War Secretary Pete Hegseth just aimed a 90-day task force directly at the heads of the professors and administrators running America’s war colleges — and if you’ve been paying attention to how Hegseth operates, you already know how this ends. The man doesn’t form task forces to make polite suggestions.
Somebody in the “whiteness studies” department should probably start updating their resume.
Hegseth ordered Under Secretary Anthony Tata to evaluate the Army War College, Naval War College, National Defense University, Marine Corps University, and Air War College. The stated goal: make sure these schools are focused on national security, strategy, history, and excellence. The unstated goal: find the woke garbage and rip it out.
Those are actually Hegseth’s own words. “We need to rip them out, and we’re going to,” he said while rattling off courses like “seminars on genocide through the analytic of gender,” “whiteness studies,” programs that “celebrate the history of Hamas,” and graduate studies on “the abolition of law enforcement.”
At a war college. Where we send our colonels and Navy captains to learn how to win wars. They’re studying the abolition of law enforcement.
Meanwhile, the entire Beltway press corps is having a collective aneurysm because the Pentagon temporarily kept some photographers out of briefings after they published “unflattering” photos of Hegseth. That’s the story they want you focused on. Not the fact that America’s future generals have been getting marinated in critical race theory — the photos. The press is going wall-eyed over camera angles while Hegseth is gutting the academic assembly line that produces the next generation of military leadership.
(You’d think journalists who spent four years shrieking at us to “follow the science” could follow a story that’s right in front of their faces.)
There’s also an 8-page memo overhauling Stars and Stripes — the military newspaper that’s been around since the Civil War — banning wire service content, comic strips, and even March Madness coverage. Content must now be “consistent with good order and discipline.” Beetle Bailey on suicide watch.
But the war college probe is the big play here, and it matters a lot more than the press realizes.
Look at the pattern. Hegseth doesn’t swing randomly — he works in a sequence, and if you’ve been watching, it’s as obvious as a flare in the night sky. Step one: fire the DEI generals at the top. He canned Gen. CQ Brown, Admirals Franchetti and Fagan, and roughly two dozen other top brass — all the ones who got their stars by checking the right identity boxes instead of winning the right battles. Step two: cut off the Ivy League pipeline. He yanked all military education programs from Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Yale, MIT, and Brown. Step three — and this is the one that just dropped — clean out the war colleges themselves.
You see what he’s doing? He’s not just pulling weeds. He’s poisoning the soil they grow in.
Fire the woke generals, and the Pentagon replaces them with warriors. But new woke generals would just grow back if the institutions that train them are still pumping out officers who think “unconscious bias in targeting protocols” is a real field of study. Cut the Ivy League fellowships, and officers stop getting radicalized at Princeton seminars about “Gender, Reproduction, and Genocide.” But the war colleges are the mothership. That’s where a sharp colonel walks in thinking about combined arms maneuver warfare and walks out three semesters later worried about whether his unit’s leadership reflects “the full diversity of the American experience.”
(“Sir, the enemy is flanking us from the north.” “Have we considered how our response might disproportionately impact communities of color?”)
When this task force reports back in 90 days — that puts us right around mid-June — the professors and administrators who get flagged aren’t going to get a stern talking-to and a diversity training session. They’re going to get the CQ Brown treatment. Hegseth ordered a 20% reduction in four-star generals. You think he’s going to go easier on tenured professors teaching “whiteness studies” on the taxpayer dime?
Mark my words: by fall, at least two of these senior service colleges will have entirely new leadership teams. The curriculum reviews will produce a purge list, and Anthony Tata — a retired two-star general who literally wrote books about military leadership — isn’t the kind of guy who buries a report in a filing cabinet and calls it a day.
And here’s the part that nobody in the media is going to connect until it’s already happened. The war colleges don’t just train American officers. They train officers from allied nations. The Naval War College alone hosts military leaders from dozens of countries every year. When those foreign officers show up next fall and the reading list says “Sun Tzu” instead of “Ibram X. Kendi,” that sends a signal straight to Beijing: the Americans are done playing faculty lounge games. They’re back to training warfighters. Good luck with that, Chairman Xi.
The left is going to scream about “academic freedom” and “politicizing military education.” That’s adorable, coming from the people who spent a decade cramming Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility” into every reading list at West Point. The politicization already happened, folks. Hegseth is the un-politicization.
Ninety days. The clock started Thursday. Enjoy your “Genocide Through the Analytic of Gender” seminars while they last, professors. Pete Hegseth doesn’t form task forces that come back empty-handed.