What is a War College?

mission, distraction, & a resignation

See UPDATE at bottom of post.

---

There is, at last, a battle to claw back our war colleges and service academies from a few decades of an unchallenged march through these institutions by the academic left that has changed so many of our civilian institutions.

We’ve covered this topic often here, but today we’re going to look specifically at a story unfolding at our Naval War College that frames this well.

At its core, this pushback is based on different views of what our war colleges should be. Is there a need for war colleges to replicate the latest socio-political trends and fads found at civilian universities, or should war colleges focus their finite time and resources in areas that cannot be found in civilian universities that can help support the development of strategic thinking in our field grade and higher officers?

We can frame the argument, no pun intended here, on the right and left sides, by two articles that nicely mirror each other not just in title, but in substance.

First, a Substack I wrote a little more than two years ago, Our Navy Needs More of the War, Less of the College.

Our war colleges are not what you think they are.

With each passing year there is less focus on war, and more on college. At the Naval War College, just getting additional time, money, faculty, and leadership focus on the “naval” portion has become a challenge with all the other ancillary agendas trying to keep pace with the cool kids cross-town at Salve Regina University.

…these are all serious people and the argument could be made that they address serious issues, but is the Naval War College - and the finite money, people, and time that it has to serve the world’s second largest navy (still getting used to saying that) the correct venue?

Some assumedly well meaning people made decisions, purchased additional positions and departments, and headed certain directions that may have been more suitable at a different institution. I don’t know, Oberlin College? Maybe Bryn Mawr College … Brown University if you squint a bit … but again, I think it is very fair to ask if this area of study is really the highest and best use of the time, money, and faculty at the Naval. War. College.

The Naval War College, incidentally, of a nation whose military has not done a very good job of seeing threats, fighting threats, and winning wars in the last few decades - not to mention needs to think real hard about what it will mean to be the world’s second largest navy.

Winners have the luxury of vanity. Those on the struggle bus need to master the fundamentals and work harder.

The left side of the argument was written seven years ago, two years before my Substack, via the Army War College in an article titled, Too Much War, Not Enough College, by Jennifer Mittelstadt.

I encourage you to read her full argument, where she includes a link to a Naval War College PME professor, but here is the core of where many of the arguments lead to that brought us here: the self-focused needs of the instructors themselves; attempts to replicate the liberal arts graduate schools they are familiar with as opposed to understanding the mission of the war college they now find themselves in; and … of course.

1. Employ More Civilian Academics

Employing more full-time, permanent civilian academic instructors will foster connections between civilian society and the military that are essential to healthy democracy and to a well-regulated professional military. Employing more civilian professors brings more people like me – people who know the military only from research – into direct contact with military personnel. This contact allows us to understand the tasks military personnel undertake. A great deal of research documents the military-civilian gap, and many commentators from the military side have bemoaned this separation. Being a civilian at the War College has increased my sense of understanding and ownership of the military, which, after all, is a vital public institution – and one specifically subject to civilian control.

2. Ensure Broad Representation of Academic Fields

Civilians are likely to have broader and more critical views of the military. By “critical”, I do not mean necessarily leveling criticism, though that can be valuable, but taking a holistic, questioning, evidence-based stance toward the military and national security. Coming into classes with an outside perspective is invaluable in an institution that sociologists recognize as a “total institution,” one that, unlike most civilian employment, envelops nearly every aspect of life. Senior military leaders who have grown up in the total institution of the military could hardly fail to have a critical perspective on it; but their critical perspectives are those of insiders, and of personal experience. Outsiders who have different assumptions about the military are more likely to question received wisdom about military and national strategy, defense management, and even operations planning. And civilians—outsiders—can bring civilian institutional experience and evidence-based inquiry to bear on both management and instruction.

3. Reduce the Military Jargon

Civilian instructors provide opportunities for students to interact with the kinds of expert civilians with whom students will work when they assume their next assignments. Students leaving War College take on larger and more complex leadership roles that require cooperation with civilians, many of whom are highly educated and experienced in their respective fields. Military leaders need commensurate educations with civilian counterparts in other federal agencies, in Congress, and in the private sector. Knowing how to speak beyond military jargon, and how to understand their institution from the perspectives of leaders in international relations or systems management are vital to leading the military. Civilian instructors provide such experiences, and their presence in the classrooms will better situate military leaders for post-graduate leadership.

