The Hegseth Doctrine? Military-Academic De-coupling Competition

On Feb. 27, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that the Pentagon will no longer fund tuition of military personnel at several top universities across the United States. In sharing this decision, Hegseth explained that “for too long, the Ivy League and similar institutions have been subjecting our warriors to woke indoctrination.” Hegseth’s decision to cut the Department of Defense’s academic ties with top civilian institutions is being framed as a culture war victory. What began as a targeted action against a single university—Harvard—has expanded into a broader doctrine of military-academic “de-coupling” with direct and tangible implications for technological competitiveness, strategic education sustainability, and long-term force readiness.

We write from the perspective of two Harvard Kennedy School alumni. One is a retired Air Force major who oversaw billions of dollars in nuclear and space acquisitions. The other is a technology policy advocate who has testified before Congress on artificial intelligence governance and advised the White House and prime ministers on the issue. While we come from different backgrounds, both culturally and professionally, we believe that this decision, and its rapid expansion, significantly weakens America’s strategic position at a time of heavy global investment in civil-military-academic education.

Following Hegseth’s initial announcement severing the Defense Department’s partnership with Harvard, he ordered that military services undergo further evaluations of all graduate programs at Ivy League universities as well as “any other universities that similarly diminish critical thinking and have significant adversary involvement.” Moreover, the Army compiled a preliminary list of more than 30 institutions classified as “moderate to high risk” for losing eligibility for Defense Department education funding. The list includes MIT, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Carnegie Mellon, Duke, Vanderbilt, as well as other institutions within the defense innovation ecosystem. Originally, the policy was targeted at legal education programs; however, policy language implies broader application across graduate-level professional military education (PME), fellowships, and certificate programs, potentially impacting more than 230,000 service members.

Hegseth’s decision marks a systematic restructuring of the academic-military strategic partnership that has underpinned U.S. defense innovation and modernization for the past century. This policy risks undermining three core pillars of American defense strategy: technological competitiveness, strategic education and talent cultivation, and competitive posture relative to adversaries. At a time when the United States openly identifies strategic competition with China and other technologically capable rivals as the defining challenge of the coming decades, weakening the institutional partnerships that drive innovation and officer education is strategically counterproductive. Civilian research universities remain central nodes in the ecosystems that produce advances in artificial intelligence, cyber capabilities, biotechnology, and space systems—the very domains shaping the future of military power. Voluntarily withdrawing American officers from these environments amounts to a self-imposed strategic disadvantage. Instead of an act of strength, this aligns toward avoidable strategic concession.

Technological Advantage

For nearly a century, the United States defense technological advantage has been shaped by strategic partnerships with research institutions. Take, for example, the Manhattan Project, which included partnerships with research labs at Columbia University, UC Berkeley, and the University of Chicago. The synergy between the military as well as U.S. scholars and researchers brought about the end of World War II.

Then-MIT President Karl Compton and then-Harvard President James Conant were responsible for presenting President Franklin Roosevelt the founding plan for radar systems deployed in World War II that produced $1.5 billion worth of radar technology. The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), created in 1958, relied heavily on this partnership model and was responsible for the advent of the internet, autonomous vehicles, GPS, and even the mRNA vaccine platforms. DARPA’s own institutional mission is self-described as “an innovation ecosystem that engages academic, industry, and government partners.” The aforementioned ecosystem is not a by-product of American technological superiority, but the underlying foundation.

Military-academic decoupling directly and adversely impacts this foundation. The institutions now appearing on the Army’s “high-risk” list are not marginal to the defense innovation ecosystem. In fact, they are central to it. Carnegie Mellon University operates the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), the only federally funded research and development center (FFRDC) that is dedicated specifically to software development and cybersecurity. In June 2025, eight months before appearing on the Army’s high-risk list, Carnegie Mellon was awarded a follow-on Air Force SEI contract with a ceiling of $1.5 billion for five years for advanced defense technology research and prototyping. Similarly, Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory holds a $493 million Space Force systems engineering contract. In 2023, the Space Force partnered with Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) to create professional development opportunities for military officers pursuing graduate education in international public policy aligned with STEM research pathways. MIT received $107 million from the Pentagon in 2024 alone for on-campus research grants, according to court filings. Additionally, MIT operates Lincoln Laboratory, a Defense Department FFRDC that applies advanced technology and innovation to problems of national security. In April 2025, Lincoln Laboratory was awarded a multiyear $12.2 billion contract for defense research and rapid prototyping. These investments collectively represent a wide array of tangible research and development capabilities that the department has previously deemed essential to national security.

