AI
Friday, February 27, 2026 8:16:52 PM
This standoff is seen as an unusual and public fight between the defense establishment and a private tech firm over the control of AI in warfare.
You don't even know the half of it. Gut all higher learning and insert AI here. Idiots.
Story today...
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5759402-pentagon-cancels-attendance-ivy-league/
He called it....
https://othermeans.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-the-warfighter
The Myth of the Warfighter
The Soldier and the Educational Institutions
JAMES
FEB 16, 2026
Over The Top, John Nash, 1918
The culture war drags ever onwards within the DoD.
The Secretary of Defense has arbitrarily decided to sever all ties between the military and Harvard—with a long list of other educational institutions1 seemingly soon to follow.
The reasoning behind this—if such a thing can be said to exist—is that civilian education is woke, hates America, and is engaged in a scheme to politically indoctrinate service members.
Civilian education, in the Secretary’s telling, has been a distraction for warfighters.
Putting aside the fact that this is obviously related to the President’s long-running pressure campaign to extort Harvard for a billion dollars in a campaign of exerting ideological control over the institution, it’s all predicated on a nonsense idea of what it is that service members do when they engage in a conflict.
Over the past few years, there has been an embrace of the cult of the operator within right-wing defense circles.
To simplify the phenomenon, it can best be described as a fairly unsophisticated view that door-kicking wins wars. If it hadn’t been for the decadent political class, inept woke and politicized officers, and perfidious JAGs with their laws of war—then the real warriors could have won in Afghanistan and Iraq.
It’s a fairly uncreative rehash of stab-in-the-back style mythos that are created in the aftermath of other failed wars. If it had not been for (insert whatever abstract scapegoat), then the real fighters would have carried the day. It is no different from Ernst Jünger calling for a politics of the frontline fighter in the 1920’s.
It is nothing more than culture war slop intended purely for consumption by people who need a comforting narrative for why their efforts failed.
You don’t need to think about how our strategic intent was misaligned with our resources. You don’t need to dwell on shifting priorities. You don’t need to bother yourself with the complex business of managing a coalition of partners with competing priorities. There’s no need to concern yourself with the delicate matter of managing relations with your host-nation. You never have to consider the fact that the American domestic audience never particularly cared much for the wars, one way or another.
You just know that if you had been able to kick one more door, then maybe things wouldn’t have gone that way.
What I mean to say here is that the whole exultation of the warfighter is a way to avoid reckoning with the fact that what actually mattered—political will—was never really there for Afghanistan, and it was only intermittently available for Iraq.
This isn’t to say I don’t think the U.S. Military doesn’t have the ability to execute impressive tactical and operational actions. We have capabilities and organization that are unparalleled on the global stage. We’ve never struggled with the ability to kick in a door or seize a piece of terrain.
We struggle with the oldest problem of politics and war—sustaining domestic will to translate our tactical and strategic successes into a viable strategic end-state. We tend to get distracted and stop caring after the first week or two of a conflict.
Just look at how much space Ukraine takes up in our newspapers at this point.
There’s no ROE that would have made up for the American public’s disinterest. If your domestic audience is indifferent to how a conflict plays out, you can’t use tactical brilliance to make up for a fraction of the troop levels2 required for these wars. You can’t sustain the boring, slow-moving nature of COIN to reach the endpoint of a battle against insurgents.
The lesson—the actual lesson—of Iraq and Afghanistan was the same lesson of Vietnam. You can’t bomb your way out of a war that the American public doesn’t particularly care about winning.
It’s not a particularly romantic notion of war. There’s no real coherent narrative arc to be told. You just lost because it wasn’t really something people cared about winning.
It’s not the sort of story that sells books and podcasts.
Selling a mythos that the warfighter was betrayed by compromised senior officials was, however, exactly what catapulted Hegseth to the role of Secretary of Defense. He has, unfortunately, dragged with him a constellation of mediocre hangers on with him.
These figures have, as of late, begun to turn their ire on what’s referred to in the military as professional military education, commonly simply called PME.
While there are legitimate complaints to be made with PME—largely around how PME is a sort of an off-brand simulacrum of civilian higher education—these are not the sort of complaints that have been picking up steam.
The latest piece that has begun to pick up momentum with this crowd is worth mentioning for its almost blistering lack of self-awareness. This one section in particular stands out to me:
The attentive reader will almost immediately pick up on the central inconsistency of the argument being made.
According to the author of this piece, the central problem of War Colleges is that they teach officers too much how to think like politicians, before immediately arguing that officers should have made explicit political judgments about the viability of using force in Afghanistan.
