Last week I read the alarming headlines. West Point cadets will no longer be inculcated with and committed to the values of “Duty, Honor, Country,” the motto of the United States Military Academy since the end of the 19th Century. I’m conservative enough to find myself immediately alarmed. After all, every day it seems the service academies have gotten up to some fresh silliness, something to raise fears that leftist, woke, progressivism (take your pick, or all three) has taken hold as it has in the similarly prestigious civilian institutions. Scary stuff, when we’re talking about those who will be called, if the need arises, to lead our soldiers, sailors, and airmen into battle.

But I was also puzzled. Although I spent my government career mainly in a civilian agency, our nuclear mission was such that we worked extremely closely with the military, and found our ranks filled with former Army, Navy, Marine, and Air Force personnel, including a goodly number of service academy graduates. I stay in touch with a few of them, and I’m included on a couple of e-mail and Facebook groups where their interests are aired almost daily. No one in these circles —and they include graduates going back to the Vietnam era and through all the wars since — had even raised this as an issue. Granted, the preponderance consisted of Naval and Air Force Academy graduates, who tend to be dismissive of whatever the West Pointers are getting up to, but still, it seemed strange.  (READ MORE from James H. McGee: Biden’s Gaza Pier Is ‘Black Hawk Down’ All Over Again)

So, I decided it might be worth peeling things back just a little further. So, first, I took a moment to read the Superintendent’s actual letter announcing the change to the academy’s mission statement. LTG Steve Gilland’s letter opens with the statement that “Duty, Honor, Country is foundational to the United States Military Academy’s culture and will always remain our motto.” He reaffirms this throughout the subsequent paragraph and returns to it in the final paragraph and the tagline for the letter. 

I also went to the trouble of looking up the “Army values” that now stand in place of “Duty, Honor, Country” in the revised mission statement. Interestingly, the “Seven Core Values” of the United States Army explicitly include “Duty” as well as “Honor,” as well as, under “Loyalty” the value of “true faith and allegiance to the U.S. Constitution.” Not, perhaps, as pithy as “Country,” but perhaps not so far removed. Looking further, at the related “Soldier’s Creed,” I find “Country” stated in the form of “I serve the people of the United States.”

Still, I’m not a card-carrying member of the “long, gray, line.” One of my closest friends, however, is a 1990 graduate of West Point, now retired after a long and honorable service career. Moreover, she’s part of a West Point family, with a brother, sister-in-law, and niece all graduates of the Academy, and also very much a conservative. I gave her a call and asked her what she made of the letter. “The motto remains the motto,” she opined, and “that is what counts.” Further, “the motto is everywhere in cadet life, and that hasn’t changed.”

Reading the new mission statement, she thought it resembled the one she’d been forced to memorize as a Plebe, which, she clearly recalled, didn’t contain the motto. So, well before “woke” became a thing, the “Duty, Honor, Country” motto had been absent from the mission statement, an omission that scarcely prevented her generation of cadets from serving honorably and sometimes giving their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Moreover, being asked to memorize the Academy mission statement as part of what cadets refer to as “Plebe Knowledge” scarcely elevates its importance. After all, “Plebe Knowledge” also traditionally included memorizing the answers to such important questions as “How many lights in Cullum Hall?” or, “How is the cow?” (“340,”and “She walks, she talks, she’s full of chalk …) I’m reminded that, while institutions set great store in changing such documents as “strategic visions” and “mission statements,” these tend to change with the wind, and are taken about as seriously as tumbleweeds at high noon. One of the abiding sins of business schools was the sin of believing that such high-flown statements had significant meaning, even when issued over the signature of the CEO, the Corporate President, or, in this case, the Academy Superintendent. (READ MORE: Hold Him Accountable: ‘Abbey Gate’ Arrest at State of the Union Exposes Biden’s Disastrous Foreign Policy)

In the latter stages of my government career, I found myself called upon to participate in the process of revising agency mission statements. What I learned is that such exercises meant much to the boss, but very little even to the next layer of management, much less to those who actually saw to the real mission of the agency. Compared to some of these undertakings, the Army values, that is “Loyalty, Duty, Respect, Selfless Service, Honor, Integrity, and Personal Courage” comprehend a mission statement we can actually admire. If only our other institutions today had similar values.

