Hegseth Targets Military Academy Bureaucracy Accused Of Undermining Military Readiness
War Secretary Pete Hegseth is taking aim at the military’s academic bureaucracy, accusing its institutions of prioritizing left-wing ideology over preparing America’s future military leaders to win wars.
Hegseth announced a sweeping 33-point overhaul of professional military education during a visit to the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island on Nov. 9, targeting what he described as entrenched bureaucracy, ideological influence and institutional resistance to military reform, according to a Department of War announcement. The reforms include eliminating lifetime tenure for newly hired civilian faculty, replacing traditional academic theses with AI-assisted wargaming and introducing performance-based evaluations for instructors, rather than tenure.
This speech occurs as Hegseth comes under fire for the increasingly unpopular Iran War and faces potential impeachment. He was met with a group of 30-40 protestors on his Monday visit to the War College, according to WPRI 12 News.
The Department of War (DoW) declined to comment.
“This morning, we strip away the comfortable veneer of academic tradition and confront unyielding elemental truths. The fundamental duty of the armed forces of the United States of America is to assure America’s victory in war full stop, victory”, Hegseth told the Naval War College audience.
Military colleges have devolved from breeding bold military leaders to the abstract postmodernism of woke civilian universities, and are thus in need of reform, Hegseth said.
“A true mission statement for a war college should be blunt: to educate senior military officers so that they can defeat America’s adversaries,” Hegseth stated plainly during his Navy War College speech.
“Our institutions succumbed to the prevailing intellectual fashions of the civilian academy, a system that has largely abandoned teaching students how to think in favor of indoctrinating them into what tothink,” he admitted during the speech.
Left-wing social agendas permeated the armed services before and during the Biden era.The United States Air Force Academy previously held seminars on “transgender visibility”, the Daily Caller News Foundation reported. Additionally, the Air Force Academy administered “gender inclusivity training” that suggested cadets do not use the terms “mom” or “dad” and instead use “person-centered words” that “include all genders.” Prior to 2025, the United States Naval Academy offered courses titled “gender matters” and “gender and sexuality studies”, per Stars and Stripes.
Academies bent to racial grievance identity politics. Many service academies taught Critical Race Theory, with “How to be an Antiracist” being required reading by the United States Naval Academy. Up until 2025, military academies took race-based DEI into consideration for admissions.
Until Trump’s executive orders targeting DEI in military service academies, West Point offered a Diversity and Inclusion minor, according to the Government Accountability Office. This minor was cut in late January 2025, according to Kiowa County News.
“Under these new guidelines, the Department will evaluate military schools by a singular, uncompromising standard: ‘Does this program forge leaders who will win America’s wars?’” the DoW announcement states.
Each school would have a “warfighter chair”— a position filled by O-5 to O-6 commanders freshly back from an operational deployment to ensure that students receive real-time combat insights. Seminars and capstones would be replaced by wargaming scenarios. Additionally, lifetime tenure for newly-hired civilian personnel would be eliminated, with instructors instead entering performance-based contracts rated on their ability to teach and caliber of their national security research.
The implementation of these new standards will be monitored by the Under Secretary of War for Personnel and Readiness, per the memo.
While addressing the Naval War College, Hegseth also pointed to a pattern of institutional resistance to new mandates.
“Most alarmingly, here at the Naval War College, our review identified a stubborn undercurrent of passive-aggressive institutional resistance…they think they should or can ignore executive orders and quietly preserve false and sinister progressive frameworks until the political winds shift in their favor” he stated, citing a bureaucrat class resisting new mandates based off of their own political ideologies.
Hegseth’sreforms have faced pushback from some leadership within the armed forces. Officers on separation boards for the Navy and Marine Corps have been refusing to separate transgender troops despite the executive order.
“In your profession, the profession of arms, the price of strategic incompetence is measured in flag-draped coffins, shattered alliances and a broken republic,” Hegseth told students.
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