Now, I would argue that officers ought to understand politics deeply. The military is a political institution that uses violence to achieve explicit policy ends. Officers should know what political capital is available for a proposed course of action, and what the political effects of that action will be.3
Yes, your ability to plan, resource, and execute an operation is a fundamental aspect of officership. You are, after all, a bureaucrat who does organizational paperwork for a living. But it is not the only thing that an officer should be cognizant of.
From the tactical level to the strategic level, the thing that you’re doing is inextricably tied to politics. Everything from choosing to patrol a specific village to theatre-wide force protection measures is a reflection of politics, whether you explicitly realize it or not.
Take this, for example.
The level of risk you’re willing to assume? That’s directly tied to the American public’s willingness to accept U.S. casualties in a conflict. If you have lax force protection and sustain casualties, and the American public doesn’t see the conflict as worthwhile? Guess what? You’re going to be more constrained in your ability to pursue future operations.
If you’re an officer and you don’t think about things like that, you’re not doing your job right, and if you’re not aware of this, then PME should explain to you how these are very real considerations.
The opposing view argues that thinking at this level—of coalition management, partner engagement, military diplomacy—is a distraction imposed by a woke and degenerate establishment.
Warfighting, to people like the author of the above article, is needlessly hindered by War College faculty who refuse to endlessly rehash Operation Cobra.
But really, what I think the author of the above article wants to say—but can’t quite bring himself to say—is that he wants the military to be hyperpolitical; he just wants it to be his politics. He doesn’t want officers who are apolitical and focus only on their specific professional tasks; he wants officers who will assert his own conservative political views in policy arguments.
The defeat in Afghanistan, in his telling, was inevitable at the outset—and if American officers had only understood certain civilizational truths, they would have been able to see that.
That is an argument that is grounded not in staff duty work, but in the humanities. It is a historical, political, and philosophical viewpoint on what the use of force can achieve.
Despite the insistence that they’re attempting to return the military to an apolitical institution, they’re not at all interested in an apolitical military force.4
They’re interested in a military force that is aligned with their own partisan political interests. If you’re insistent on getting rid of “wokeness” in the military5, you’re at least implicitly injecting your own vision of what the politics of the military ought to be.
To return to the myth of the warfighter—often stylized as some sort of elite warrior caste modeled off the Spartans—it is really nothing more than a dueling myth of what the political nature of the U.S. military ought to be.
It’s also reflected in the views of the aforementioned author in his insistence that PME be completely divorced from all civilian educational standards and that War Colleges be completely purged of civilian educators.
In his telling, civilians weaken service members. They distract warfighters from what they ought to be doing—learning how to kill6—with nonsense about climate change7, or how to engage with foreign partners.
In this version of the military, we have little need for theories on the use of violence or an overview of international relations; we only need to study other members of the military to teach us the exact technical methods of killing.
It speaks to a greater desire among members of this crowd. To see the U.S. military completely divorced as an institution from the broader American community.
Everything from the ban on Harvard to the prospective purging of War Colleges is built around sheltering the military from any outside perspectives. It removes the possibility of hearing new viewpoints. It reduces civilian insight and oversight of the DoD. You will have more officers reflexively aligned with the culture of the Pentagon, rather than the public writ large.
Hegseth, since his days as a Fox News host, has consistently advocated for a separate set of ethics, norms, political views, and status within society for service members.
Rather than the citizen-soldier model we currently have, which represents a broad cross-section of American society and mirrors the wide variety of values in American society, this is all just another step in an attempt to insulate the DoD from the American public.
The real question in all of this is, do we really want a military filled with praetorians?
1
I’m not even going to bother touching on how disastrous this would be for the force in terms of depriving the military of people with advanced degrees from top-tier institutions in areas like engineering and physics. If that’s not self-evident to you, you should stop reading.
2
Not to mention things like State, USAID, or providing the political capital necessary to sustain operations.
3
For a good view on how senior officers and politicians work together to synchronize military actions with political needs, I’d recommend No End Save Victory by David Kaiser. But really, any book on FDR and WW2 covers this quite a lot.
4
This is putting aside that there’s no such thing as an apolitical military, as all militaries are fundamentally reflections of their societies and are subordinate to what political considerations demand of those militaries.
5
For the sake of argument, I’m going to put aside the idea that the U.S. military is “woke” as an absurd claim. Not that “woke” actually means anything at this point besides “vaguely liberal according to social media.”
6
I’ll again put aside the fact that the military—especially at higher levels of officership—involve signifigantly more activities than direct kinetic actions. You only need to look at someone like Eisenhower to see how this is an illiterate view of what military activities entail.
7
Climate Change is, to be clear, a very real national security concern, and if you don’t think that things like sub-saharan africa experincing water scarcity matter for security, you’re a complete idiot.