4. Emphasize Diversity and Inclusion

Civilian instructors offer a way to bring much-needed diversity to the War College. The heavy reliance on current and former officers as instructors at the War College produces an over-representation of white male instructors.

So, more “war” or more “college”? That’s the argument.

As a side note, Mittelstadt at the time she wrote that was the Harold K. Johnson Chair of Military History at the U.S. Army War College.

On her wiki page, her selected works are:

• The Military and the Market: New Histories of War, Capitalism, and Empire, edited with Mark R. Wilson (Philadelphia: Penn Press, 2022)

• The Rise of the Military Welfare State (Harvard University Press, 2015)

• Welfare in the United States: A History with Documents, co-authored and edited with Premilla Nadasen and Marisa Chappell (New York: Routledge, 2009)

• From Welfare to Workfare: The Unintended Consequences of Liberal Reform, 1945-1964 (University of North Carolina Press, 2005)

Huh.

Anyway.

As those with time in the military like to do, let’s look at the Naval War College’s mission statement:

The mission of the U.S. Naval War College is to educate tomorrow’s leaders, inform today’s decision-makers, and engage with allies and partners on all matters of naval power in order to preserve the peace, respond in crisis, and win decisively in war.

There needs to be an understanding by everyone at the start that our war colleges are not like civilian institutions, nor should they be. The United States and the West are planted thick with civilian institutions of higher learning that study a broad spectrum of topics involving the human condition and industry, yet have but a precious few war colleges.

Time is finite, and career windows to go to war college are narrow for the field grade officers who are the primary core of students there. Decisions have to be made and priorities have to be set.

Into this ongoing discussion come two individuals who are alumni of the Midrats Podcast, Tom Nichols and Pauline Shanks Kaurin. Tom is a former instructor at the Naval War College, and Pauline has resigned her position.

(NB: You can listen to Tom’s visit to Midrats in 2015 here. Pauline was our guest three times in 2018, 2020, and 2024.)

In a recent article in The Atlantic titled A Military-Ethics Professor Resigns in Protest, Tom informs the reader,

(Pauline Shanks Kaurin)’s leaving her position and the institution because orders from President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, she said, have made staying both morally and practically untenable. Remaining on the faculty, she believes, would mean implicitly lending her approval to policies she cannot support. And she said that the kind of teaching and research the Navy once hired her to do will now be impossible.

…

In January, Trump issued an executive order, Restoring America’s Fighting Force, that prohibits the Department of Defense and the entire armed forces from “promoting, advancing, or otherwise inculcating the following un-American, divisive, discriminatory, radical, extremist, and irrational theories,” such as “gender ideology,” “race or sex stereotyping,”…

Let’s press the pause button here, because we have some definitions and references that matter and you need to keep in mind as it refers to instruction at a war college as you read the rest.

Tom puts “gender ideology” and “race or stereotyping” in quotes because they are in the Executive Order (EO) he references. Let’s go to the EO and pull the definitions from them.

The purpose of the EO was,

Section 1. Purpose. As Chief Executive and as Commander in Chief, I am committed to meritocracy and to the elimination of race-based and sex-based discrimination within the Armed Forces of the United States. No individual or group within our Armed Forces should be preferred or disadvantaged on the basis of sex, race, ethnicity, color, or creed.

For “gender ideology” it references section 2(f) of the EO of January 20, 2020. That EO defines it as;

(f) “Gender ideology” replaces the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity, permitting the false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa, and requiring all institutions of society to regard this false claim as true. Gender ideology includes the idea that there is a vast spectrum of genders that are disconnected from one’s sex. Gender ideology is internally inconsistent, in that it diminishes sex as an identifiable or useful category but nevertheless maintains that it is possible for a person to be born in the wrong sexed body.

For “race or stereotyping”, it references EO 13950, Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping. In Section 2(b);

(b) “Race or sex stereotyping” means ascribing character traits, values, moral and ethical codes, privileges, status, or beliefs to a race or sex, or to an individual because of his or her race or sex.

