Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered an overhaul of higher military service colleges today, releasing a memorandum listing 33 directives that he stated would be effective immediately.
The mandate will require students aspiring to roles as senior military leaders to prove their acumen using Artificial Intelligence in war games rather than write lengthy written dissertations, and end emeritus status and eliminate lifetime tenure for newly hired civilian faculty.
It will also decrease the number of civilians employed who have no military experience. Hegseth has instructed military colleges to “realign the civilian-faculty ratio” in their workforces to “ensure that the majority of full-time faculty possess direct military experience and defense experience,” while civilians who are considered “purely technical subject-matter experts shall be limited.”
“We speak endlessly of producing critical thinkers, strategic enterprise leaders, and officers with an appreciation of complex global security environments,” said Hegseth in a speech about the directives to students and faculty at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island today.
Hegseth said the primary focus of military education should be to teach students how to achieve victory, pointing out that the words “win” and “defeat” are absent from service colleges’ mission statements, and the word “victory” appears only once.
“This is the language of civilian bureaucracy, not military command,” he said.
He asserted that the United States is undergoing “the most far-reaching strategic recalibration of our national security posture since the end of the Second World War,” which he described as “deeper and more profound than the fall of the Soviet Union.”
He spoke out against what he called a “stubborn undercurrent of passive-aggressive institutional resistance” within the Naval War College and academics who hope to “wait out President Trump’s term in office.”
“Hear me clearly: they’re wrong, and they’re dead wrong,” he said.
Addressing the faculty, Hegseth urged them to drive their students into “the crucible of realistic operational thought” and stressed that victory should be the only goal of all coursework.
“Prepare them for war for lethality, for the life and death struggles that they one day may face,” he said.
Addressing the students, he also declared that the United States must not accept a stalemate in a war.
“The American people do not entrust their blood, their treasure, or their sons and daughters in our armed forces to lose or to fight to a draw,” he said. “They expect, they demand, they deserve nothing less than victory.”
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