Hegseth Orders War College Review as Pentagon's Higher Education Purge Turns Inward

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced a 90-day task force Thursday to review the U.S. military's own war colleges for ideological deficiencies — the latest escalation in his campaign to reshape military education that has already severed Pentagon ties with Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, MIT, Brown, and Yale, raising concerns among defense education experts about the long-term impact on military officer development and critical thinking.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Thursday night the formation of a new task force to conduct a sweeping review of the United States' war colleges — the Pentagon's own graduate-level institutions — signaling that his months-long campaign to reshape military education is no longer aimed solely at civilian universities.

The task force, announced in a video posted to social platform X, will have 90 days to produce a report identifying any deficiencies and ensuring that war colleges are focused on what Hegseth described as "core national security issues." The move comes weeks after Hegseth banned military attendance at more than a dozen elite civilian universities and severed all Pentagon ties with Harvard — and it suggests that the administration's reorientation of military education is entering a new, more internal phase.