WASHINGTON — The United States will no longer appoint civilian employees to tenured positions at United States military academies, The Daily Wire can first report.
The move is intended to refocus military academies on “warfighter education,” Secretary of War Pete Hegseth shared in a Tuesday memo to senior Pentagon officials.
“The primary purpose of our Military Service Academies (MSA) is to prepare the next generation of officers to lead the men and women of the greatest military on Earth,” Hegseth wrote. “To ensure our educational institutions remain firmly focused on this warfighting mission, we must address the structural mechanisms that have allowed civilian academic norms to dilute our focus on lethality.”
Hegseth said that granting tenure to civilian faculty often leads to “academic stagnation, faculty complacency, and institutional inability to adapt to emerging needs,” adding that it “contributes to curriculum that drifts from the mission of educating our warfighters to the research priorities of the tenured academics.”
He directed the secretaries of the military departments to develop hiring plans prioritizing “institutional flexibility and contributions to the warfighting mission.”
There are 217 tenured civilian professors at the United States Naval Academy and 67 civilian professors on tenure track. West Point reports 27% civilian faculty next to 73% military staff. The Air Force Academy historically prohibits the academy from giving conventional academic tenure to civilian professors, instead using three-to-five-year renewable contracts.
The War Department will also announce this week that it plans to reduce the number of positions for generals and admirals by 20%, Fox News reported Tuesday morning — “less generals, more GIs,” as Hegseth wrote, according to the publication. The announcement will come in Hegseth’s State of the Force address on Wednesday, in which the secretary will lay out his priorities for the United States military in the coming year.
Memos obtained by the publication show that Hegseth approved plans to reduce the Army, Navy, Air Force, and the military’s joint pool earlier in September, and that these military services were told to complete their reductions by January 2027.
Hegseth also rolled out new battlefield-style assessments, unique to each military service, for senior officers to prove they can solve military problems as part of the Joint Warfighting Evaluation, a new assessment from the War Department. The move is part of the secretary’s effort to identify which service members are warfighters rather than people who have climbed the ranks on the career front.
“People figure out they don’t have to be the best at their job, they have to be the best at making sure their boss thinks they’re the best,” senior Pentagon adviser Stu Scheller told Fox News Digital. “And those are actually two very different things.”
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