You don't even know the half of it. Gut all higher learning and insert AI here. Idiots.
Story today...
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5759402-pentagon-cancels-attendance-ivy-league/
He called it....
https://othermeans.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-the-warfighter
The Myth of the Warfighter
The Soldier and the Educational Institutions
JAMES
FEB 16, 2026
Over The Top, John Nash, 1918
The culture war drags ever onwards within the DoD.
The Secretary of Defense has arbitrarily decided to sever all ties between the military and Harvard—with a long list of other educational institutions1 seemingly soon to follow.
The reasoning behind this—if such a thing can be said to exist—is that civilian education is woke, hates America, and is engaged in a scheme to politically indoctrinate service members.
Civilian education, in the Secretary’s telling, has been a distraction for warfighters.
Putting aside the fact that this is obviously related to the President’s long-running pressure campaign to extort Harvard for a billion dollars in a campaign of exerting ideological control over the institution, it’s all predicated on a nonsense idea of what it is that service members do when they engage in a conflict.
Over the past few years, there has been an embrace of the cult of the operator within right-wing defense circles.
To simplify the phenomenon, it can best be described as a fairly unsophisticated view that door-kicking wins wars. If it hadn’t been for the decadent political class, inept woke and politicized officers, and perfidious JAGs with their laws of war—then the real warriors could have won in Afghanistan and Iraq.
It’s a fairly uncreative rehash of stab-in-the-back style mythos that are created in the aftermath of other failed wars. If it had not been for (insert whatever abstract scapegoat), then the real fighters would have carried the day. It is no different from Ernst Jünger calling for a politics of the frontline fighter in the 1920’s.
It is nothing more than culture war slop intended purely for consumption by people who need a comforting narrative for why their efforts failed.
You don’t need to think about how our strategic intent was misaligned with our resources. You don’t need to dwell on shifting priorities. You don’t need to bother yourself with the complex business of managing a coalition of partners with competing priorities. There’s no need to concern yourself with the delicate matter of managing relations with your host-nation. You never have to consider the fact that the American domestic audience never particularly cared much for the wars, one way or another.
You just know that if you had been able to kick one more door, then maybe things wouldn’t have gone that way.
What I mean to say here is that the whole exultation of the warfighter is a way to avoid reckoning with the fact that what actually mattered—political will—was never really there for Afghanistan, and it was only intermittently available for Iraq.
This isn’t to say I don’t think the U.S. Military doesn’t have the ability to execute impressive tactical and operational actions. We have capabilities and organization that are unparalleled on the global stage. We’ve never struggled with the ability to kick in a door or seize a piece of terrain.
We struggle with the oldest problem of politics and war—sustaining domestic will to translate our tactical and strategic successes into a viable strategic end-state. We tend to get distracted and stop caring after the first week or two of a conflict.
Just look at how much space Ukraine takes up in our newspapers at this point.
There’s no ROE that would have made up for the American public’s disinterest. If your domestic audience is indifferent to how a conflict plays out, you can’t use tactical brilliance to make up for a fraction of the troop levels2 required for these wars. You can’t sustain the boring, slow-moving nature of COIN to reach the endpoint of a battle against insurgents.
The lesson—the actual lesson—of Iraq and Afghanistan was the same lesson of Vietnam. You can’t bomb your way out of a war that the American public doesn’t particularly care about winning.
It’s not a particularly romantic notion of war. There’s no real coherent narrative arc to be told. You just lost because it wasn’t really something people cared about winning.
It’s not the sort of story that sells books and podcasts.
Selling a mythos that the warfighter was betrayed by compromised senior officials was, however, exactly what catapulted Hegseth to the role of Secretary of Defense. He has, unfortunately, dragged with him a constellation of mediocre hangers on with him.
These figures have, as of late, begun to turn their ire on what’s referred to in the military as professional military education, commonly simply called PME.
While there are legitimate complaints to be made with PME—largely around how PME is a sort of an off-brand simulacrum of civilian higher education—these are not the sort of complaints that have been picking up steam.
The latest piece that has begun to pick up momentum with this crowd is worth mentioning for its almost blistering lack of self-awareness. This one section in particular stands out to me:
The attentive reader will almost immediately pick up on the central inconsistency of the argument being made.
According to the author of this piece, the central problem of War Colleges is that they teach officers too much how to think like politicians, before immediately arguing that officers should have made explicit political judgments about the viability of using force in Afghanistan.
