ANALYSIS – This is a topic I have been engaged in for years. I have discussed it with retired generals and top Pentagon officials, but it rarely gets the attention it deserves.
Sending America's military officers to prestigious civilian schools is a big reason the military is going ‘woke.'
And going woke is a big reason the Pentagon is suffering an ‘unprecedented' recruiting crisis. (RELATED: Anti-Woke Victory – Marines Top 100% Retention Goals)
And I say that as a former Marine Corps officer who graduated from Georgetown University and earned graduate degrees from London and Cambridge universities in the UK.
Elite education is fine, as long as you have the solid intellectual grounding, values and moral strength to resist the indoctrination.
Too many military officers today don't have that.
As a matter of fact, I recently dropped out of an executive online public policy program at Harvard's Kennedy School because it was a drain, even on me, being surrounded by woke professors and students, even via Zoom! (RELATED: Republicans Seek Information on Washington's New ‘Global Woke Czar')
To make the case against sending our officers to these civilian schools, Frank Wuco, a retired Naval Intelligence Officer with 23 years of active-duty service, penned an excellent op-ed in Newsweek.
Wuco, who also served as a senior advisor to Team Trump, wrote of our current cadre of military leaders:
Many find it difficult to shake the woke indoctrination of their campus experience. Back on duty in Arlington, officers are wholly dependent upon the approval of their civilian bosses. Uniformed “leaders” in the five-sided building may be physically brave, but too many are moral cowards.
And that is why the current destructive leftist wokeism is able to infect our military.
Wuco adds:
The military itself birthed this one by building a system that miseducates our officers. Over the course of decades, Pentagon luminaries convinced themselves that non-military education forges better practitioners of the arts and sciences of warfare. So in terms of instruction, military officers are on par with their civil-servant and academic counterparts. You might think that's fantastic. It's not. This ruinous and disorienting requirement has left our military leaders as far afield from their war-fighting forebears of the previous centuries as one could possibly imagine.
Our officers are politically and socially indoctrinated right alongside the population that passes through our colleges and universities. We send our officers to Ivy League schools and other elite institutions of “higher learning” to supposedly round out their educations…
Our nation's official war colleges offer little solace. They seem suicidally determined to out-progressive their rabidly progressive civilian counterparts. Whatever the case, without advanced degrees from these institutions, officers can turn in their resignation letters at the 10-year mark. Their careers will go no further.
Eager to fit in on campus, many officers seek to demonstrate that they are not quite so bad as their civilian colleagues think. They want to be thoughtful and understanding, politically correct in ways that make them less distasteful to their temporary peers. The ideologies they absorb—to be fair, sometimes out of survival—flow back to base, out to sea, onto the field, and straight into the Pentagon, where woke mantras are now fostered, promoted, and enshrined into policy with evangelical zeal.
Wuco rightly concludes:
Recruitment problems are a symptom of the failure to educate and cultivate genuine military leaders. The young and service-ready of our nation still want to stand out as elite guardians of their society against foreign threats and domestic ruin. Unfortunately, if what they are being asked to join is no longer discernible from the disorientation of modern civil society, and they are smart enough to notice, then the question understandably becomes, “what's the point?”
“Wokeness is a sickness. It's prevalent. It's the rule. And it's destroying our military.” ALD
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
READ NEXT: How to Defeat Woke, Inc. >>
Its the colleges & now service academies
No, I think you’ll find that the academies still teach them how to be leaders. The woke movement has co-opted post graduate education of these young officers.
The article does not mention what happened in parallel with woke education. Woke education directly facilitated Obama’s campaign to force out officers who were either not woke – or not woke enough. Obama, as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces weaponized the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) to go after them.
Obama forced out nearly 300 officers O6 and higher. I had noticed the many times he used military only audiences to repeat controversial policies or announce new ones. Protocol requires all officers at a Command or Base to attend. Obama operatives (many of them active duty officers) would report the reactions / comments of officers around them. If an officer made a neutral comment, or did not gush enthusiastically enough, their actions made them subject to penalties under the UCMJ. They would have faced one or more of four articles. Article 88 (Contempt toward officials), Article 89 (Disrespect toward a Senior Officer), Article 91, (Insubordination toward a Senior Officer), or Article 134 (Actions to the prejudice of good order and discipline). Faced with a possible career ending Letter of Reprimand or Court Martial, most already had 20 years and simply retired.
They were warned to keep quiet, or they would be recalled to Active Duty for Court Martial, and lose everything. (Yes, Officers can be recalled. Title 10 US CFR)
Sec Austin and Gen Milley were willing hatchet men for Obama. They used the Pentagon 60 day stand down “to root out extremism” to force out even more.
1SG, USA, Ret
The college/university institution in the US is good for just one thing in the greatest part; producing arrogant, soulless douche-bags. That’s all, folks.
Paul Crespo is on-target. Too bad he has left active duty. The Marines lost a good one.
Taking a class at UCLA or Stanford or UofM or Yale or Princeton is NOT going to ruin a good soldier. Indeed, one might well argue that being exposed to the same philosophies (and education) as the non-military portion of the population would improve the military person’s grasp of – and ability to rebut – the more pernicious notions leaching out of the halls of academia – it’s no more dangerous than any other effort to “know one’s enemy”. Studying Marx in order to understand the manner in which it influenced Soviet Military thinking did not make me a Commie or compromise my ability to fight a ship. The problem is that every commissioned officer’s promotion must receive Congressional approval. Up through Major/Lt. Cdr, that’s pretty pro forma, but at the O-5 level and above, the ability to ape the attitudes of the politicians who control one’s fate becomes increasingly critical and by the time that they start handing out stars, the ability to kiss a_s in Congress counts for far more than the ability to kick a_s on the battlefield. How many career officers, with 20+ years in and bucking for flag rank are gonna tell AOC she’s full of crap when she starts talking about integrating transgenders into the military? THAT is the problem. Congress’ influence over the military needs to be constrained so that the important issue becomes military competence, not groveling for approval.
The left has made sure that our real military leaders were forced out and what we have now are nothing but politicians in uniforms. It’s no wonder our military is so screwed up, they are without leaders.
I received my Ph.D.in Physics from U of New Mexico while on active duty. I worked full time a a blue suiter while attending classes in the evening.. Once I had my degree, I ran into one Col who hated my guts because I would not lie to him. If you want to keep “non-woke” officers you need to stop the “up or out” system of promotion. General Patton would have never obtained rank with the current promotion system. We need to go back to the pre-WWII promotion system where the majority of of officers can stay for a 40 year career if they wish and can do their jobs. Another option is to let us retire at 20 but keep them in the active reserves so we can keep our military skills up at the same time we are working in the civilian world.
Great comments. They ought to be sent to the Republican members of the Armed Services Committees.
As a one time NCO and drill instructor, I had observed that the military didn’t support the same values that the Army did when I was a part of it. Now I understand that the leftist indoctrination industry has wedeled its way into the military and fed these young officers the same bullshit that they feed our children. The view the military as some sort of big social justice experiment lab rather than its true purpose of defending the nation.