Eliot A. Cohen
If Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has some notions about strategy, he has been reticent in sharing them. But he does trumpet his commitment to restoring Confederate names to bases and their statues to national military cemeteries, which is absurd and vile. And we know that he thinks civilian academics have little if any place in military education, which is wrong and even more damaging.
Forty years ago, I turned down promotion from assistant to associate professor at Harvard to join the strategy department of the U.S. Naval War College, in Newport, Rhode Island. My academic mentors were baffled and dismayed by such a self-willed fall from grace, but in retrospect it was one of the best professional decisions of my life.
The Naval War College, not to be confused with the Naval Academy, was established in 1884 to prepare senior officers for the higher-level problems of warfare. For a service that, like the Royal Navy, believed in learning on the job rather than in classrooms, creating such a school was a remarkable thing to do. The War College immediately brought in as faculty members not only Alfred Thayer Mahan, a Navy captain who became the most prominent naval historian and naval publicist of his time, but a U.S. Army colonel, Tasker Bliss, to provide instruction beyond the maritime realm.
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