Hutzell: Inside Pete Hegseth’s strategy to control military thinking

Pete Hegseth has lots of ideas for reshaping the American military.

“We are no longer the ‘woke’ department, or the ‘weak’ department,” he said in a speech last week. “Simple translation of that? No fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos. No wimps, no radicals.”

The secretary of defense, who styles himself the secretary of war, offered those offensive words at a State of the Forces address to describe whom he doesn’t want for the armed forces.

He has ideas about whom he wants, too.

“Just warriors. Just tough, ready, committed troops ... the ideological clowns are out,” he added. “The patriotic cowboys are in — with testosterone testing on top.”

And he has ideas on how those warriors should think.

“We need students of Western civilization and the pillars of our Republic,” he said, “leaders who understand the faith of Jerusalem, the philosophy of Athens, the power of Rome and the freedom of Philadelphia, circa 1776.”

He took a step toward that vision one day before his speech at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia. He ended tenure for civilian professors at the Naval Academy and its kin at West Point, Colorado Springs, New London and Kings Point.

“To ensure our educational institutions remain firmly focused on this warfighting mission, we must address the structural mechanisms that have allowed civilian academic norms to dilute our focus on lethality,” he wrote in a memo titled “Refocusing the Military Service Academies on Warfighter Education.”

If you think Hegseth is right, that civilians have diluted the focus on lethality at American military academies, then you really need to know about these 10 teachers.

They are engineers, historians and scholars who helped make Annapolis the nation’s top military school, shaping generations of officers.

E.B. Potter taught history from the late 1940s until he retired in 1977. He edited “Sea Power: A Naval History” with Adm. Chester W. Nimitz and wrote “Nimitz,” the definitive biography of the U.S. Pacific Fleet admiral during World War II.

Karen Flack teaches mechanical engineering. In 2014, she was named a fellow of the American Physical Society for her groundbreaking work to quantify the friction of an object moving through water or gas. It has fundamentally changed the math and physics used to design warships.

Miles Yu teaches mids about China, both its present and its past. He was a senior adviser to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Trump’s first term, during which Yu was broadly seen as an architect of the U.S. pushback against a key adversary.

Craig Symonds retired as the history department chair in 2005. He won multiple Navy civilian service awards and published acclaimed books on naval history. “Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings” won both the Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Naval Literature and the Gilder Lehrman Military History Prize.

Sommer Gentry teaches mathematics at the academy. She co-designed the algorithms used to match kidney donations across the United States and Canada. She published her method in 2005, a breakthrough covered by Science, Time and NPR.

Richard Abels retired in 2017 as the history department chair after a 35-year career. He received all three civilian faculty excellence awards and helped generations of mids understand how culture shapes the practice and representation of warfare.

Chemistry professor Judith Harrison’s pioneering work on molecular dynamics has changed naval engineering, materials design and energy systems. She’s a fellow of both the American Vacuum Society and the Society of Tribologists and Lubrication Engineers.

Samara Firebaugh is currently the academic dean and provost, the first woman to serve in the role. She has degrees in electrical engineering from Princeton and MIT and has endured two years of attacks on women in leadership and independent thinking by Hegseth and President Donald Trump.

Some of the best civilian professors served in uniform first.

Bob Bruninga served as a Navy officer at the academy and stayed on for decades after retiring as a commander in 1990. He taught aerospace engineering, and his research into digital technology transformed tactical radio communication.

Aaron B. O’Connell served 27 years as a Marine and earned a doctorate in history at Yale University after he retired.

He brought his expertise in military history to the Naval Academy in 2008, teaching there for eight years until he was appointed director for defense policy and strategy on the National Security Council.

Oh, and don’t forget William Chauvenet. Considered the “father of the Naval Academy,” he was one of the first civilian professors to work for the Navy, teaching mathematics and astronomy to young officers aboard the frigate Mississippi. He successfully argued for the creation of the academy and taught in Annapolis when it opened in 1845.

Right now, every professor without tenure at Annapolis and the other service academies is thinking about leaving. Tenure provides not only job security but the freedom to pursue important work that takes time and vision.

Almost two years ago, I wrote that Trump and Hegseth would come for the minds of the Naval Academy. I could thank them for proving me right.

Hegseth’s assistants rifled the Naval Academy library for books with ideas he finds disagreeable. He removed the first woman superintendent because she didn’t fit his ideas about leadership.

He removed ideas about equality from the academy’s behavior guidelines and course outlines. His fear of critical voices convinced the U.S. Naval Institute to abandon its longtime partnership with the Naval Academy and produce this year’s history conference.

Next month’s “Why Wars Come Faster Than We Expect — and What Readiness Really Requires” will include both uniformed and civilian speakers.

Not content with making the military weaker through bumbling adventurism in Iran, Hegseth is determined to make it dumber. The only consolation may be that his actions will hurt his party in November.

When Republicans lose control of Congress — if Hegseth’s ideas don’t include pushing the military into the elections — the secretary will learn that the people he disdains so casually know how to fight back.