Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced sweeping educational guidelines Monday supporting his efforts to de-civilianize military higher education and align it with wartime priorities at the Naval War College.
In total, 33 directives were unveiled on Monday. Key changes included an AI-assisted capstone wargame instead of a written graduate thesis and expanded access to classified information for teaching courses.
To facilitate greater use of classified information in the study of war, Hegseth said he was ordering accelerated investments to build and expand Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities, or SCIF, on every war school campus to eliminate existing bottlenecks and ensure that students can learn and play war “at the highest national classification levels.”
“You can’t study real-world threats using open source journalism,” he said. “You cannot conduct realistic war games against an adversary’s operational plans over unclassified networks, and that is why today, under my leadership, this department is acting decisively to address these structural failures.”
Hegseth praised NWC for its integration of AI-supported wargaming, which the Pentagon now calls superintelligence, or SI. He said he was ordering the elimination of foundational theses in favor of establishing AI-assisted wargaming and highly stressful decision-constraint scenarios as the core of senior officer evaluation. To reinforce this change, he ordered a review of grading policies for the next academic year that ensure the majority of final grades are based on “individually assessed experiential learning activities, formal written assignments and examinations”, with participation in seminars being underestimated.
“I want to give a tip of the hat to the Naval War College. I understand that you’ve already done two of these IS-assisted war exercises this year alone, and in our discussions, that was a focal point of where they wanted to take this college,” Hegseth said. “We will create a permanent architecture of inter-college war games across all senior service colleges. No longer will collaboration be reduced to an Army colonel and a Navy captain sharing coffee in the same seminar room. True collaboration is forged through competitive operational friction.”
Additional guidance calls for the creation of “warfighter chair” positions to be filled by high-performing O-5 and O-6 officers across all SSCs to integrate emerging operational lessons into curriculum and war games. Hegseth also ordered a review of the charters of the SSC boards of visitors, including an audit of current members. Department secretaries will have 120 days to report any recommended changes, the results of a membership audit, and a proposed implementation schedule.
The United States Naval Academy has a Board of Visitors comprising members appointed by the President and a bipartisan selection of legislators appointed by Congress; the Naval War College has a board of academic advisors.
Hegseth, who did not respond to questions, had harsh words for the Naval War College during the speech. He said a study of military education launched in March, the full results of which have not yet been released, found that the institution was demonstrating covert opposition to his aggressive series of changes.
“Even more alarming, here at the Naval War College, our study identified a stubborn undercurrent of passive-aggressive institutional resistance,” Hegseth said, without citing specific names or examples. “There are those who believe they can hide behind academic, civil and regional accreditation mandates to wait out President (Donald) Trump’s term. They believe they should or can ignore the executive orders and quietly preserve false and sinister progressive frameworks until the political tide turns in their favor. Hear me straight. They are wrong. They are dead wrong.”
NWC faculty who have publicly opposed Hegseth and the Trump administration include Professor Pauline Shanks Kaurin, who resigned from the Admiral James B. Stockdale Professorship of Professional Military Ethics in 2025, citing a loss of academic freedom and perceived censorship under policies purporting to eradicate DEI philosophies. Professor Sarah CM Paine, who also left the university in 2025, was also critical, calling the Iranian conflict “one of the most incompetent wars in human history”.
The list of 33 new policies designed to prepare service colleges for war also called for the inclusion of “formal case studies analyzing recent operational and ethical successes and failures in (service colleges),” with a 90-day requirement to report on how such studies are integrated into curricula.
The directive targets those who opposed Trump’s policies within the military — particularly former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, who worked to keep the military out of disputes over the results of the 2020 presidential election and who appeared to take aim at Trump in his retirement speech, saying the military did not swear an oath to a “tyrant” or “wannabe dictator.” As a first step after taking office during his second term, Trump revoked Milley’s security clearance.
“Our programs routinely ignore the modern crises unfolding before our eyes. When a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff engages in actions during a presidential transition that raise profound constitutional questions regarding civilian control of the military, that is not an issue to be swept under the rug,” Hegseth said. “Just because some of you know Mark Milley does not mean we should not study his failures. This is arguably the most significant civil-military crisis since President (Harry S.) Truman relieved General Douglas MacArthur in 1951. Our schools of war should study it, debate it, and reinforce the fundamental constitutional principle that the military is strictly subordinate to elected civilian authority.”
Following this month’s midterm elections, which saw Democrats take control of the US Senate and House of Representatives, it was widely reported that lawmakers would attempt to impeach Hegseth over his handling of the war with Iran. Rep. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, introduced articles of impeachment against Hegseth on Monday. The House must pass the measure within two legislative days.
Hegseth acknowledged in his speech that the recently announced reforms would also be criticized, but maintained that professional military training required “purging bad ideas” and centering the goal of American military victory.
“In your profession, the profession of arms, the price of strategic incompetence is measured in flag-draped coffins, broken alliances and a broken republic,” he said. “The true mission statement of a war school should be straightforward: to train senior military officers so they can defeat America’s adversaries. »
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