Now you understand the no-go zones defined in the “orders” that people have issues with.

Let’s get back to Tom’s article.

Many professors at military institutions began to see signs that they might soon be prohibited from researching and publishing in their fields of study.

Welcome to the military. If your area of study is not in line with the needs of the service, then perhaps your services are best invested elsewhere.

This is where Pauline started to perceive that she had a problem with her position as the James B. Stockdale Chair in Professional Military Ethics.

…one day, shortly after the executive order in January, she was walking through the main lobby, which proudly features display cases with books by the faculty, and she noticed that a volume on LGBTQ issues in the military had vanished. The disappearance of that book led Pauline to seek more clarity from the college’s administration about nonpartisanship, and especially about academic freedom.

…jumpy military bureaucrats started tossing books and backing out of conferences. Pauline became more concerned. Newport’s senior administrators began to send informal signals that included, as she put it, the warning that “academic freedom as many of us understood it was not a thing anymore.” Based on those messages, Pauline came to believe that her and other faculty members’ freedom to comment publicly on national issues and choose research topics without institutional interference was soon to be restricted.

It would be helpful to know what book that was, and again, this is not a small liberal arts graduate school. It administrators were trying to shape the course of instruction away from the core requirements of a war college towards something more in line with the critical studies department, then that is their fault.

“if we were thinking we had academic freedom in our scholarship and in the classroom, we were mistaken.” (Other faculty present at the meeting confirmed to me that they interpreted the message from the college’s leadership the same way; one of them later told me that the implication was that the Defense Department could now rule any subject out of bounds for classroom discussion or scholarly research at will.) Pauline said there were audible gasps in the room, and such visible anger that it seemed to her that even the administrators hosting the meeting were taken aback. “I’ve been in academia for 31 years,” she told me, and that gathering “was the most horrifying meeting I’ve ever been a part of.”

Pauline stated in March of 2021,

“I teach Critical Race Theory as part of what I do academically.”

Clearly that is a no-go in 2025.

The next quote is curious as NWC’s provost, Stephen Mariano, is largely responsible for the position NWC found itself in the winter of 2025. In talking to present faculty at NWC who know him personally, he is not “right wing” by any stretch of the imagination. Ahem.

In March, Pauline again sought clarity from college leaders. They were clearly anxious to appear compliant with the new political line. (“We don’t want to end up on Fox News,” she said one administrator told her.) She was told her work was valued, but she didn’t believe it. “Talk is cheap,” she said. “Actions matter.” She said she asked the provost point-blank: What if a faculty member has a book or an article coming out on some controversial topic? His answer, according to her: Hypothetically, they might consider pulling the work from publication. (Mariano denies saying this and told me that there is no change in college policy on faculty publication.)

Every government employee knows the bureaucratic importance of putting things on paper. Pauline’s current project is about the concept of honor, which necessarily involves questions regarding masculinity and gender—issues that could turn the DOD’s new McCarthyites toward her and her work.

Hold on a minute. Point of order. It is not “necessary” to involve questions of “masculinity and gender” into the concept of honor…unless you feel compelled to bring critical theory into every topic. This would align with critical theory that you finds its way into many of Pauline’s work.

Herbert Marcuse, a key figure in the Frankfurt School, argued in his 1964 work, One-Dimensional Man, that critical analysis should challenge the "totalitarian" nature of advanced industrial society, suggesting that no area of social life should be exempt from critical scrutiny. You can find similar writings from the founders of critical theory and current practitioners along the same lines.

Again, interesting area of study at Brown, perhaps, but down the road in Newport?

Tom’s use of “McCarthyite” seems a bit obtuse, but a poet must be allowed his license.

That is when Pauline reached a fork in the road.

Administrators, she said, told her that they hoped she wouldn’t resign, but that no one was going to put anything in writing. “The upshot,” according to her, was a message from the administration that boiled down to: We hope you can just suck it up and not need your integrity for your final year as the ethics chair.

