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Pete Hegseth, perhaps the most thuggish, toadying, all-around underqualified secretary of defense in the job’s nearly 80-year history, has now shown himself to be the most institutionally destructive as well.

His announcement on Friday, that he was cutting the department’s ties to Harvard University—and possibly to other centers of higher learning too—reflects not only a smug anti-intellectualism, which is out of sync with a high-tech modern military, but also a total misunderstanding of how and why its ties to academia first came about.

“For too long,” Hegseth said in a video, “this department has sent our best and brightest officers to Harvard, hoping the university would better understand and appreciate our warrior class. Instead, too many of our officers came back looking too much like Harvard—heads full of globalist and radical ideologies that do not improve our fighting ranks. … We train warriors, not wokesters. Harvard, good riddance.”

From start to finish, this speech is pure rubbish.

The need to broaden the education of America’s warriors was first perceived by Gen. George Marshall, the U.S. Army’s chief of staff during World War II (hardly an emblem of woke). Marshall relied heavily on the chief of his Strategy and Policy Group, Brig. Gen. George Lincoln. (I delved into his papers at the West Point Archives for Chapter 1 of my 2013 book The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War.)

In the last year of the war—at age 37 the Army’s youngest general officer—Lincoln met with Marshall daily, coordinated every major military campaign, and helped draft the treaties at Yalta and Potsdam, which shaped the political map of postwar Europe. He then assisted Marshall’s replacement, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, in creating the Department of Defense.

The special thing about Lincoln was, after graduating from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1929, he won a Rhodes scholarship and spent the next three years at Oxford, studying philosophy, politics, and economics—then returned to West Point to teach before getting assigned to high-level staff jobs after WWII broke out.

While working with Marshall at the various Allied planning conferences, Lincoln noticed that much of the crucial work was done by a handful of fellow military officers, almost all of whom had also been Rhodes scholars. He did a little research and found that West Point had produced 13 Rhodes scholars in its history. Of the six still alive, four were holding senior policy posts, helping set the terms of military strategy and postwar peace treaties.

As the war ended, the United States was emerging as a global power with global responsibilities. It would need leaders well versed in politics, diplomacy, economics, and strategy. But few such people existed in or out of the military. Certainly West Point, Lincoln’s alma mater, wasn’t training such people. At the time, all its cadets took the same courses, which focused mainly on engineering. There was a course on bridge building, but no courses on military history.

In May 1945, less than two weeks after the end of the war, Lincoln wrote a letter to one of his mentors back at West Point. “I am beginning to think that what we need is a type of staff officer with at least three heads—one political, one economic, and one military.” In another letter, he proposed “baptizing practically all officers” with a “sprinkling” of education in politics, history, and economics, while taking “certain selected” officers and “dunking” them in those waters much more deeply.

The Army, he continued, “can no longer afford to depend on the fortuitous assembly of Rhodes Scholars. … There must be an integrated system of high-level training if Army policy and national policy are properly to be served, a system which begins here at West Point.”

Lincoln could easily have gone on to have a storied career, rising through the Army’s officer corps. Instead, he returned to West Point to create a new department of social sciences, which would mold this new system. Since regulations required that department heads be colonels, not generals, Lincoln even took a demotion in his rank and was never again promoted.

He started his new job on Sept. 1, 1947. He and Col. Herman Beukema, his onetime mentor and now the new department’s co-founder, created courses in history, government, foreign affairs, geography, national-security economics, and international relations. Lincoln also wrote the nation’s first college-level textbook on international politics, a reference that was assigned not only at West Point but at several civilian colleges across the country.

Over time, cadets concentrating in social sciences formed an elite enclave, which became an object of resentment and ridicule among some more hidebound officers. As late as 1991, when Gen. “Stormin’ Norman” Schwarzkopf returned from his command of Operation Desert Storm to deliver a rousing victory speech at West Point, he reminisced about his own days as a cadet and poked fun at the crazy ideas advanced by “a couple of left-wing pinko Social Science instructors.”

Schwarzkopf was mining a well-known stereotype. (Even at this late date, some of the cadets laughed at and applauded his remark.) He was only half joking, however. Some of his own staff officers had been products of “Sosh,” the academy’s nickname for the social sciences department. But Schwarzkopf’s jab (minus the humor) is the view that Hegseth now holds of the entire enterprise: seeing war as nothing more than killing. In this view, all other dimensions of warfare—the idea that soldiers should understand the enemy they’re fighting, interpret their tactics in a strategic context, and stay within the confines of international law—are not merely secondary but counterproductive, contrary to a “warrior spirit,” woke.

Lincoln had another purpose in creating the new department. “I am certain,” he wrote in one letter, “that we must make strenuous efforts … to improve the so-called Army mind.” This would mean, above all, “impressing the student with the fact that the basic requirement is to learn to think—sometimes a very painful process.”

Perhaps more than anything else, this is what Hegseth sees, and fears, in the officers who have earned degrees or fellowships at places like Harvard. This spirit of inquiry, curiosity, and criticism is what he defines as “woke.”

A Seat on Trump’s “Board of Peace” Costs $1 Billion. Guess Who Gets the Money.

Early on in the development of Sosh, Lincoln put in place a rule allowing cadets who did especially well in his courses to go study at a civilian graduate school, with West Point paying their tuition. In exchange, these cadets, after earning their master’s or doctoral degrees, would come back to teach in the Sosh department for at least three years. Once they fulfilled that obligation, Lincoln would use his still-considerable connections in Washington to get them choice assignments in the Pentagon, the State Department, the White House, a foreign embassy, or a prestigious command post.

Lincoln died in 1975, but the Sosh tradition lived on. Today almost all general officers in the U.S. Army (and also in the Air Force, which was a branch of the Army until 1947, when it became an independent service) hold graduate degrees—and most of them, at least the generals I know, are as proud of their degrees as they are of their ranks.

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For instance, Gen. David Petraeus, commander of the more successful phases of the war in Iraq, went to West Point, then earned a Ph.D. at Princeton University. Gen. H.R. McMaster, who was a lethal tank commander and a counterinsurgency strategist in Iraq (as well as, briefly, national security adviser during Donald Trump’s first term as president), followed a similar path, getting his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina.

Maybe Hegseth sees those officers as epitomes of woke. But what about the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Dan Caine, appointed and lauded by Trump and his entire team, including Hegseth? His page on the JCS website states that Caine “has completed a range of national security and leadership courses, including Harvard Kennedy School’s course for Senior Executives in National and International Security.”

Someone should ask Caine, the next time he appears at a press conference or a congressional hearing, whether his spirit and skill as a warrior and a citizen were helped or hindered by his Ivy League exposure. Maybe Hegseth should have asked the question—and maybe he should think and read up even a little bit about a vast range of topics before opening his mouth.

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