On Monday, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth spoke at the United States Naval War College, a military academy that is, in essence, the school that trains Navy officers who are or are about to enter flag rank. It was an interesting and lengthy speech, made more so by the Secretary of War's announcement of a major overhaul of our nation's general officer training and promotion practices. 

Watch:

Here's what SECWAR said.

At my direction, I'm announcing 33 new directives. A complete overhaul to reform our Department of War senior service colleges. To forge leaders of unmatched competence, sound moral judgment, and resolute warrior ethos. That memo and those 33 directives will be arriving in your inbox today.

For example: Effective immediately, one important change, one of many. There will be no more 80-page theoretical written theses as the primary capstone of war college achievement. In its place, we are establishing competitive SI-assisted war gaming and high-stress decision forcing scenarios as the centerpiece of senior officer evaluation. Now, on that front, I want to give a hat tip to the Naval War College. Understand you've already done two of those SI-assisted war games this year alone. And in our discussions, that was a focal point of where they want this college to go. 

We will create a permanent intercollege wargaming architecture across all senior service colleges. No longer will jointness be reduced to an Army colonel and a Navy captain sharing coffee in the same seminar room. True jointness is forged under competitive operational friction. Our service colleges will execute interconnected capstone war games, linking live, virtual, and constructive forces against domains, testing students against complex unscripted peer adversary maneuvers. Furthermore, these war games will feed directly into the newly established joint warfighter exercises and evaluations. 

We haven't yet seen the 33 directives, but what we've seen so far looks like a solid upgrade. The modern face of warfare, especially in any possible near-peer conflict, will be one of combined arms operations, and that means the services working together, with common logistics and combined operations. When we go at an enemy, we go at them with the entire inventory, and this should be something the war colleges should be training these prospective general and flag officers to do.

SECWAR continues:

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Again, SECWAR said:

The senior service colleges will serve as the modern proving ground. Through intensive wargaming, combined with vigorous, adversarial, oral defense boards, that eliminate the ability to hide behind academic ghost writers or generative SI. We will stress test every prospective general and flag officer. Promotion to senior rank will not be an administrative reward for longevity. It will be earned by demonstrating the intellectual agility, lethal operational competence, and moral resolve required to win in combat.

Leveraging technology is great, but there's nothing like a real-time stress test with no technological backups. If that's good enough for privates in basic training, it's good enough for prospective general officers. On the battlefield, be the commander under canvas or on a ship, there's no substitute for being put on the spot, standing there shaking in your boots while being grilled: "You have to make a decision. You have to make a decision NOW. What are you going to do?" I had to do that as an officer candidate. These senior officers should have to do the same.

Finally:

SECWAR:

We know that we cannot demand world-class performance from an institution that's suffering from institutional decay. 

For too long, our senior institutions have been neglected. Something we talked about this morning as well. 

 Our Task Force visited National Defense University facilities plagued by black mold and obsolete IT networks. They witnessed the Army War College struggle with a faculty manning crisis, hobbled by its bureaucratic subordination to a tactical-level command structure that fails to truly leverage and appreciate its mission. They saw our Reserve Component officers crushed under unrealistic administrative burdens in distance learning programs. 

Worst of all, nearly all of our senior colleges have been bottlenecked by a severe lack of authorized, modernized Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities or  (SCIFs). You cannot study real world pacing threats using open source journalism. You cannot conduce realistic war games against an adversary's operational plans on unclassified networks. That is why today, at my direction, this Department is acting decisively to fix these structural failures: 

  • We are accelerating capital investments to build, modernize, and expand SCIF capacity across every single war college campus, ensuring that our students learn, plan, and wargame at the highest levels of national classification. 
  • We are cutting through bureaucratic neglect to repair facilities, modernize digital infrastructure, and resolve manning shortages. 
  • We are establishing dedicated research institutes within the war colleges to study the operational and strategic requirements of the America First defense paradigm, ensuring our faculty have the time, resources, and institutional backing to produce pioneering military history and strategic theory.”

So, not just the curricula, but the infrastructure, as well. If the 119th Congress makes sure, before January 3, the funding is in place for all this, that is. And yes, it seems rather baffling that these senior colonels and captains, all of whom should have security clearances, don't have better access to classified materials. There's an old saying in military circles that the military branch of choice is always training to fight the last war; these innovations, these overhauls, may at least go part of the way towards remediating that problem.

And the Democrats want to get rid of this guy? He's the first warfighter Secretary of War that we've seen in a long, long time.