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One day before the United States began an ill-defined and illegal war of indefinite length with Iran, Pete Hegseth angrily attacked a different enemy: the Ivy League. The Secretary of War denounced Ivy League universities as "woke breeding grounds of toxic indoctrination” and then eliminated long-standing college fellowship programs with more than a dozen elite colleges, which had historically served as a pipeline for service members to the upper ranks of military leadership. Of the schools now on Hegseth’s "no-fly list," four sit in the top ten of the World’s Top Universities for 2026. So, why does the Secretary of War not want his armed forces to have the best education available? Because he wants a military without a brain.

For a guy obsessed with being the strongest and most lethal force in the world, cutting access to world-class schools is a bizarre gambit. It does reveal Hegseth doesn’t consider intelligence a factor–let alone an asset–in strength or lethality. That tracks. Hegseth alleges the Ivies infect officers with “globalist and radical ideologies that do not improve our fighting ranks…” God forbid the tip of the sword of our foreign policy has knowledge of international cooperation and global interconnectedness. The Ivy League has its own issues, but the Pentagon’s claim that they "fail to deliver rigorous education grounded in realism” is almost laughable. I’m a veteran Lieutenant Commander with two Ivy League degrees, both paid for with military tuition assistance, and I promise: it was rigorous. Meanwhile, are Hegseth’s performative politics grounded in reality? Attacking Harvard on social media the eve of initiating a new war with a foreign adversary is disgraceful, and even delusional.