Memo to Hegseth: Our military’s problem isn’t only fitness. It’s bad education.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth delivered a bracing address Tuesday to the nation’s generals and admirals on restoring the warrior ethos and “unwoking” the military. His words hit their mark. But if the United States wants real warriors, the work starts with education — and ends with the National Guard.

The collapse of military education

Mr. Secretary, I have taught at the National Defense University and the National Intelligence University since 1992. Over three decades, I have watched the steady decline of military education, especially in American military history.

The rot deepened after 2021, when NIU was shifted from the Defense Department to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The move made little sense, and the result has been worse: a pipeline of “graduates” sent into your War Department who bear the marks of the politicized training they received.

What good are polished bayonets and perfect push-ups if our enemies own the digital battlefield?

Until last year, NIU’s executive vice president, Patricia A. Larsen, pushed a cartoonish form of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Imagine Rube Goldberg and Cruella de Ville designing education policy after a bender, and you get the idea. She maximized DEI, minimized rigor, and turned classrooms into therapy circles for “sensitive” intelligence students — while riding roughshod over her faculty and staff.

The result? A crop of intelligence officers shaped by Larsen’s priorities: officers less like warriors and more like the “less-than-warriors” you warned about. And no amount of push-ups or rifle drills will fix that mindset. Bad intelligence has destroyed the best warfighters before — Pearl Harbor, Chosin Reservoir, Tet. It can happen again.

Citizen soldiers and information war

If you want a different kind of warrior, look to the citizen soldier. Men like Gen. Dan Caine, the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Or like yourself.

Citizen soldiers carry the heart and soul of warriors into the non-kinetic fight: information warfare. China fields armies of hackers and propagandists who corrupt American culture, flood social media with poison, and wage psychological war around the clock. They don’t need to fire a shot to weaken us.

What good are polished bayonets and perfect push-ups if our enemy — say, China — owns the digital battlefield? Unlike the kinetic fight, information war shifts daily. By the time the Pentagon recognizes a problem, builds a school, and launches a course, the enemy has already moved on.

That’s where the Guard excels. Citizen soldiers live in this world every day — coding, marketing, designing, working AI prompts and hardware. They bring practical knowledge the active-duty military cannot match.

I know this firsthand. Years ago, I organized and trained an experimental National Guard unit for the Pentagon. In their world, physical fitness matters less than mental agility. Discipline, imagination, and technical mastery were the weapons they carried. And they were lethal.