Somehow in the hours of February 27, 2026, as he was planning the U.S. attack on Iran the very next day, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth found time to issue an extraordinary 5-page memo. It is entitled, “Aligning Senior Service College Opportunities with American Values.” It is yet another way in which Hegseth demands blind obedience, silent salutes, from our officer corps to Donald Trump.
His memo announced that the Department of Defense would no longer financially support military officers attending a list of 22 elite educational institutions, including MIT, the Ivy League schools, Tufts, St. Louis University, Georgetown, George Washington University, William and Mary, and Carnegie Mellon. The cream of non-profit, policy-oriented institutions such as Brookings, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Council on Foreign Relations are also among the 22 unacceptable institutions.
Instead, the memo says the Department of War may financially support military officers who attend a list of 21 schools less celebrated, but more acceptable to Hegseth. These include the self-described Christian universities of Liberty University in Lynchburg, VA, and Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan. Certain state universities in the South and West are also acceptable.
Hegseth said in the memo, “We are strategically refocusing the education of its senior officers.” He accused the unacceptable entitles of “wokeness” and called them, “factories of anti-American resentment.” He offered no evidence for this nebulous conclusion, but the fine print at the memorandum’s end tips us off. His criteria for choosing the acceptable universities include: “…minimal relationships with adversaries, minimum expression in opposition of the Department…” Hegseth seeks to stamp out dissent, not wokeness, whatever that is. (Ironically, Hegseth graduated from Princeton and Harvard.)
Every military officer in any service branch learns in their first week of training that their oath is to the Constitution, and not to the President. They are also told that their duty is to refuse to obey an illegal command, no easy thing.
Recall that on Sept. 30, 2025, Hegseth assembled his 800 top generals and admirals from around the world to lay out his new policies for the Department of War, including his opposition to “stupid rules of engagement,” and the “toxic ideological garbage that had infected our department”. He admonished them “to fight for God and country” and warned that “if the words I’m speaking today are making your heart sink, then you should do the honorable thing and resign.” He ended by reciting the Commander’s Prayer.
Since taking office, Hegseth has fired without explanation at least two dozen senior commanders. The only obvious common factor is their gender and color of their skin.
Hegseth’s memo argues that his list of unacceptable institutions “fail to sharpen our leaders’ warfighting capabilities.” Yet the current top general at several combatant commands was educated at entities that Hegseth deems unacceptable, including U.S. Space Command, U.S. Africa Command, U.S Southern Command, and U.S. Strategic Command. So was the Acting Deputy Commander of U.S. Cyber Command.
My worry is that Hegseth’s memo goes not just to permissible places for education but also reflects Hegseth’s criteria for promotion of General officers. The sooner Hegseth leaves, the safer our republic.
Jim Bruce, of St. Michaels, is a former Army officer who attended unacceptable universities, largely on ROTC scholarships
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