TNation’s military service academies have become a central battlefield in the “war against Woke” of the Trump administration. During the confirmation hearing for the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) [Race] Theory.”
Hegseth has undertaken to tackle the problem by getting rid of civilian teachers of “left and awakened universities” who “try to push this in service academies” and replace them with officers in hardened and hardened uniforms. President Trump could go even further: on February 10, he rejected the visitors’ council for the four service academies to combat their infiltration by “awakened left ideologists”. Trump then embarked on his social platform for truth: “Make military academies again.”
Each part of this debate accuses the other of dragging the country’s venerated service academies in cultural wars and political debate. But the truth is that our service academies have been part of these battles since their creation. For more than two centuries, service academies have been both pawns and prices in evolving cultural and political battles.
George Washington recommended establishing a military academy in 1783. Theoretically, it should have been an easy victory. During the Revolutionary War, the continental army of Washington depended on the good graces of foreign officers like the Prussian baron von Steuben, who instilled order and discipline in the forces of Ragtag in Valley Forge, and Tadeusz Kościuszko a Polish engineer which designed the fortifications at West Point, among other places. It seemed obvious that if the United States wanted to maintain its new independence, it should educate its officers in the art and science of war.
But the creation of an American military academy has become politically dividing, attached for decades by competing visions for the nation.
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The initial debate opposed the federalists, led by Alexander Hamilton, to the Republicans, led by Thomas Jefferson. The federalists dreamed of a commercial colossus competing with the empires of Europe, while the Republicans imagined a simple agrarian republic of the Yeoman farmers defended by civic militias, without the need for a federal military academy. When General Washington became President Washington, he tried to prevent the emergence of parties by introducing the two factions in his administration, making secretaries of Jefferson and Hamilton. But that has indeed gave the two men a veto on major initiatives, and no proposal for a military academy has made debates from the cabinet.
Two days before his death in 1799, Washington still wrote with nostalgia on the need for an academy.
But Jefferson quickly changed speed when he became president in 1801, suggesting that his objection was not at a military academy in itself, but rather to put such a powerful institution available to elitist federalists like Hamilton. A year later, he signed the law of 1802 on the law of military peace, which finally created the American military academy in West Point.
But despite the Republicans who dominate politics over the next three decades, the nature and goal of the new academy have remained unresolved. The Republican purists wanted a simple technical training school which maintained the low costs and, more importantly, prevented the body of officers from evolving towards an aristocracy. Many other Republicans, however, were expansionists, who had a continent to conquer. In addition, they were supporters of the science and the education of the Enlightenment, without vehicle to advance these objectives other than the Academy.
This faction dispute proved to be fatal in the first years of West Point. As the leader of the engineers, Jonathan Williams was, by law, the superintendent of the Academy, and he envisaged “a large national establishment to … compete with everything in Europe”. But his functions mainly removed it from West Point, and daily leadership fell to Alden Parridge, who preferred to manage things more like a drilling sergeant. If the army did not know how to manage the Academy, the government was not – in 1811, the secretary of war ordered most of the cadets for service elsewhere in the army, actually closing it during a year and a half.
It seemed that Williams’ vision won when, in 1817, President James Monroe appointed Sylvanus Thayer as director. Thayer inaugurated a set of reforms that established West Point as the first scientific and engineering school in the country and have obtained an inheritance as “father of the military academy”. But Partridge was so attached to his rival vision of the Academy that the path of this progress had to be eliminated by moving him away from West Point by virtue of the arrest.
In addition, while the hand of Thayer eliminated a set of faction disputes, he envisaged the program of science and engineering in West Point as serving strictly military ends. This vision has created a new set of problems, because it has taken over the Academy as well as the Republican Party was divided into factions. The “national republicans” led by John Quincy Adams wanted to develop the country’s infrastructure. They needed civil engineers to build roads, canals and railways to promote the national economy and support expansion to the west. West Point was the only school that could provide them, but Thayer resisted all changes in the study program.
Finally, in 1824, a frustrated congress adopted the law on the general investigation, which authorized the body of army engineers to support internal improvements. The law has left Thayer as a choice than to overcome the development of the country’s first civil engineering program.
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The General Survey Law also gave Adams the president now and its general administration to distribute federal money in a very targeted manner. West Point graduates have led many of these internal improvement projects. Many have had a private salary, in addition to their military wages, then collected their studies funded by taxpayers by leaving the army for more lucrative civil employment. It felt corruption, and it fueled the rise of the democratic republican party of Andrew Jackson (ultimately just democrat), while the national Republicans became the Whig party.
The Academy has become an easy target for Jackson, the self-taught populist hero of the Battle of New Orleans. After defeating Adams in 1828, Jackson actively thwarted Thayer by reinstating the cadets that Thayer had expelled several times for disciplinary offenses, including for pro-jackson political demonstrations. Partridge resurfaced to join the Democrats of Congress like Davy Crockett who called for the completely West Point abolition.
Thayer has resigned from frustration, but the academy survived. Having asserted his political point, Jackson ceased to mingle and rather referred to the successors of Thayer in their disciplinary decisions.
In the romantic era that followed, there were so many asking for the Academy’s study program – history, literature, rhetoric – that the study program was extended to five years To welcome them all, before the civil war could return to the four – program of the year. This model continued thanks to the secession and the civil war, the reconstruction, the movement of civil rights of the 20th century, to the other rights of the rights which rendered the academies more diverse and until today. An increasing American army has also created the need for additional service academies to train naval, air force and coastal guard officers.
Neither progressivism wakes up nor Maga populism are terms that would be familiar in Hamilton, Jefferson, Partridge, Thayer or Jackson. But the underlying debate would resonate with everyone.
Today, cadets and aspirants in academies study the theories of civil-military relations which emphasize the apolitical nature of military service and a strict separation of military institutions from partisan concerns. However, this objective has never fully equaled the reality of military education. Because the United States is a democracy, the army – including our military academies – has never been fully isolated from the political and cultural concerns of the day. And, in fact, they are forced to meet the needs of the nation, as determined by the citizens of the ballot boxes.
The main concern, expressed by the two parties in each era, is that service academies continue to produce leaders who can defend the nation in wartime. The challenge for current leaders of all academies will be – as it was for their predecessors – to remain focused on this mission in the middle of political noise.
Ryan Shaw is professor of practice in history and strategy at Arizona State University. A retired army officer, he previously learned history in West Point.
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