The Pentagon under Secretary Pete Hegseth has launched a systematic campaign to reshape military education, cutting academic ties with elite universities, purging library shelves, and cancelling courses on ideological grounds, "Hvylya" reports, citing The Atlantic.
Hegseth has called the targeted institutions "factories of anti-American resentment and military disdain." The Defense Department has instructed service academies to remove library books that promote "divisive concepts and gender ideology" and required them to cancel some classes because of their content. A former Biden-administration official's professorial appointment at West Point was also rescinded.
The ripple effects extend beyond formal directives. Defense scholar Kori Schake, who was recently disinvited from a planned lecture at the Air War College, argued that Hegseth "has created a command climate in which subordinates might fear defending their educational programs." She compared the chilling effect to the tightening of rules of engagement in Afghanistan under the Obama administration: subordinates "sometimes comply preemptively and even more stringently than the formal directive might require."
Schake, who has taught at West Point and spoken at several senior service schools, warned that service members are being "denied opportunities to learn the history of the military's relationship with its civilian leaders" at a time when that history has never been more relevant. Her own cancelled lecture covered two centuries of U.S. civil-military relations - research that produced a book favorably reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and the military's Joint Force Quarterly.
Previously: McMaster and Sullivan Call Trump's National Security Strategy a Description of a Non-Existent World.