What led to West Point removing ‘Duty, Honor, Country’ from its mission statement
On March 7, Superintendent Steve Gilland announced a planned change to the official mission of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point: eliminating the words “Duty,” “Honor,” and “Country.”
It is impossible to overstate the reverence with which those three words have been held at West Point, in the entire Army, and throughout the U.S. military. In his 1962 farewell address to the West Point Corps of Cadets, Gen. Douglas MacArthur encapsulated their meaning for American soldiers:
Duty, Honor, Country — those three hallowed words, reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying point to build courage when courage seems to fail, to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith, to create hope when hope becomes forlorn.
MacArthur graduated from West Point in 1903. By that time, “Duty, Honor, Country” was already recognized as the official West Point motto. Among many other locations, it is on the West Point crest that is on every graduate’s class ring. It remains the standard for military professionalism.
This is the presentation LTG Gilland gave to the Board of Visitors on March 7, about the change:
Everything — planning, training, execution — is compelled by a military unit’s defined mission. The more simply it can be stated, the better. My favorite example is the mission the Combined Chiefs of Staff gave to Gen. Eisenhower in 1944: “Enter the continent of Europe and, in conjunction with the other United Nations, undertake operations aimed at the heart of Germany and the destruction of her armed forces.”
The West Point mission statement tells all its faculty and staff, exactly what they must do in training new officers. It defines the professional purpose for their existence.
Blowback and the Hasty Release of the New Mission
The change first made news last week in a short article in the Armed Forces Press. On March 11, it was publicized by the MacArthur Society — a group of West Point graduates concerned about West Point’s decline. Its president, Bill Prince, is a West Point graduate and decorated CIA veteran who attended the Board of Visitors meeting where the change was announced.
As news of the change began to spread, the initial reaction by many was that it was fake news. It had to be fake news because “Duty, Honor, Country” is so fundamental to West Point’s core identity, and it was inconceivable that anyone would excise it from the official West Point mission statement. I spoke with several people at West Point who said the decision had not yet been finalized and West Point might even seek congressional approval. Later in the day, likely because of the emerging blowback, Gilland sent a letter to all West Point graduates announcing the change had been implemented.
An officer with whom I spoke emphasized the change was the result of a regular review of the mission statement to see if any changes were needed to “modernize” it. LTG Gilland’s letter made the same point and noted that the mission statement has been changed nine times in the past 100 years. Such changes are sometimes necessary. For example, shortly after women were first admitted as cadets in 1976, the mission statement was modified to make it sex-neutral.
Although I believe his decision was wrong, I do not believe the superintendent intended to diminish the centrality of the West Point motto. LTG Gilland is a patriot, and I believe he has the best interests of West Point and the country at heart. His chief spokesman, Col. Terence Kelley, emphasized that when he told me, “Great young men and women are graduating from West Point to lead soldiers on the battlefield. That is what we are focused on.”
However, many West Point graduates perceive this most recent change to the mission language not as a necessary step of modernization, but as another woke attack on tradition. There have been all too many of those, both at West Point and throughout the country. For example, Robert E. Lee’s name was removed from West Point’s Reconciliation Plaza, which had commemorated Lee’s contribution to the reconciliation of opposing forces and people after the Civil War. The irony of removing any reference to Lee from a memorial to reconciliation apparently escaped the perpetrators of the purge.
What’s more, given what we have learned about “politicization of the curriculum,” “the erosion of the honor code,” and “race and gender-based admissions” — which the MacArthur Society
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