Pete Hegseth was in my neighborhood today. I live just up the road from the Naval War College, where I taught for 25 years, and where Hegseth gave a speech this morning about the future of military education.
But “speech” may be too generous. What he delivered was more like an early Festivus “Airing of Grievances,” in which the secretary of defense unburdened himself about academics, academic credentials, term papers, and education in America in general. He seemed rather stressed and in a hurry to sock it to the assembled faculty. Students and administrators attended the talk as well, but he had relatively less to say to them—and in any case, instructors and students alike were advised to maintain decorum and not to clap for any of his lines unless the president of the Naval War College clapped first.
Two things were clear at the end of Hegseth’s speech: First, the secretary has no real idea what goes on in war colleges. Second, Hegseth is very angry that the war colleges are not incorporating his personal political vendettas into their curricula.
If Hegseth had been accurate in his account of what happens in professional military education, I might have walked out on my first day teaching at the Naval War College and become a local lobsterman. (I retired in 2022.) I came to Newport after teaching at Dartmouth, and although I think that the secretary is right about some of the lunacy that has overtaken American college campuses, I did not recognize his bizarre depiction of the war colleges.
The secretary went on, at length, about how the war colleges have substituted airy academic talk for “victory,” because they have become “dangerously civilianized.” These academics, he said, have imported the “worst pathologies” of civilian education to the war colleges. He believes that this has been done to satisfy “outside accreditors” who apparently will not certify a degree without rigorous studies in “wokeism” as part of the curriculum.
[Eliot A. Cohen: Pete Hegseth’s magic marker]
Hegseth also believes that the ideologies of the Frankfurt School have made their way into the war colleges and undermined the schools’ mission to recognize that “intellect” is a “weapons system.” He took special pride in noting that he had ended the relationship between the Naval War College and Brown University, describing Brown as even worse than that nest of leftists at Columbia. He seemed unaware that the relationship was with Brown’s Watson Center, an organization dedicated to foreign and security affairs, and not the program in gender studies.
“What a caricature of what we do,” one faculty member told me after the address. For one thing, civilian accreditors generally couldn’t care less about what’s in the curriculum. Unlike Hegseth and his coterie, I’ve been through accreditations at the Naval War College; mostly, accreditors ask about things such as funding and internal governance, and how the schools deal with having new administrators sent to them every few years. Nothing on the syllabus in Newport is there because of accreditors, but it’s an easy mistake to make if you don’t know anything about military education.
Also, I’m fairly certain that very few of the faculty in the auditorium could explain the Frankfurt School in any way that would hold water. It is not in the curriculum.
Hegseth claims that his perspective on military education came from a “comprehensive” review led by a team that reported to Anthony Tata, the Defense Department’s undersecretary for personnel. It’s worth pausing here for a moment to note that Tata is such an extreme character—a conspiracy theorist, among other things—that the GOP Senate, back when it still had a spine, declined to confirm him to a Pentagon post in President Trump’s first term.
The “review team” was a group of three retired colonels, all of them far-right social-media personalities. One was Thomas Anderson, a lawyer who posts on X under the name “Cynical Publius”; another was Rob Maness, a right-wing podcaster and failed political candidate; and the third was Kurt Schlichter, another lawyer who mostly publishes Second Civil War fan fiction. (I knew Kurt and worked with him occasionally in the days before Trump, and even co-authored a short article with him. We often disagreed, but I find many of his views unrecognizable now; I’m sure he’d say the same of mine.)
This cobbled-together team of retirees, none of whom have experience in military education, were given 90 days to review all of America’s senior war colleges. Their report remains a mystery because it hasn’t been released. But judging from the reviewers’ online comments, they came into the process believing that the war colleges had been taken over by Marxist DEI commissars.
Much of the speech amounted to Hegseth’s usual culture-war performance art. But things got more interesting when he castigated the faculty for being “passive-aggressive” and trying to “wait out President Trump.”
Specifically, he was very angry that the Naval War College refused to study “failure.” This mystified me and some of the people who still teach there, because the college studies both historical failures (such as Napoleon in Russia) as well as modern American disasters, including Vietnam, the Iraq War, and the global War on Terror. They do this as Hegseth claims he wants them to do: dispassionately, much like pathologists talking about what killed a patient, what might have worked as alternatives, and lessons for the future.
What, then, could Hegseth have been talking about? Trump’s political enemies.
For example, the secretary wants a case study on the Biden administration’s COVID-vaccine mandate. (How this squares with his insistence that every case be about war and victory is unclear.) The goal, apparently, is to lend the credibility of military-education institutions to the administration’s descent into anti-vaccine nuttery, and to support the subsequent decision to restore to duty military people who had refused orders to add the vaccine to the many they had already been required to take.
More important, Hegseth castigated the faculty for not making a case study out of the evacuation of Afghanistan. What he means, apparently, is that the faculty should be doing what the Pentagon is already doing—conducting a classified after-action—and assigning blame. Hegseth isn’t interested in lessons; he’s looking for revenge on the previous administration.
As a rule, the Naval War College tries to stay away from very recent cases, because the students are too emotionally invested in them. Hegseth finds this unacceptable, but this reasoning is why, during Vietnam, Vice Admiral Stansfield Turner made students study the Sicilian Expedition in the Peloponnesian War (a case still taught today). Student seminars on Vietnam in the early 1970s were literally turning into fistfights in the hall, and Turner wanted them to focus on the larger lesson about how an empire could get itself into a jam far from home.
The college does, in fact, study the Afghan War—just not as the kind of blame-storming session that Hegseth clearly desires. If that seems uncharitable, consider that Hegseth also wants a case study on Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, apparently for his actions on January 6, 2021. Milley, at the time, called his Chinese counterpart to reassure him that the government of the United States was not in chaos. (Milley made a similar call in late October 2020 at the direction of then–Secretary of Defense Mark Esper.)
Hegseth called this the worst crisis in civil-military affairs since Douglas MacArthur’s defiance of President Harry Truman during the Korean War. That’s not only a partisan claim; it’s silly. (Hegseth’s nickname in the Pentagon is “Dumb McNamara”; comments like this reaffirm why it has stuck.) “Just because some of you know Mark Milley,” he said, “does not mean you should not study his failures.”
[Read: Democrats are ready to run Hegseth ‘out of town’]
I’m not sure how many of the people in the room know Milley; when I retired, most of my colleagues were fairly young civilians who’d never met any senior officers. (I’m so old that I met Milley: He was apparently in one of my seminars back in the 1990s, when he was a young major, but I don’t remember him.) But no matter: Hegseth’s point was to make a personal and cheap accusation that the current members of a professional school are refusing to study something not because they made a judgment about the merits of the case, but because they were covering for a buddy.
Insofar as Hegseth said anything of substance, it was to insist that the faculty ditch what he sees as an artificial distinction between “education” and “training.” This is odd because the remit of the war colleges has long been the opposite: to wrench students out of the comfort zones of their previous jobs, acclimating them to uncertainty and ambiguity. Their time flying helicopters or driving ships is over. They’re in a classroom to learn how to become officers capable of advising civilians, able to see the links between national goals and military strategy and navigate the policy world.
Understandably, a man whose Army career topped out at major does not like that idea. Very few majors do, until they’ve spent a year studying at a war college.
Hegseth also complained that the word victory does not appear anywhere at war colleges. It is, in fact, everywhere on the Newport campus: It is in the syllabi, the lectures, and the seminar case studies. But it was also right in front of Hegseth as he entered the halls of the Naval War College—had he bothered to notice—on the school’s crest with its motto under a trident: Victory Through Seapower.