By Patrick “Kit” Bobko, USAF veteran, USAFA ’91
Here are five things to make the venerable institution, which has struggled with wokeness, recruitment, and declining standards, great again.
Whether it’s the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff stating in a congressional hearing that he hopes to understand his “white rage,” or an official memorandum about establishing “aspirational” race and sex quotas for officers, it’s clear that partisan ideology has supplanted competency as the defining attribute of our current military’s leaders.
Nowhere has this leftward shift been more apparent than at the United States Air Force Academy and its newfound obsession with indoctrinating cadets in woke, anti-American ideology.
Although not comprehensive, the following list provides five things that the new secretary of defense and the incoming secretary of the Air Force could immediately do to restore the Academy to its core mission: developing and training future combat leaders for our Air Force and Space Force.
Pull DEI Out by Its Roots
Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and all its derivatives (read: transgenderism) must be excised from the Academy wherever they exist.
At its core, DEI is an immoral, pernicious political theory that separates people into two groups: victim and oppressor. An ideology that treats people differently according to innate characteristics has no place in the military.
This is doubly true for the U.S. Air Force’s premier commissioning source, because young officers will carry these learned prejudices to their operational squadrons.
The bureaucratic scaffolding that promulgates and enforces DEI can and should be eliminated overnight — starting with the Academy’s “Chief Diversity Officer” and everyone on her staff. The academic pretense that services DEI should also be expunged.
Cadets need not waste their already limited academic time earning a minor in “Diversity & Inclusion” or attending a local Black Lives Matter meeting.
A cadre of cadets should not treated like budding political commissars who operate outside of the traditional chain of command, given the authority to enforce ideological conformity on other cadets.
We must return the Academy to a place where integrity, competence, and merit are what matters most. DEI and all the apparatus that comes with it actively prevent this from happening.
Find Another Robin Olds to Be the Commandant of Cadets
Colonel Robin Olds holds a place in U.S. Air Force lore as one of its greatest fighter pilots. Olds, a triple ace (16 air-to-air kills) with an out-of-regulation handlebar moustache, famously led the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing (later called “The Wolf Pack”) in Vietnam.
Olds is best known for “Operation Bolo,” in which his pilots downed between seven and nine North Vietnamese MiGs in a single, ingenious fighter sweep. Bob Hope, while on tour, later referred to Olds’ Wolf Pack as “the greatest distributor of MiG parts in the world.”
When Olds left the war, he returned to the Academy as its commandant, putting a bona fide war hero and combat leader front and center in the cadets’ day-to-day lives.
Cadets must see combat leaders early in their careers. It’s even more critical that cadets hear their stories.
They must have examples of what warriors look like, in the flesh, and see how the men who have been in harm’s way interact with subordinates, and how subordinates interact with them. Having these examples is a crucial element of a young officer’s development.
These leaders are out there in the operational Air Force, and finding someone like Robin Olds to serve as the commandant of cadets would go a long way in reorienting the Academy toward leadership and warfighting.
Make the Academy a Forge Again
The writer James Salter described his arrival at West Point in terms any service academy graduate will appreciate: “It was the hard school, the forge. To enter you passed, that first day, into an inferno.”
That same forge produced some of our nation’s greatest leaders — Ulysses S. Grant, Douglas MacArthur, and Dwight Eisenhower among them.
The Air Force Academy was also a place where cadets, like metal, were hammered under intense pressure and heat for the purpose of making them stronger.
The cadet experience was unrelenting and at times brutal. Almost everyone considered quitting and going to school somewhere else. Roughly a quarter of cadets who enter each year eventually do quit.
Reports are that the forge has cooled at the Air Force Academy. Significantly. So much so that the new superintendent has decreed he will institute a “more demanding” experience for cadets.
And while there is nothing inherently beneficial about subjecting cadets to a demanding, rigid, and unforgiving process, there is a fortification of spirit and an accumulation of confidence that are the product of surviving the process. The experience teaches endurance, steadfastness, and grit in the only way those virtues can be taught — in the presence of adversity.
Make the Academy a forge again.
Reemphasize the Honor Code
The Honor Code is a pillar of the Academy experience, and changes that impose graduated applicability are a mistake and should be rescinded.
Until recently, all cadets were universally expected to adhere to the following standard: “We will not lie, steal, or cheat, nor tolerate among us anyone who does.”
This is not an aspirational canon, nor is it applicable only when a cadet is on duty or in uniform. This is the minimum standard of conduct for members of the cadet wing and, when they graduate, officers.
Cadets are expected always to tell the truth, even when it hurts — especially when it hurts. Lives may depend on it.
The Academy does itself and the Air Force a grave disservice by watering down this standard.
‘Bring Me Men’
From 1964 to 2003, cadets arriving at the Air Force Academy saw the words “Bring Me Men” as they walked up a wide ramp to the marble-lined Terrazzo. The three words were understood as both a challenge and a wary admonition to those who passed beneath them.
The words came from an 1894 poem by Sam Walter Foss:
Bring me men to match my mountains
Bring me men to match my plains
Men with empires in their purpose
And new eras in their brains.
In 2003, the Academy removed the words in the wake of a sexual assault scandal because they were allegedly sexist.
A line from a poem obviously had nothing to do with any allegations of sexual assault, and removing three words from the ramp had no more beneficial effect on the service or the Academy than did recent changes that neutered the Air Force song. (Rest easy, “boys” no longer “give ‘er the gun.”)
Instead, removing “Bring Me Men” from the ramp was a soft-headed political gesture by unserious people that evidenced a lack of institutional focus at the Academy.
Demonstrate to the world and those who claim offense by such things that the Air Force Academy is once again a serious place with serious people in charge. Put the words back.
There are 200 years of history to show that the merit-based and competitive process for training cadets — whether it be at West Point, Annapolis, or “on the hill” in Colorado Springs — produces capable, daring combat commanders upon whom we can call to lead our nation in time of war.
America will inevitably need these leaders, and soon.
Make the Air Force Academy great again.
First published in National Review
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