After that, she told me, her choices were clear. “As they say in the military: Salute and execute—or resign.” Until then, she had “hoped maybe people would still come to their senses.” The promises of seven years ago were gone; the institution now apparently expected her and other faculty to self-censor in the classroom and preemptively bowdlerize their own research. “I don’t do DEI work,” she said, “but I do moral philosophy, and now I can’t do it. I’d have to take out discussions of race and gender and not do philosophy as I think it should be done.” In April, she submitted a formal letter of resignation.

…

She kept her resignation private until early May, when a professor at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Graham Parsons—another scholar who teaches ethics in a military school, and a friend of Pauline’s—likewise decided to resign in protest and said that he would leave West Point after 13 years. Hegseth’s changes “prevent me from doing my job responsibly,” he wrote in The New York Times. “I am ashamed to be associated with the academy in its current form.” Hegseth responded on X, sounding more like a smug internet troll than a concerned superior: “You will not be missed Professor Parsons.” The episode changed Pauline’s mind. She felt she owed her friends and colleagues whatever public support and solidarity she could offer them.

Nor are she and Parsons alone. Tom McCarthy, a professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, in Annapolis, Maryland, recently resigned as chair of the history department rather than remove a paper from an upcoming symposium. And last month, a senior scholar at the Army War College, in Pennsylvania, Carrie Lee, also handed in her resignation, a decision she announced to her friends and followers on Bluesky.

Lee told me in an email that she’d been thinking of leaving after Trump was elected, because it was apparent to her that the Trump administration was “going to try and politicize the military and use military assets/personnel to suppress democratic rights,” and that academic freedom in military schools was soon to “become untenable.” Like Pauline, Lee felt like she was at a dead end: “To speak from within the institution itself will also do more harm than good. So to dissent, I have little choice but to leave,” she said in a farewell letter to her colleagues in April.

As a Tamarian might say, “HMCS Uganda off Okinawa.”

If you feel you must go, then go. At the end of the day, you have to be happy with the person looking back at you in the mirror.

I asked Pauline what she thinks might have happened if she had decided to stay and just tough it out from the inside. She “absolutely” thinks she’d have been fired at some point, and she didn’t want such a firing “to be part of the legacy of the Stockdale Chair.” But then I asked her if by resigning, she was giving people in the Trump administration, such as Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought—who once said that his goal was to make federal workers feel “trauma” to the point where they will quit their jobs—exactly what they want: Americans leaving federal service.

She didn’t care. “When you make a moral decision, there are always costs.” She dismissed what people like Vought want or think. “I’m not accountable to him. I’m accountable to the Lord, to my father, to my legacy, to my children, to my profession, to members of the military-ethics community. So I decided that I needed to resign. Not that it would change anyone’s mind, but to say: This is not okay. That is my message.”

I don’t think it was necessary for her to leave, and I believe that she was poorly served by an overly heated environment at NWC that I am sure (because people there have been telling me for years) became used to the steady drift to being a butched up liberal arts graduate school.

If you get a chance to see what we talked to Pauline about on the three Midrats episodes as linked above, you see the value of much of her area of expertise could have continues to bring to NWC. There are very few places in the world, especially in academia, where someone has free-range to write about anything one wants. Just ask any academic who has written against many of the critical theory related positions Pauline has defended.

However, if she has decided at this stage in her career she wishes to invest more time in socio-political gender/sex/sexuality issues, then perhaps this was the right call. That is just my opinion on the outside looking in, and I could be wrong. One way or the other, I wish her well wherever she finds herself in the next year.

(PS: I think it is a grave error for the DOD entities, either well meaning or through malicious compliance, to have gone through and deleted everything from articles (like Mittelstadt’s) to photographs that someone thinks might be offensive to this boogyman they have in their mind. They need to be there because they document the thinking of a time and place and are part of our history. They should all be put back up, or future people will have difficulty in understanding what the argument is about. Memory holing things helps no one. Let ideas stand or fall in the light of day.)

---

UPDATE: A source inside the lifelines of NWC sent me a note on the book in question as discussed above is:

Of the co-authors of Forging Queer Leaders, Bree Fram is not on staff at NWC. You can read about his background here.

Liz Cavallaro, Ed.D., is an Associate Professor at NWC’s College of Leadership and Ethics, so she would be the reason this book was on display at NWC before it was removed.