Good morning! Trip the Beltway Fantastic is going on a hiatus of sorts to make way for some more original reporting on my part. I will be posting new stories, and interviews here as breaking news and opportunities for interesting conversations arise.
In this vein, I wrote a new article at The American Conservative on Pete Hegseth’s crusade to de-wokify U.S. military colleges and academies, to make them more aligned with what he is calling a “warfighter ethos”. I talk to several current instructors/professors and former students at these storied institutions who say these efforts don’t get at the real problem, which is these schools aren’t preparing future military leaders to actually win wars. Instead, they are prepping officers to be conformists — politically savvy yes-men who fly through the ranks and retire with a bunch of medals and bars with cushy defense industry gigs and TV celebrity status in their futures. The schools need to look at the pool of students, the professors, what they are teaching and how.
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos is Editorial Director of Responsible Statecraft and Senior Advisor at the Quincy Institute. She was a regular news writer and reporter for Antiwar.com from 2009 to 2014. She served for three years as Executive Editor of the The American Conservative magazine, where she had been reporting and publishing regular articles on national security, civil liberties, foreign policy, veterans, and Washington politics since 2007. From 2013 to 2017, Vlahos served as director of social media and online editor at WTOP News in Washington, D.C. She also spent 15 years as an online political reporter for Fox News at the channel’s Washington D.C. bureau, as well as Washington correspondent for Homeland Security Today magazine.
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