Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth today ordered an overhaul of the military service colleges, issuing a memorandum listing 33 directives that he said would take effect immediately.
The mandate will require students aspiring to senior military leadership roles to demonstrate their acumen in using artificial intelligence in war games rather than writing lengthy written theses, and will end emeritus status and eliminate lifetime tenure for newly hired civilian professors.
It will also reduce the number of civilians employed without military experience. Hegseth called on military colleges to “realign the civilian faculty ratio” in their workforces to “ensure that the majority of full-time faculty have direct military experience and defense experience,” while civilians considered “purely technical subject matter experts will be limited.”
“We continually talk about developing critical thinkers, strategic business leaders and officers with an appreciation of complex global security environments,” Hegseth said in a speech on the guidelines delivered today to students and faculty at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island.
Hegseth said the primary goal of military education should be to teach students how to achieve victory, pointing out that the words “victory” and “defeat” are absent from military college mission statements and that the word “victory” appears only once.
“This is the language of the civilian bureaucracy, not that of the military command,” he said.
He asserted that the United States is undergoing “the most thoroughgoing strategic recalibration of our national security posture since the end of World War II,” 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 the end of President Trump’s term.”
“Listen to me clearly: They are wrong, and they are completely wrong,” he said.
Addressing professors, Hegseth urged them to lead their students into “the crucible of realistic operational thinking” and stressed that victory should be the sole objective of all courses.
“Prepare them for the deadly war, the life and death struggles they may face one day,” he said.
Speaking to students, he also said the United States should not accept stalemate in a war.
“The American people do not entrust their blood, their treasures or their sons and daughters to our armed forces to lose or fight evenly,” he said. “They expect, they demand, they deserve nothing less than victory.”
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