Pete Hegseth Has Outdone Himself |
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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........