Service Academy Hearing a Missed Opportunity

By Richard Kline, USMA 1967
Served in the US Air Force
Senior Executive Service, retired

On March 26th, the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Personnel conducted a hearing with the Superintendents of West Point, the Naval Academy, and the Air Force Academy.

Because there are many stakeholders in actions affecting the academies—some active stakeholders and some not—I thought it might be valuable to summarize what went on in the hearing.

After all, the Academies collectively account for about 20% of all officers on active duty in our armed services .

Sadly, anyone keenly interested in the current challenges faced by the military academies would have been sorely disappointed by the questions and answers exchanged during the Subcommittee hearing.

To begin with only 7 or 8 Senators attended.

The liberal senators, lead by Senator Warren, praised the academy superintendents for the job they are doing in the face of the Trump Administration Executive Orders. These senators took every opportunity to charge the Administration with racist and misogynistic management of Academy programs, curricula, and recruitment.

On the other hand, the three senators representing the Republican side spent most of their time offering “softball” questions thus allowing each Superintendent to tout the positive aspects of academy training.

The entire hearing was basically a love fest with a few targeted liberal snipes at Trump and Hegseth.

There was very little oversight or probing of academy issues such as enrollment quotas, honor system decay, and indoctrination into the tenets of CRT/DEI

What little discussion regarding CRT/DEI was touted by the Democrats as necessary and valuable to which the superintendents sat silently … or gently nodded in approval.

There was a brief exchange about having cancelled two or three of the CRT/DEI course offerings, with more courses being reviewed. (NOTE :The professor who wrote a NY Times article touting her teaching CRT/DEI at the Air Force Academy is apparently still employed on the faculty.)

Another brief discussion centered around the expanding use of civilian professors. West Point has about 26% civilian professors, the Naval Academy has about 50%. The Air Force Academy has about 46%.

Many of these civilian professors are eventually eligible for tenure, making them almost permanent fixtures of academy academia. The superintendents alluded to the advanced academic credentials of civilian professors as compared to the military professors. Not mentioned was the fact that there are, however, many learned military officers with Masters Degrees and PhDs on the faculty.

Toward the end of the hearing, subcommittee members and the superintendents exchanged pleasantries about the importance of athletics at the academies, especially football. This lead to a brief discussion about modifying this year’s coming NDAA to include provisions for those athletes demonstrating expertise in their sport to defer their military service obligations and try to join professional sports.

Shortly thereafter, the meeting adjourned.

The MacArthur Society, the STARRS group, and the Calvert Task Group along with thousands of other retired and active duty military personnel watched this hearing.

We are proud of the Academies and the young men and women that pass through there. We believe they collectively represent a solid core of leaders for tomorrow’s armed forces.

However, we have noted that woke advocates have begun to push their agenda into academy life and training.

The Academies are rigorous training settings with little or no time to embrace transgenderism, CRT/DEI contamination, racial quotas for entrance and advancement, deterioration of the Honor System, divisive and racially oriented clubs, and other similar diversions from their core mission.

We had hoped for more substantive exchanges that asked the three superintendents how they were going to handle these pressing issues.

In short, we had hoped to hear about more focused emphasis on the warrior mentality and DUTY, HONOR, COUNTRY.

We did not.