Shut Down West Point, Please

By John R. “Buck” Surdu

While this is a bit of hyperbole, we need to shut down West Point while the few American people who have the remotest interest or acquaintance with the military can still remember its glory and before they realize its shameful state. As a graduate of West Point who found it a rewarding growth experience (though only rarely an enjoyable one), it pains me to say this. Most of my heroes growing up were West Point graduates. Of course, I would rather see it return to its former glory, but the leadership climate in the Army is toxic, anti-American, anti-meritocracy, and self-destructive. I have scant hope of anyone in leadership or the administration even having a desire to rescue West Point from the brink of irrelevance – or worse.

Senior Army leadership, likely down to the field grade (i.e., major) level, is often more concerned with politics; posturing; Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI); blame storming; careerism; and excising non-existent white rage and racism (while ignoring anti-racist racism), than in winning wars. Remember the disgraceful retreat from Afghanistan?! Remember the openly pro-Communist cadet turned lieutenant? A high level of dishonesty and lack of moral compass has become endemic in the officer corps.

Recently, Armed Forces Press and other sites reported that West Point is now offering degrees in DEI. This is a disgrace!

The move to offer ANY majors, let alone “minors,” was a mistake for West Point.  My class, 1985, was the first year to offer them.  They were limited to ABET-accredited engineering and computer science degrees. Prior to that, graduates took a standard set of courses with a small number of electives conferring a “concentration” in certain fields. Graduates without “majors” never had issues getting into top-tier graduate schools or medical schools.  The adoption of majors was a seismic shift in focus at West Point away from West Point as a leadership trade school toward West Point as just another ivy league style (albeit more expensive) liberal arts school.

The creation of majors moved the power at West Point away from the Commandant of Cadets, who is responsible for the military and ethical training of cadets. Power moved to the Dean of the Academic Board. Academic performance is much more important than military performance. This trend has been exacerbated by the fact that the Commandant and the various Tactical Officers are on a normal two- or three-year military rotation while the Dean, the Department Heads, and many Professors of the United States Military Academy (so called “PUSMAs”) are permanently assigned to West Point. This allows the Dean’s side of West Point to continually beat down or use passive-aggressive stalling tactics to defeat any of the Commandant’s initiatives and monotonically erode the focus on the profession of arms.

Having experienced West Point as a cadet, faculty member, and parent, I have seen West Point continue to try to make itself look like Harvard and Yale.  The nation already has those schools, and we have ROTC programs to bring in officers from institutions like them.  West Point must be different.  For the high price tag, it should offer a different (presumably better), focused, and tailored experience for its officer candidates. The lack of a special experience and higher-quality outcome was recognized a few years ago when West Point graduates stopped receiving Regular Army commissions upon graduation.

Today West Point offers many different degrees that are just as frivolous as those offered at many universities across the nation. Given that cadets receive a free education (in exchange for five or six years of indentured servitude), the nation and the Army have right to demand that West Point officer cadets major in hard science and engineering degrees. Any degree that ends in “studies” must be expunged. In fact, most majors should be eliminated, and the Academy should go back to a mostly fixed curriculum.

I told my cadets that the difference between a Humanities major and a Math, Science, or Engineering (MSE) major is that Humanities majors argue about whether there is an answer to a question while MSE majors argue about the best solution. I would rather have MSE majors running the Army. We need very few officers who want to know whether we did something to offend the guys on that other hill or whether their Communist beliefs are nifty. We do not need officers who sacrifice field training for DEI and CRT indoctrination. We need officers who are focused on the mission, on killing those guys on the other hill. The Army mission is deterring wars and winning them when the politicians inevitably fail. Let the politicians and State Department folks get degrees in Renaissance literature, <blank> studies, CRT, and DEI from other universities. We need to move away from Army officers as political animals and regain our focus on Army officers as steely-eyed killers of men and small fur bearing animals.

How did this happen right before our eyes? Our republic is founded on the civilian control and oversight of the military. The Legislative and Executive branches exercise different aspects of oversight, determining which actions are rewarded. The Obama and Biden administrations consistently demonstrated they have neither interest, understanding, nor concern about what makes its armed forces effective. After years of the warped rewards from these administrations, senior officers have focused on encouraged actions rather than correct actions. They are not punished for poor performance. To this day, the Biden administration and the administration’s media apologists and propaganda arm still insist the abysmal failure to plan and execute an orderly withdrawal from Afghanistan was Trump’s fault months after he left the White House. No one, from General Milley on down were held accountable for the epic failure of planning and leadership. When I was in the Army, the commanders were held accountable and responsible for the failures of their units while simultaneously passing on the credit for success to their subordinates. Today’s senior officers behave in exactly the opposite manner, taking credit for others’ accomplishments and passing blame for their failures to others – if anyone is to be held accountable. No officers or senior civilians were forced to retire, faced demotion, or were censured for their failures. Indeed, General Milley was rewarded for treasonous and disloyal statements he and other general officers made during the Trump administration. General Williams, the former Superintendent of West Point, was promoted for tolerating cheating at West Point. Given no downside for failures in their job, but failure to gain promotion if they didn’t provide the approved virtue signals, it is not surprising sycophant officers have created our current nearly valueless West Point. If the products of our academies are the current cabal of poltroons cosplaying as military leaders, the academies no longer have value.

We need a major course correction of the government, including the largely unaccountable administrative state. We do not need to revise or rewrite the Constitution; we instead need to re-read it. Only then can we focus on repairing our military. If we do that while holding the failed academies as an example of the cost of not doing so, perhaps we can resuscitate and rehabilitate them someday. The right answer might be to shut them down until the current generation of officers are long gone and then to reboot them.

If West Point does not provide a unique experience, it should be shuttered. Soon there will be no way to justify its continued existence and cost.  Is West Point the premier commissioning source for the Army or merely the premium priced source? Frankly, I’d rather see it close while people still remember its glory before people wake up to its disgrace. Several books have assigned a date for the fall of the Roman Empire, but at that date, most citizens felt that nothing had changed and didn’t recognize the warning signs of decay. For years after that arbitrary date many citizens considered themselves citizens of Roman empire. Will this administration retroactively be known as the date of the fall of the US military and its academies – indeed of the country as a whole?