Officers who study and engage in this work within these institutions develop long-lasting relationships with faculty, researchers, and technologists who shape the trajectory of defense-relevant innovation. In fact, the officers effectively develop the stewardship necessary to govern and drive programmatic outcomes with budgets exceeding $25 billion. Program officers in these roles learn to evaluate emerging technologies not from briefing slides, but from direct engagement with the researchers and people developing them. Removing officers from these academic institutions deprives them of access to knowledge that sustains American defense modernization.

If history is to be any guide, severing strategic academia-military partnership ties comes with strategic and long-term costs. When DARPA shifted away from university computer science investments in the early 2000s, the Defense Science Board warned that the move was eroding the agency’s “intellectual mindshare on critical technology issues.” Subsequently, university computer science departments reported that the loss in DARPA funding diminished their capacity for breakthrough-oriented research.

The lesson is straightforward: If the defense establishment withdraws from academic institutions, the resulting gap with our military adversaries widens in their continued formation of academic partnerships, while our officers lose access to world-class educational infrastructure, cutting-edge research and development capabilities, and an apparatus of diverse strategic knowledge and leadership perspectives.

Strategic Education

Moreover, removal of officer attendance under the assumption that war colleges are fully substitutable for traditional university institutions does not hold. War colleges are designed to train senior military officers to plan and lead complex operations at the strategic level, working jointly across military branches and across land, sea, air, space, and cyber domains. War colleges excel in this specific type of education.

However, the institutional design of war colleges is fairly homogeneous. The student population is a narrow peer group consisting predominantly of senior military leaders, select civilian components, and a small footprint of international military fellows. In fact, the 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS) determined that professional military education had “stagnated.” In other words, officer development and education had become a “box-checking” exercise prioritizing completion over operational ingenuity or warfare innovation. A 2020 Joint Chiefs of Staff vision statement conceded that current war college systems were not prepared for future warfare.

According to the 2018 NDS, civilian graduate programs were never identified as part of the problem. Instead, these academic institutions were identified as part of the solution to complement the war college education by exposing officers to differing perspectives, disciplines, and networks outside of military institutions. Exposure to holistic learning is critical to ensure future U.S. military leaders are exposed to different skills and ways of thinking. It is why former Pentagon Chief of Staff Eric Rosenbach stated that military officers “need exposure to nontraditional military perspectives and thoughts.”

This type of cross-disciplinary pollination is exactly where civilian institutions excel. For example, at institutions such as SAIS or the Harvard Kennedy School, classmates come from a wide range of backgrounds including diplomacy, media, technology, consultancy, investment banking, entrepreneurship, nonprofits, and international leadership across many countries. Military officers studying at the school of government sit directly beside politicians, foreign government officials, and educators while accessing faculty in security studies, emerging technology, government, and international affairs.

These institutions produce future heads of state or nation leaders. For example, the Harvard Kennedy School has graduated more than 20 heads of state as well as numerous elected individuals and thousands of civil servants in varying levels of global government. Countries send their best and brightest students to the U.S. to learn because the American higher education system is a global standard-bearer. In this sense, officers studying in classroom environments with these peers are partnering with some of the sharpest minds from other countries. Students in this environment are not solely earning a degree in their chosen field. They are also building interpersonal relationships with people who will lead foreign governments, shape emerging technology policy, and head international institutions. These interpersonal relationships have the capacity to persist throughout careers and become strategic assets in crisis diplomacy, coalition-building, and foreign leader engagement.

Leading research defends the underlying principle that students gain a cognitive advantage by surrounding themselves with different thinkers and more diverse collaborative environments. A 2022 RAND Europe study determined that workforce diversity enhances organizational decision-making, fortifies innovation capacity, and improves military readiness and adaptability in strategic environments. Additionally, the U.S. Naval Institute published an analysis that argued military organizations with homogeneous cultures risk impeding cognitive diversity through reward conformity and promotion systems over originality of thought.

Isolating senior officers within a homogeneous intellectual environment narrows the range of perspectives and expertise necessary for sound strategic judgment at the highest levels of command.

Competitor Posture

Supporters of the Pentagon’s policy argue that severing ties with elite universities is necessary to mitigate national security risks associated with foreign influence—particularly from China. Research partnerships and past engagements with Chinese officials have been cited as grounds for the Pentagon to terminate military-civil relationships with elite higher education institutions. A September 2025 House Select Committee investigation found six universities (University of Maryland, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Carnegie Mellon, University of Southern California, Purdue, and Stanford) used American taxpayer dollars to fund doctoral programs for Chinese nationals including students with ties to Chinese military and defense research universities. A study from Parallax Advanced Research also found that 15 U.S. universities received up to $534.5 million in Chinese gifts with minimal disclosure of funding allocation or expenditure.

