Fluellen Making Pistol Eat the Leek (1795) | Robert Mitchell Meadows (after Henry William Bunbury) / Metropolitan Museum of Art / Public Domain
We are witnessing the most sweeping overhaul of American military higher education in decades. On September 29, Hegseth’s DOD issued a memo indicating that civilian faculty at military institutions will no longer receive tenure. Labeled “Refocusing the Military Service Academies and Senior Service College on Warfighter Education,” the memo directs institutions such as West Point, the Naval Academy, and the Air Force Academy to eliminate civilian faculty tenure “effective immediately.” An earlier, leaked version of the memo also demanded that schools launch a line-by-line curriculum review to eliminate courses deemed non-essential to immediate combat leadership.
To a casual observer, stripping tenure or focusing strictly on “warfighting” might sound like a commonsense attempt to streamline military training. Understanding why this proposal is intensely concerning requires an understanding of how military higher education operates, and why Congress deliberately built it to incorporate tenured civilian scholars.
The United States operates a complex, multi-tiered network of professional military education institutions. The first tier includes the undergraduate service academies like the US Military Academy (West Point), the US Naval Academy (Annapolis), and the US Air Force Academy (Colorado Springs), which educate roughly 13,000 undergraduates at any given time. These students may select from a variety of majors across the humanities, social sciences, and technical fields and are awarded a Bachelor of Science degree upon graduation.
The second tier are institutions such as the Naval War College in Rhode Island and the Army War College in Pennsylvania, which provide graduate-level education to mid-career and senior officers preparing for high-level command and strategic planning.
These institutions are both military commands bound by Defense Department regulations and accredited higher education institutions. To grant recognized degrees, they must meet the same academic standards, accreditation requirements, and peer-review expectations as civilian universities such as Ohio State or Stanford.
Military academies rely on a hybrid faculty model composed of two distinct groups. Depending on the academy, a majority—ranging from 50 percent at the Naval Academy to roughly 70 to 73 percent at West Point and the Air Force Academy—are active-duty military officers, with the vast majority serving in rotating military instructor roles on short-term assignments ranging two-to three-years. The remaining 27 to 50 percent of the faculty are civilian professors, professional academics hired through traditional university search processes.
In 1992, Congress enacted federal legislation (the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1993, Sec. 523.a) explicitly directing the service academies to expand their civilian faculty ranks. The Pentagon memo argues that tenure leads to “stagnation, complacency, and inflexibility,” asserting that it causes curricula to drift away from warfighting priorities toward individual faculty members’ research interests.
However, leadership at the service academies—including superintendents testifying before Congress—has historically defended civilian tenure for two primary structural reasons. At the institutional level, active-duty military faculty rotate out every few years. Without a more permanent civilian core of faculty, departments will suffer constant turnover, resulting in the loss of long-term curriculum oversight and institutional memory, as well as the depth of specialization that only comes from educators with years of emphasis in their particular fields, like languages, medicine, and engineering. This will also disrupt multi-year scientific and strategic research projects that short-term military rotations are not equipped to sustain.
Developing scientific breakthroughs or tracking global security threats requires research timelines that span 5, 10, or 20 years. Major projects—such as developing orbital satellite hardware over a decade at the Air Force Academy, analyzing decades of global extremist networks at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, or engineering quantum-resistant encryption at the Naval Academy—require continuous academic leadership. Tenured civilian faculty provide the institutional stability essential to ensuring these critical scientific and strategic endeavors continue.
At the organizational level, military culture is hierarchical; active-duty officers are bound by orders and the chain of command, making it difficult for them to publicly challenge official doctrine or to critique military failures without risking their careers. Tenured civilian professors are freer and obligated to engage in more rigorous debate. This academic independence and demonstration of personal confidence encourages future leaders to show intellectual courage and question assumptions before facing real-world conflicts.
As West Point Superintendent Lt. Gen. Steven Gilland and Naval Academy Superintendent Vice Adm. Yvette Davids told lawmakers during Senate hearings, tenure is also an essential recruiting tool. Without standard academic protections, military academies will struggle to attract top scholars away from civilian universities.
Stripping civilian faculty and reducing education to only Military Sciences flies in the face of current best practices. Highly effective and respected militaries, such as the German military, are currently incorporating more civilians into their education programs, not fewer, while historically ineffective militaries like Saudi Arabia use military-centric training programs with limited educational breadth and of shorter duration. Successful militaries like those in Europe have chosen to copy and expand upon the current civil-military model of American education for a reason: because it produces better leaders.
Hegseth’s changes to military education will create service academies that are focused on producing people who are good at killing (an extension of Hegseth’s broader obsession with “lethality”) when they are meant to produce people who are good at leading. This is reflective of the MAGA movement’s general rhetoric towards higher education: that it ought to be designed to produce students who embrace conformist thinking and reject the type of critical thought that leads to the questioning of political leaders or proclaimed American supremacy.
This marks a fundamental shift in how the United States prepares its military officers, and not for the better. Stripping tenure and purging non-tactical coursework will transform America’s military academies from world-class, accredited universities into narrow, intellectually unadventurous vocational training centers. While that may satisfy short-term political goals, it removes the intellectual friction and critical thinking that have sustained American military leadership for over two centuries. In William Shakespeare’s Henry V, just before the famous Battle of Agincourt, the king proclaims, “All things are ready if our minds be so.” The removal of civilian faculty and the streamlining of educational material will damage the readiness of the mind. But of course, an officer who only studies military sciences and rejects the arts would never read such words.
