The way America trains its top military officers is about to change significantly. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has issued a sweeping set of directives aimed at reshaping what happens inside the nation’s highest-level military schools — and he wants the changes to start now.
Hegseth released a memorandum outlining 33 specific directives for the military’s higher service colleges, all effective immediately. The order targets everything from how students are evaluated to who is allowed to teach them — with a clear emphasis on battlefield readiness over academic tradition.
AI War Games Replace Written Dissertations
Under the new rules, students working toward senior military leadership roles will no longer be required to complete lengthy written dissertations. Instead, they will need to demonstrate their ability to apply Artificial Intelligence in war game scenarios — a shift that reflects the Pentagon’s broader push to modernize how the military prepares for future conflicts.
The memorandum also eliminates lifetime tenure for newly hired civilian faculty and ends emeritus status at these institutions. Hegseth directed colleges to reduce the number of civilians on staff who lack military or defense experience, calling on schools to “realign the civilian-faculty ratio” so that “the majority of full-time faculty possess direct military experience and defense experience.” Civilians classified as “purely technical subject-matter experts shall be limited,” the directive states.
A Direct Message at the Naval War College
Hegseth delivered remarks on the new directives in person at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, speaking directly to students and faculty gathered there. His message was pointed: military education should be centered on winning, not on producing polished academic writing or broad geopolitical analysis.
Hegseth noted that the words “win” and “defeat” do not appear in the mission statements of the service colleges, and that the word “victory” shows up only once across all of them.
“We speak endlessly of producing critical thinkers, strategic enterprise leaders, and officers with an appreciation of complex global security environments,”
he said, before adding:
“This is the language of civilian bureaucracy, not military command.”
He urged faculty to push students into what he called
“the crucible of realistic operational thought,”
and made clear that preparing officers for combat should be the singular purpose of all coursework.
“Prepare them for war for lethality, for the life and death struggles that they one day may face,”
Hegseth told the faculty in attendance.
Turning to the students directly, Hegseth argued that the American public expects nothing short of full victory from its armed forces.
“The American people do not entrust their blood, their treasure, or their sons and daughters in our armed forces to lose or to fight to a draw,”
he said.
“They expect, they demand, they deserve nothing less than victory.”
Pushback Within the Institutions
Hegseth also addressed what he described as internal resistance to the administration’s agenda within military academic circles. He characterized it as a
“stubborn undercurrent of passive-aggressive institutional resistance”
and took direct aim at faculty members he said were hoping to outlast the current administration.
“Hear me clearly: they’re wrong, and they’re dead wrong,”
he said.
The Defense Secretary framed the broader reforms as part of a historic national security shift, asserting that the United States is undergoing
“the most far-reaching strategic recalibration of our national security posture since the end of the Second World War”
— one he described as
“deeper and more profound than the fall of the Soviet Union.”
