The small mind of a big man on campus

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth proposed an answer that won’t work to a problem that doesn’t exist during his visit this week to the U.S. Naval War College in Newport

The problem, according to Hegseth, is that professional military education — the coursework and experiences that prepare service members for their next jobs or promotions — has succumbed to “academic drift,” without enough emphasis on warfighting. The answer, he says, is reducing civilian faculty. 

Even scratching minimally below the surface, his Nov. 9 speech was largely political theater rather than thoughtful consideration of military and national security needs.

Hegseth attacks civilian-led education in Naval War College speech

Hegseth wants to make the fighting force more lethal and laser focused on “victory.” But the U.S. military is already the best trained, most lethal and effective military in the world, as evidenced by every other military in the world wanting to train and operate with it. The U.S. military is very good at tactical jobs when not put into impossible situations, like trying to eradicate terrorism or democratize a country largely composed of internally warring elements, or being overtasked to be everywhere all the time. Unfortunately, our nation’s leaders have failed to understand our adversaries’ motives and how to link our political objectives to military strategy. Iran, for example, doesn’t have to match U.S. military capabilities, it just has to keep surviving the beating the U.S. can inflict, thus keeping the U.S. in a military and political quagmire.

If there were any substance beyond Hegseth’s 33 new directives, the first step would be to “fix” who attends the nation’s six war colleges, a problem professional military education leaders have been trying to address for years. At the Naval War College, there are as many or more staff officers and officers on their last tour attending in person than line officers who see combat. Is Hegseth looking for more lethal logisticians, dermatologists and retirees? Most officers fulfill their education requirements online while working full time. Completion is largely a hoop to be jumped.

Professional education for intermediate and senior personnel prepares officers to transition from tactical to operational and strategic positions. That means teaching officers how to think, not what to think. How to think is education; what to think is training, or indoctrination. Senior service and war colleges began hiring civilian academics to achieve this purpose after the passage of the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act. The reasoning is simple: Being the best pilot or ship driver does not prepare an officer to teach subjects like policy development and implementation — critical for their inevitable Pentagon tour — or strategy development and implementation critical for higher level assignments and working with allies. 

There is little incentive for active-duty military line officers to teach; it does little for promotion purposes and takes them from the field. Hiring military retirees works in some cases, if they are willing to get and keep up the subject matter qualifications needed. Some of the best professional military educators I have worked with fit this category. When teaching operations, however, their value rapidly diminishes the longer they are away from active duty because operating procedures and parameters change quickly.

Last month, the Pentagon ended a 12-year joint research and teaching partnership with Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies. Hegseth went out of his way to disparage Brown, calling the Providence Ivy League school “the only place more stridently ideological in one direction more than Columbia or Harvard. A Princeton University graduate, Hegseth is among several other Ivy League graduates who benefited from the educational rigor those elite schools offered only to denounce them for the sake of populist appeal. 

In his speech, Hegseth, railed that professors are indoctrinating students with Frankfurt School Marxism, which apparently left many students wondering what the Frankfurt School even is. He obsessed on culture war themes and accused previous military officers, specifically Gen. Mark Milley, of not supporting an insurrection. Missing from Hegseth’s speech was any reference to a soldier’s first responsibility to defend and protect the U.S. Constitution. 

Professional military education needs to be more challenging, more broadening, and more academic. Once military officers leave their tactical jobs, they will need to hold their own in venues where they must deal with very smart civilians. Unfettered, civilian politicians rarely recognize the limits of military power and are overly willing to task the military to achieve their political goals. Military officers must be able to parry with their Ivy League educated peers. Gen. David Petraeus won academic awards from professional military institutions throughout his career. But when he was sent to earn a doctorate at Princeton, Petraeus was forced to step up his game after he got a D on his first exam and one professor called a paper he wrote “simplistic.”

Hegseth made it clear in Newport that he sees little difference between training and education. He even seemed OK with indoctrination, telling students what to think, thereby avoiding anything that could later be used as the kind of “derogatory information” that could block an officer from promotion or get them fired. As the saying goes, control the classrooms and you control the future. 

The main effect of Hegseth’s raid on professional military education will be more emphasis on training, brain drain of the best faculty, and a hollowing out of the U.S. military’s strategic thinking. Focusing on fighting future wars, another of Hegseth’s themes, requires not just thinking how to do what we’ve always done better, but to think about how to do things differently. 

The educational agenda Hegseth advocates has only one answer to all security problems — ham-fisted military force. It says the U.S. will not be ready for a fight as a last resort, it says the U.S. is itching for a fight – bring it. 

But as the midterm election showed, the American people are tired of political theater, politics by spectacle and wasting taxpayer money on unwinnable wars of choice. Rhode Island’s Democratic Sen. Jack Reed is expected to reclaim the chair the Senate Armed Forces Committee in the upcoming Congress. Professional military education falls well within that panel’s purview. Hopefully the committee will use its investigative power to consider how professional military education can serve national security.