Now, I would argue that officers ought to understand politics deeply. The military is a political institution that uses violence to achieve explicit policy ends. Officers should know what political capital is available for a proposed course of action, and what the political effects of that action will be.3
Yes, your ability to plan, resource, and execute an operation is a fundamental aspect of officership. You are, after all, a bureaucrat who does organizational paperwork for a living. But it is not the only thing that an officer should be cognizant of.
From the tactical level to the strategic level, the thing that you’re doing is inextricably tied to politics. Everything from choosing to patrol a specific village to theatre-wide force protection measures is a reflection of politics, whether you explicitly realize it or not.
Take this, for example.
The level of risk you’re willing to assume? That’s directly tied to the American public’s willingness to accept U.S. casualties in a conflict. If you have lax force protection and sustain casualties, and the American public doesn’t see the conflict as worthwhile? Guess what? You’re going to be more constrained in your ability to pursue future operations.
If you’re an officer and you don’t think about things like that, you’re not doing your job right, and if you’re not aware of this, then PME should explain to you how these are very real considerations.
The opposing view argues that thinking at this level—of coalition management, partner engagement, military diplomacy—is a distraction imposed by a woke and degenerate establishment.
Warfighting, to people like the author of the above article, is needlessly hindered by War College faculty who refuse to endlessly rehash Operation Cobra.
But really, what I think the author of the above article wants to say—but can’t quite bring himself to say—is that he wants the military to be hyperpolitical; he just wants it to be his politics. He doesn’t want officers who are apolitical and focus only on their specific professional tasks; he wants officers who will assert his own conservative political views in policy arguments.
The defeat in Afghanistan, in his telling, was inevitable at the outset—and if American officers had only understood certain civilizational truths, they would have been able to see that.
That is an argument that is grounded not in staff duty work, but in the humanities. It is a historical, political, and philosophical viewpoint on what the use of force can achieve.
Despite the insistence that they’re attempting to return the military to an apolitical institution, they’re not at all interested in an apolitical military force.4
They’re interested in a military force that is aligned with their own partisan political interests. If you’re insistent on getting rid of “wokeness” in the military5, you’re at least implicitly injecting your own vision of what the politics of the military ought to be.
To return to the myth of the warfighter—often stylized as some sort of elite warrior caste modeled off the Spartans—it is really nothing more than a dueling myth of what the political nature of the U.S. military ought to be.
It’s also reflected in the views of the aforementioned author in his insistence that PME be completely divorced from all civilian educational standards and that War Colleges be completely purged of civilian educators.
In his telling, civilians weaken service members. They distract warfighters from what they ought to be doing—learning how to kill6—with nonsense about climate change7, or how to engage with foreign partners.
In this version of the military, we have little need for theories on the use of violence or an overview of international relations; we only need to study other members of the military to teach us the exact technical methods of killing.
It speaks to a greater desire among members of this crowd. To see the U.S. military completely divorced as an institution from the broader American community.
Everything from the ban on Harvard to the prospective purging of War Colleges is built around sheltering the military from any outside perspectives. It removes the possibility of hearing new viewpoints. It reduces civilian insight and oversight of the DoD. You will have more officers reflexively aligned with the culture of the Pentagon, rather than the public writ large.
Hegseth, since his days as a Fox News host, has consistently advocated for a separate set of ethics, norms, political views, and status within society for service members.
Rather than the citizen-soldier model we currently have, which represents a broad cross-section of American society and mirrors the wide variety of values in American society, this is all just another step in an attempt to insulate the DoD from the American public.
The real question in all of this is, do we really want a military filled with praetorians?
1
I’m not even going to bother touching on how disastrous this would be for the force in terms of depriving the military of people with advanced degrees from top-tier institutions in areas like engineering and physics. If that’s not self-evident to you, you should stop reading.
2
Not to mention things like State, USAID, or providing the political capital necessary to sustain operations.
3
For a good view on how senior officers and politicians work together to synchronize military actions with political needs, I’d recommend No End Save Victory by David Kaiser. But really, any book on FDR and WW2 covers this quite a lot.
4
This is putting aside that there’s no such thing as an apolitical military, as all militaries are fundamentally reflections of their societies and are subordinate to what political considerations demand of those militaries.
5
For the sake of argument, I’m going to put aside the idea that the U.S. military is “woke” as an absurd claim. Not that “woke” actually means anything at this point besides “vaguely liberal according to social media.”
6
I’ll again put aside the fact that the military—especially at higher levels of officership—involve signifigantly more activities than direct kinetic actions. You only need to look at someone like Eisenhower to see how this is an illiterate view of what military activities entail.
7
Climate Change is, to be clear, a very real national security concern, and if you don’t think that things like sub-saharan africa experincing water scarcity matter for security, you’re a complete idiot.
Radical Left Scum.... UNITE!
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