The Program Nobody Was Talking About
Turns out the Pentagon has been sending active duty military personnel to attend Ivy League schools on the taxpayer dime. Harvard. Yale. The whole gilded circuit. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth just cancelled it. And the response from the defense establishment has been exactly what you'd expect from people who've spent too long inside buildings without windows.
Before I explain why Hegseth is right, let me paint the picture a little clearer. We're talking about a military that is currently struggling to meet recruitment targets. The Army missed its recruiting goal by 10,000 soldiers in fiscal year 2023 — the worst shortfall since the end of the Vietnam-era draft. The Navy and Air Force are fighting their own retention crises. Skilled NCOs are leaving faster than they can be replaced. The services are stretched across multiple theaters, equipment is aging, and the readiness numbers that actually matter are not heading in the right direction.
In that environment, the decision to pay for soldiers to sit in seminar rooms at Harvard while some kid from Spokane who wants to serve can't get a recruiter to call him back is not a neutral resource allocation. It's a statement about who the military thinks its future leaders should be — and where those leaders should be shaped.
What Ivy League Formation Actually Does to Officers
I'll be direct about something the Pentagon brass will never say in public: sending military officers to elite universities for extended graduate study is not primarily about making them better soldiers. It's about making them more acceptable to the Washington policy establishment. It's about credentialing. It's about teaching them the language and assumptions and social norms of the class that runs American foreign policy — so that when they eventually sit across the table from the State Department or the NSC, they can be understood.
I've talked to guys who went through programs like this. Some of them came back better. Genuinely sharper on strategic theory, better at writing, more comfortable with complexity. But a lot of them came back with something else — a kind of institutional drift. A slow absorption of the assumptions that elite academic culture runs on. Assumptions about what conflicts are worth fighting, what kinds of force are acceptable, what American power can and should do in the world. Assumptions that have not produced great results over the past twenty years of foreign policy.
West Point, the Naval War College, the Army War College — these institutions exist to produce military leaders shaped by military culture and military values. They're not perfect. Nothing is. But they don't spend their time teaching officers that American power projection is inherently suspect or that the military's job is to be an instrument of social transformation. Harvard does. And the military officers who spend time there absorb it whether they intend to or not.
The Real Reason the Establishment Is Angry
The fury over Hegseth's decision is disproportionate to the actual policy change. This wasn't the end of military education programs broadly. It was the cancellation of attendance at specific elite institutions. The reaction tells you what the real stakes are.
For the defense establishment — the generals and admirals who rotate into think tanks and defense contractor boards and NSC staff positions — the Ivy pipeline serves a gatekeeping function. Officers who've done the Harvard fellowship speak the language. They've been socialized. They're acceptable to the foreign policy consensus in ways that officers who haven't been through that finishing school are not. Hegseth's decision threatens that pipeline. It threatens the credentialing system that keeps the defense establishment's social world coherent.
That's what they're protecting. Not readiness. Not strategic effectiveness. Their pipeline.
The American military's officer corps has become increasingly disconnected from the country it recruits from. The percentage of officers who come from rural areas, from working-class backgrounds, from the non-coastal interior has declined steadily. The percentage with elite university credentials has risen. This is the exact opposite of what a healthy civil-military relationship looks like. The military should reflect the country. Not the country's credentialed elite.
Hegseth's instinct — that the military's formation institutions should be military institutions — is the right one. You want officers who are shaped by Ranger school and deployment rotations and the NCOs who've kept their soldiers alive through two tours. Not by whatever Cambridge decided was important this semester.
What Should Actually Replace It
Cancelling a bad program isn't enough if the underlying need it was meant to address is real. Officers do need to engage with strategic complexity. They need to be able to think beyond their immediate tactical environment. So what should replace the Ivy fellowship circuit?
Expand the service war colleges. Fund them properly. Staff them with serious people who've actually served and actually understand what military force can and can't accomplish. Create exchange programs with allied military institutions — the Royal Military College of Canada, the Bundeswehr universities in Germany, the École de Guerre in France — where officers encounter different strategic traditions without being immersed in the specific ideological environment of American elite academia.
And invest in the enlisted force. The NCO corps is where military effectiveness actually lives. The most operationally effective units in the U.S. military are not distinguished by their officers' graduate degrees. They're distinguished by the quality of their staff sergeants and master sergeants. Spend the money there.
Hegseth did one thing right this week. More of it, please.