However, these facts can also cut against the argument for severing academic-military partnerships. If rival governments view exposure to elite American academic institutions as strategically valuable, withdrawing U.S. officers from those same environments forfeits a home field educational advantage while alleviating bandwidth constraints for competitor access.

China’s investment into foreign elite higher education institutions is a component of a broader national strategy. Under Xi Jinping, China’s military-civil fusion effort to “enable the PRC to develop the most technologically advanced military in the world” was elevated to a national-level strategy in 2014 with the explicit intent to remove barriers between civilian research, academia, and military development. The Chinese government has fully invested in this strategic endeavor. A Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology analysis identified 2,857 artificial intelligence-related contract awards published by the People’s Liberation Army between 2023 and 2024, in which universities were among the top-awarded entities. This level of contracting illustrates how Chinese universities function as strategic assets in national defense and military technological development, demonstrating the practical implementation of Beijing’s military-civil fusion strategy.

Furthermore, China’s “Seven Sons of National Defense,” a research consortium of seven elite universities under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, spends at least half of their research budgets on military products, and three-quarters of graduates recruited by Chinese defense state-owned enterprises come from these institutions. As it stands, the Center for a New American Security assessed that “Chinese officials and experts are eagerly studying and attempting to replicate” American defense-academia partnership models. The irony is stark. China’s military-civil fusion strategy was built in part by studying and adapting the very model of close collaboration among academia, industry, and the military—pioneered by the United States—that the Trump administration is now trying to eliminate.

This reality clarifies the geopolitical and national security stakes. When a rival state treats access to American universities as strategically valuable, the response should be engagement rather than withdrawal. American officers studying at these universities operate in the same classrooms, seminars, and professional networks that foreign officials seek to access. They build relationships with international peers and faculty that can later prove consequential in moments of diplomatic friction, intelligence coordination, or coalition management.

These advantages are cumulative and durable. The networks formed during a single academic year can shape communication channels, trust, and informal access points for decades. The withdrawal of American officers from a growing list of American universities will not deny China access to world-class education. Instead, the withdrawal removes an American military presence from an environment that China is deliberately expanding into.

In strategic competition, contested terrain is not abandoned because an adversary seeks influence within it. It is secured, shaped, and leveraged. When one side consolidates presence and the other withdraws, the outcome is a self-imposed disadvantage.

Across the Institutional Divide

There are few countries in the world where a retired military officer responsible for nuclear and space acquisitions might sit alongside a civil rights lawyer focused on artificial intelligence governance, debate national strategy, and emerge as long-term collaborators. And fewer still where individuals from different regions, races, ideologies, and professional mandates are intentionally placed in sustained intellectual engagement—not as symbolism, but as design.

That convergence is not accidental. It reflects a distinctive feature of America’s diverse higher education system. American research universities and professional schools deliberately bring together military leaders, technologists, policymakers, scientists, entrepreneurs, and advocates in shared classrooms and research environments. The relationships formed in such environments are not social by-products. They are strategic assets strengthening the country’s capacity for innovation, democratic resilience, and long-term strategic competition. They create durable channels across civil-military lines, partisan divides, and policy domains that otherwise remain siloed.

In continued collaboration, our political perspectives may differ. Our professional backgrounds certainly do. But on this point there is agreement. Curtailing military access to such environments narrows the range of strategic dialogue and weakens, rather than strengthens, American national security.

Pulling military officers from American higher education institutions deprives them of access to research infrastructure that supports defense modernization, exposure to heterogeneous intellectual environments that sharpen strategic judgment, and cross-sector relationships with future global leaders. Exacerbating the issue is that the officers most impacted by this decision are the most promising, selected precisely because they are entrusted by the Department of Defense to represent the military at the highest levels of education.

Meanwhile, China will not withdraw from elite American institutions. The Chinese Communist Party will continue to channel its most promising officials through top-tier higher education programs, building the networks and institutional fluency intended to serve long-term Chinese interests. Vacating that space narrows America’s military presence within it.

Operating through a culture war framework in America’s strategic educational infrastructure will ultimately prove counterproductive to operations and readiness. If the objective is to cultivate the most capable military leadership in the world, the solution should be neither isolation nor withdrawal from institutions that will train the next generation of world leaders but, instead, increased interaction and engagement.