And the dark secret is that military graduate students (I have taught many) plunge enthusiastically into academic life and often wish to linger there.
All of this would be amusing if it were not so appallingly destructive. Civilian faculty in military educational institutions play a crucial role: Unlike their military colleagues, they can devote a lifetime to mastery of their specialties, including teaching. They can bring cadets and midshipmen into contact with a wider world; the service academies are, of necessity, inbred places where the students all have similar clothes, haircuts, and aspirations. While it is important to have officers teach in departments such as English—General Frederick Franks, one of the commanders of U.S. forces in Iraq in 1991, led a poetry club while teaching at West Point—they cannot in the nature of things be the backbone of such departments. Their busy careers simply do not give them the necessary time.
At the more advanced professional military educational institutions such as the war colleges, civilians will almost invariably have deeper expertise than their uniformed counterparts in areas such as military history, foreign culture, and politics, and even in technical subjects such as cyber operations. The American ethos is that officers should be generalists whenever possible, whereas teaching and scholarship require more in the way of specialization.
The chances, unfortunately, are that further purges of the civilian professoriate await. The Russians and Chinese can only rejoice. A historical data point: The famous Kriegsakademie, the war college of the German General Staff, was overwhelmingly dominated by officers, except in subjects such as language instruction. This helped foster a belligerent and strategically obtuse military culture in the years before the First World War. Meanwhile, the greatest German military historian of the 19th and early-20th centuries, Hans Delbrück, was shunned by the German army for his insightful critiques of the General Staff's views. It would have done far better to have hired and listened to him before the General Staff led their country to disaster in the First World War.
William Francis Butler, a Victorian British general who served from the plains of Canada to the Coromandel Coast of India, was a talented commander and no less talented a writer. In his biography of that strange military genius Charles Gordon, he lamented 'the idea prevalent in the minds of many persons that the soldier should be a species of man distinct from the rest of the community' who 'should be purely and simply a soldier, ready to knock down upon word of command being duly given for that purpose, but knowing nothing of the business of building up.'
He concluded: 'The nation that will insist on drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards.'
That, unfortunately, is the direction that the Pentagon's decisions are taking the U.S. armed forces. There is a certain kind of soldier who can only be comfortable in the company of those just like him in outlook and prejudices. As these latest directives indicate, in Hegseth's case, that would appear to be Butler's fools.