Even though Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is mired in waging an unpopular and unsuccessful war against Iran, on Wednesday he demonstrated his ongoing fixation on culture wars by announcing that he would not allow civilian professors at military academies to receive tenure.
Now an expert is calling him out for this, characterizing it as evidence of an anti-education philosophy — including Hegseth literally banishing the word “educate.”
“The supersize black Sharpie is what gives it away,” wrote The Atlantic contributor Eliot A. Cohen, a professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins University, on Wednesday. “Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s order to stop awarding tenure to civilian professors at the military academies ends with a huge, jagged signature—an homage, perhaps, to that of the president—the size of two of the paragraphs above.”
Cohen continued, “Military education is still education—a point that Hegseth fails to understand. It seeks to develop disciplined, curious, insightful thinkers. The service academies do not, in any meaningful way, teach tactics. They are there to educate young officers, admittedly emphasizing some qualities that get a lighter touch in civilian institutions.”
Civilian professors are essential to this process, Cohen pointed out.
“The best anthology of writing about leadership I know of was produced by a West Point professor—someone with nary a day of military service—who also edited a fantastic edition of the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant,” Cohen said. “Men and women who are going to be officers will learn as much about what leadership entails from Shakespeare, or classes in cognitive psychology or ancient history, as they will from a perusal of field manuals.”
The Johns Hopkins scholar then drew attention to an on-the-nose manifestation of Hegseth’s war on education.
“Hegsethian thinking, if that is the right word, has permeated the senior ranks of officers and officials in some of these institutions,” Cohen explained. “In a particularly egregious act, the Air Force Academy has removed the word educate from its mission. This is a step backward worthy of a caveman in a G suit—someone who thinks that fancy weapons and aggressiveness guarantee victory. It is the mindset of someone who has learned nothing from the American military failures that now stretch back to Vietnam, and will produce more such in the future.”
Despite Hegseth’s outwardly confident makeover of the Pentagon, President Donald Trump may fire Hegseth if Republicans suffer losses in the 2026 midterm elections, with retired naval officer Theodore R. Johnson writing for The Washington Post on Wednesday that Hegseth would be a logical scapegoat given his prosecution of the controversial Iran war. Twenty years earlier, after President George W. Bush’s Republicans were shellacked in the 2006 midterms, the president fired Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
In addition to the Iran war, Hegseth has provoked harsh criticism for focusing on culture wars in the military, particularly by trying to purge references to “woke” information such as climate change and targeting racial minorities and women in terms of ending careers and denying earned promotions.
“Welcome to the cold open for ‘Saturday Night Live’ this week, right?” executive director of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America Paul Reickhoff said on Wednesday. “But it is our reality. And I’ve always said that Pete Hegseth is the acting secretary of ‘Culture War.’ His job has been to wage culture war on the Pentagon. And this is the latest extension of that.”