Hegseth orders military education overhaul targeting ‘ideological distractions,’ prioritizing merit and combat readiness

“For too long, academic drift in our Professional Military Education (PME) enterprise, specifically our Senior Service Colleges, traded combat readiness for theory and indulged ideological distractions over practical warfighting,” Hegseth wrote.

The overhaul follows a review Hegseth launched in March with an explicitly stated goal of keeping political ideology out of military education.

On March 12, Hegseth ordered a 90-day review of senior military colleges to determine whether their faculty, curricula and standards were focused on warfighting and free of political bias. His memorandum, titled “Strengthening the Effectiveness of Our Senior Service Colleges,” established the Senior Service College Task Force under the Pentagon’s personnel and readiness leadership.

The panel was tasked with examining senior service colleges and their fellowships at military institutions, identifying deficiencies, and assessing their alignment with the National Defense Strategy. Institutions covered included the National Defense University and the Army, Naval, Air and Marine Corps war colleges.

Hegseth’s March announcement was more explicitly directed at “woke” education than the November memorandum.

“Professional Military Education should produce warfighters and leaders—not wokesters,” he wrote in his March announcement.

The November 9 memorandum contains 33 directives covering curricula, faculty qualifications, grading, artificial intelligence and competitive war games. It also eliminates lifetime tenure and emeritus status for newly hired senior service college faculty, subject to statutory requirements and existing agreements.

The order presents its reforms as the follow-through on that review. It says the task force’s assessment and a parallel departmental review found that military education had stagnated and required immediate realignment. It does not identify particular courses or instructors as examples of ideological distractions or explicitly name diversity, equity and inclusion programs or critical race theory.

Under the new order, constitutional principles, civil-military relations, command authorities, and officers’ legal and oath-bound obligations must form the foundation of professional ethics and leadership education. Schools must incorporate case studies examining recent operational and ethical successes and failures.

The Pentagon will also establish mechanisms to audit curricula, faculty hiring and student assessments. Those reviews must ensure that instruction, personnel decisions and evaluations are based solely on merit, individual excellence, initiative, hard work and objective performance standards.

The overhaul would change both who teaches future military leaders and how those officers are evaluated.

Senior service colleges must develop plans to ensure a majority of full-time faculty possess direct military and defense experience. Civilian faculty should primarily have backgrounds in honorable military service, substantial Pentagon civilian service, intelligence work or national security.

Civilian faculty positions would convert, as appropriate, to renewable three-year contracts. Renewal evaluations would consider teaching effectiveness and research supporting national security or defense priorities. The tenure restriction expressly applies to newly hired faculty.

Students would face greater emphasis on measurable individual performance. Beginning with the 2027–28 academic year, most of a student’s final grade must come from individually assessed experiential learning, formal writing assignments and examinations. Schools must reduce the weight of subjective seminar participation while continuing to require satisfactory participation.

The order also requires a standardized culminating war game or comprehensive examination that carries substantial weight in students’ final grades and class standing, helping inform talent management decisions. Schools must fully incorporate that assessment before the 2028–29 academic year.

Speaking to approximately 700 students and faculty members at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, Hegseth argued that military education must prepare officers for operational competition.

“Promotion to senior rank will not be an administrative reward for longevity,” he said. “It will be earned by demonstrating the intellectual agility, lethal operational competence and moral resolve required to win in combat.”

Other directives require AI competencies for graduates, secure environments for experimenting with emerging AI tools, and an acquisition strategy for advanced military simulations and war games.

The Pentagon will also examine alternative institutional accreditation options aligned with military missions. The memorandum does not immediately terminate existing accreditation arrangements.