As business guru Peter Drucker famously (and perhaps apocryphally) observed: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” This was certainly true of the government agency where I worked for three decades, and I know, from frequent interaction, that it’s also true of the armed services. When a cadet becomes a freshly minted second lieutenant, he or she enters the world of hard-bitten NCOs, and that is where the cultural education really begins. Anyone who has known both second lieutenants and veteran sergeants understands that the transmission of cultural values has more to do with sergeants than  with “corporate speak” mission statements. In this context, it’s no accident that the Army “values” listed above pass muster with the senior NCOs that, since time immemorial, have served as the backbone of Army culture.

Having said all this, I still tend to agree with The American Spectator’s own Francis P. Sempa when, in effect, he raised the question: “why now?” It’s no defense to say with LTG Gilland that the “Duty, Honor, Country,” motto wasn’t added to the Academy’s mission statement until 1998. It would, of course, have been useful to revisit the history of that addition in justifying the present change. I suspect that it had more to do with celebrating the 100th anniversary of the “Duty, Honor, Country” motto, first formalized in 1898, than with a perceived need to affirm it in a mission statement. Even more important than “why then?” would have been clearly articulating a “why now?” explanation for deleting the motto from the mission statement.

One can only suspect that the change may have attached to the word “Country,” and that, in itself, is extremely troubling. Certainly, the Army values and the Soldier’s Creed and dozens of other related documents make explicit reference to upholding the Constitution and defending the Nation, but there’s a breadth and simplicity about “Country” that stands squarely athwart much of what our globalist elites have come to value. 

The very notion of “Country” adheres to something more basic than high-flown principles, the progressive’s much beloved projects in promoting “global democracy,” or opening our doors to “the peoples of the world,” or, more crassly, “flying the rainbow flag at our African embassies to promote LGBTQ values internationally.” Instead, “Country” speaks to an almost Norman Rockwell like allegiance to our families, our friends, our neighbors, our way of life, writ small, not large. It speaks to our essential Americanness as something worthy of defending, indeed, as worthy of the ultimate sacrifice we sometimes ask of our soldiers. But one couldn’t change the motto by simply deleting “Country.” That would have been much too obvious, much too pointed.

I doubt if anyone, not LTG Gilland, not the Army Chief of Staff, not the Secretary of the Army, thought explicitly in the foregoing terms. I suspect instead, that discomfort with “Country” may simply reflect the disturbing internationalism that has become common coin in Washington in all precincts, including, sadly, the Pentagon. (READ MORE: Dishonest Language, Truth, and Failed Policies)

I could be wrong about the motivation. Regardless, in the current climate, the very notion of making such a change cried out for a genuine effort in justification. If, however, it’s authors thought the change would be noticed, much less challenged, then probably they wouldn’t have done it in the first place. It’s the kind of insider message sending meant to be ignored by the outside world.

Given the assault on our institutions in evidence every day, we’re certainly right to be on guard against woke capture of the service academies. Certainly, there have been many worrisome headlines in recent years. Does the Naval Academy need an Assistant Professor of English specializing in “Gender and Sexuality Studies,” for example? For that matter, did we need a Chairman of the JCS worrying so loudly about “white rage?” 

Looking over the credentials of West Point professors in History, my one-time professional academic discipline, I worry that while they are typically themselves Academy graduates, their advance degrees come from the Ivy League and Ivy-adjacent institutions. History, along with English, has become one of the academic disciplines most corrupted by left-wing and progressive ideology. If we’re going to be concerned about the service academies, we should start with concern about what is currently taught in these disciplines.

In the midst of all this, I’m glad that “Duty, Honor, Country” remains the motto of West Point, an unchanging part of the academy, something every cadet sees every day. I hope that it remains that way, and I would be delighted if these words would be restored to the mission statement. Above all, however, I hope that this recent tempest focuses renewed attention of how our future officers are being taught and, particularly, the values that suffuse every element of the curriculum.

James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. His 2022 novel, Letter of Reprisal, tells the tale of a desperate mission to destroy a Chinese bioweapon facility hidden in the heart of the central African conflict region, and a forthcoming sequel carries the Reprisal team from the hills of West Virginia to the forests of Belarus. You can find it on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback editions, and on Kindle Unlimited.