Hegseth’s Self-Defeating Hatred for Harvard

Maybe Pete B. Hegseth should’ve paid more attention in school.

In February, Defense Secretary Hegseth announced that the Pentagon would cut academic ties with his alma mater, declaring on X that “Harvard is woke; The War Department is not.”

For decades, graduate-level programs and fellowships at universities like Harvard have taught military officers to make better informed strategic policy decisions. Such programs were grounded in the notion that military leaders benefit from exposure to the nation’s best academic institutions.

Hegseth seems to view the practice much differently, instead claiming that officers return from Harvard with their heads full of “globalist and radical ideologies” that serve only to weaken the military. But in severing ties with Harvard, Hegseth rejects forms of academic knowledge that would make for a more enlightened and effective military.

The simplistic theory of power that Hegseth ostensibly subscribes to approximates the logic of “my club is bigger than your club.” Such an ideology eschews a traditional foreign policy orthodoxy that prefers diplomacy and collaboration to Tomahawk missiles and F-35s.

Apparently, in the view of the Secretary, the U.S. can and ought to achieve its foreign policy objectives through pure military might; “woke” scholarship is at best a distraction. That this is fundamentally shortsighted is no more evident than today in the Persian Gulf.

Nearly a decade before Hegseth scrawled the words “return to sender” on his diploma on live television, he graduated with a Masters in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School.

One must understand Hegseth’s disavowal of his alma mater not just in the context of the Trump administration’s assault on Harvard, but also in the context of a broader lack of interest in policy particulars that the administration views as domains of woke academia.

Scholarship is thus understood as just a “woke” distraction, not an asset. Hegseth isn’t especially specific when it comes to defining what exactly constitutes “wokeness,” and in his imprecision, he forsakes a range of historical, cultural, and critical scholarship that in fact is essential to effective military decisionmaking.

Hegseth, it seems, sees the failure of U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan as the result of overfocus on lofty ideals instead of simply killing enemy combatants. Hegseth’s ideology is reflected in his rhetoric about “Operation Epic Fury” as he brags about raining “death and destruction from the sky all day long.” “Maximum lethality, not tepid legality” is the maxim of the Hegseth War Department.

Hegseth criticizes Harvard as insufficiently loyal to the military, but perhaps such voices are simply more informed about the consequences of wantonly exercising military force abroad. A cogent U.S. military strategy would recognize that learning from such “woke” scholarship is not weakness, but rather prudence.

Hegseth ignores scholars like those at Harvard to the peril of us all — experts who warn that airpower alone has quite literally never achieved regime change, or that the unique nature of Iran and the Islamic Republic must be taken into account.

I have no fear that the U.S. military suffers from a lack of capability when it comes to killing people in other countries. I have immense concern about a Defense Secretary who openly shirks scholarship just as he directs American military might in a conflict with few clear achievable objectives and many serious risks.

The Iranian regime shows little signs of imminent collapse despite overwhelming U.S. tactical victories — and apparently, the Trump administration didn’t anticipate that the Iranian regime might do the obvious thing and close the Strait of Hormuz.

What we have learned in Iran, contrary to Hegseth’s thought, is that you can seldom bomb your way to complex sociopolitical outcomes. One wishes that Hegseth had learned in his time at the Kennedy School that focusing purely on “lethality” and eschewing scholarship is at best foolish — and that institutions like Harvard, and the careful, rigorous academic inquiry that they represent, are valuable assets to military decisionmakers.

There is a reason why we want our military leaders to be well-educated, so that they understand that the world is not a video game, but a thick morass of cultures and ideologies that cannot be leapfrogged with laser-guided munitions and jacked-up Marines.

In winning political points in the battle against his alma mater and the “woke” scholarship it represents, Hegseth manages in one motion to sabotage U.S. military strategy and to reap senseless death and destruction abroad.

Andrew W. Shlomchik ’29, a Crimson Editorial editor, lives in Greenough Hall.