The primary mission of America’s service academies is not to mimic Ivy League institutions—it is to produce officers capable of fighting and winning our nation’s wars. While the academies do provide a world-class education in exchange for years of military service—one that is both rigorous and enriching for its recipients—it is both impractical and irresponsible for academy leadership to get these priorities out of order.
War is not fought with essays, and it is dangerous to treat the academies as merely liberal arts colleges in uniform. Rather, their telos—their end, their reason for being—has always been to prepare officers and warfighters committed to the defense of the Constitution and the nation, not to cultivate harmless, disembodied intellectuals or to replicate ivory tower academia. As Aristotle taught, every object comes into being through four causes: material, formal, efficient, and final. A marble statue, for instance, has stone as its material, a figure as its form, a sculptor as its efficient cause, and a purpose—perhaps to honor, inspire, or remember—as its final cause. The same logic applies to our academies: their material is the cadets and midshipmen; their efficient cause, the faculty and programs; their form, the structure of training and discipline; and their final cause—their telos—is clear: to produce competent, ethical, and combat-ready officers.
Political theorist Samuel Huntington echoed this same sentiment when he identified the profession of arms as one of the four institutional pillars of Western civilization, alongside law, medicine, and the clergy. Each of these professions has its own distinct telos: law aims at justice, medicine at healing, the clergy at spiritual guidance—and the military at the defense of the nation. That purpose demands a unique body of knowledge, discipline, expertise, and ethos. The academies must be shaped by this core mission, and their curriculum, culture, and standards must reflect it.
Of course, future officers benefit immensely from studying such subjects as literature, philosophy, and history. These disciplines foster empathy and moral judgment, sharpen cultural awareness, and enhance leadership. They also ground future officers’ decision-making and critical reasoning abilities within a larger cultural, political, and historical context. Additionally, such educational offerings play a vital role in future recruitment—attracting high-caliber young citizens and families who rightly value intellectual breadth alongside physical and ethical rigor. Lastly, these disciplines remind cadets and midshipmen of their duty to the Constitution and the importance of civilian control, and they strengthen their future reintegration into civilian life. Indeed, the academies must produce leaders capable of wielding both the pen and the sword—and who never lose touch with the reasons for which they wield them.
But within the walls of the academies, these intellectual pursuits must never eclipse the greater imperative of military preparedness. It is one thing to read and contemplate the works of Lacan, Derrida, or Deleuze, for instance; it is another thing entirely to assume that prioritizing such works best prepares someone to clear a room, plan an invasion, or make split-second ethical decisions in the chaos of combat. These are the kinds of challenges that are endemic to war and warfighting—the unforgiving, high-stakes demands we are entrusting young future officers to manage and navigate with competence, courage, and clarity. The enemy lying in ambush does not care how well-read you are, how thoughtful your seminar contributions were, or how nuanced your paper on post-colonial theory might have been. What matters in that moment is training, judgment, composure, and the ability to act decisively under pressure. That is the academy’s foremost charge—to produce officers ready to meet those challenges head-on.
There will always be wolves. And it is the duty of the academies to train those sheepdogs who stand ready to defend the flock—without becoming wolves themselves, and without mistaking themselves for sheep. And while the fundamental character of the academies should never come to perfectly resemble Ranger School, Basic Underwater Demolition School, Combat Controllers Course, or Marine Raider Course nor the leafy campus of Yale, the hard realities of war, history, and human nature suggest that if one must err, it is better that our academies resemble the former rather than the latter.
George Orwell once wrote that “people sleep peacefully in their beds only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” Similarly, Thucydides observed that “The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.” These are not mere literary flourishes—they are battlefield truths.(1)
Contrary to longstanding critiques, the academies are not forgetting their primary mission—they are in the process of remembering it. Plato’s concept of anamnesis—the soul’s recollection of truths it always knew—fits well here. We are not rejecting education. We are recovering clarity.
In a world where adversaries are watching and war is never far off, the academies cannot afford the luxury of boundless academic indulgence—and if they forget this, it’s a luxury that civilian universities may soon be unable to afford as well.
The line must hold. The perimeter must be defended. The mission must not fail. Let the academies do what they were built to do: teach America’s best and brightest how to lead, how to fight, and how to win.(2)
(1)-Note to reader- both popular quotations are often misattributed to Orwell and Thucydides respectively. The first quotation comes from conservative columnist, Richard Grenier, who wrote in The Washington Times (1993), “As George Orwell pointed out, people sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” The second quotation is often misattributed to Thucydides but does not appear anywhere in The History of the Peloponnesian War or any of his other works.
(2)-Acknowledgment: Portions of this essay were refined with the assistance of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, under the author’s direction.