“I tried to educate in my classroom, because it’s clear that citizens need thinking officers to defend them who can respond creatively to fast-changing circumstances”, professor Bruce Fleming writes in his memoir of Annapolis. “The administration begged to differ.”
Fleming means the school administration, not any particular presidential administration. The politics of the service academies are the worst of both left and right, combined. In Fleming’s 2024 book Saving Our Service Academies: My Battle with, and for, the US Naval Academy to Make Thinking Officers, these “Victorian holdovers” come into question on a more fundamental level. What is their purpose, exactly?
The ostensible reason for a military academy is to bring academic rigor to military science and promote military operational art. But the college campus is a threatening place, and “this opening up to the world has made the military panicked and afraid of what it might mean to actually have tenured professors exercising academic freedom.” Challenging the system is inimical to good order and discipline.
“They can’t have it both ways: both a military and a real college. They say it’s college — that’s to entice unsuspecting students, but the reality is they want military control of what is taught.” Certain conversations cannot be entertained if they threaten good order and discipline. Because the military wants to avoid political bias, almost all of politics is verboten.
Fleming recalls an investigation incurred by simply answering students’ follow-up questions to an acknowledgement of transgenderism in class. When the administration found out, they leaned on students to report their professor. They were astroturfing a student struggle session, but not for left-wing purposes. Fleming did not take a side in the issue in class. He had merely stepped on a kind of land mine.
This talking-to by the cat herder was about answering the midshipman’s question, “Sir, what does it mean to have sex change surgery?” to which I initially responded, “You’re kidding? You don’t know?”—hormone therapy, the mechanics of male to female or female to male body reconstruction. But in fact this objection hadn’t even come from a student. This was before they had begun harnessing student objections to punish professors, or rather to punish one professor: me. Instead, it came from an adult woman, a civilian secretary to whom another student, not the one who asked, was recounting her day. I imagine the student saying, “And oh yes, Professor Fleming explained a sex-change operation.” “He did what?” I imagine this easily shocked secretary saying, starting up from her chair. And she went straight to the Marine colonel with her discovery. Clearly, we had to put a stop to that!
Fleming laments that “the defense of snowflake students has been adopted by the military, this harnessing by adults of the young’s self-righteous, self-centeredness, for the military’s own purposes.”
Rather than a left-wing takeover, this episode was “the co-opting of a hard-left MO (students have the rights to an environment where they are not offended, and they alone can determine when they are offended) to further a hard-right agenda (no academic freedom and toe the party line).”
“The expectation is that they’re generating warfighters, not philosophers and future bureaucrats,” Restoration of America founder Doug Truax, a West Point graduate, told Fox News Digital in July. Truax is a “right wing” culture warrior. He argues that the academies “gradually adopted the culture and priorities of civilian universities during the Obama and Biden administrations, shifting attention away from preparing officers for combat.”
His organization is touting a paper calling for “permanently banning consideration of race, ethnicity and sex in admissions decisions, requiring at least 75% of coursework to focus directly on military competencies and warfighting, replacing most civilian professors with active-duty or retired military officers and abolishing tenure at military educational institutions.”
Retired Army officer Bradford Duplessis argues that “the cult of lethality approach, characterized by its focus on tactical warfighting at the expense of strategic study, will not produce senior military leaders with the necessary skills and attributes to effectively lead in today’s complex environment.” Again, this is about the academies that produce junior officers rather than strategic leaders. Duplessis is projecting a career path that few Annapolis grads will even follow.
Butterbar lieutenants do not need deep strategic thinking. They benefit most from the socialization of the academy, the rituals and marching and other shared annoyances that come with high-intensity physical training and instruction in the basic knowledge of US Navy culture. Fleming imagines a system in which ROTC officers attend a finishing school rather than producing four-year degrees. His experiences at the hands of the Annapolis administration call the value of tenure into legitimate question.
“The removal of civilian faculty from the war colleges would result in brain drain in vital areas where military officers possess little to no experience or education,” Duplessis says. Some number of future graduates will become senior officers, and then they will need to know about diplomacy and politics and the Thucydides trap. He is piling future responsibilities on kids who are just turning into adults.
The agenda Truax represents has the virtue of ending all questions about who can teach what at the academies, and what the purpose of the academy is. What Duplessis calls “the cult of lethality” is in fact the natural reaction of military culture against efforts to impose ideology in place of lethality.
The Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) devotes more time to Chairman Xi Jinping Thought than communications security training. American civilian academics likewise bring the “authoritarian imposition of left-wing causes on a right-wing institution.”
The cult of ideology had already taken over American service academies by 2023, so that “the service academies have long since moved on from preparing leaders to wage and win wars. Now they’re about enforcing by military rather than constitutionally permitted means (even against civilians) the obsessions of a certain sector of society” (emphasis added).
Asking whether the academies are worth saving, Fleming concludes their present form is unsustainable. The basic problem as he sees it, is that Annapolis puts young men and women together in their sexual prime while also enforcing monastic boundaries with a toxic, punitive approach to alleged violations. Mixing Title IX and the UCMJ doesn’t work. For
teaching everything according to categories of race, gender, and sexual orientation is what has supplanted sexual assault training as topic A at Annapolis: hiring and teaching courses in gay, Latino/a, and African American literature focused on the experiences of recent immigrants to the exclusion of almost everything else, usually to emphasize how tough they had it. For example, two out of three upper-level senior seminars English majors could choose from in Spring 2023 were “The Queering of the Renaissance” and “Queer Communities in Film and Literature.” We have courses in post-colonial studies, African American studies, and Native American Studies, and a “diversity” requirement. I guess we’re really with the Zeitgeist!
Sexual harassment allegations have become a new administrative weapon for keeping people in line, and accusations of ‘racial bias’ will work the same way, Fleming predicted in 2023. DEI — diversity, equity, and inclusion, the holy trinity of social justice ideology — and an “epidemic of sexual assault” turn moral panic into political power.
Warrior men are confused by the new, feminized military academy. “Saying men are never to take the initiative simply contravenes the rules of normal male-female interaction”, Fleming admits. “No wonder sexual assault ‘training’ seems so other-worldly to men: they are being told things that simply do not jibe with reality.” The politics of ‘gender bias’ are a poor fit for military culture.
Fleming criticizes the military response to the supposed crisis as “intellectually unjustified … imposed from the top down based on force,” an injustice that “brooks no opposition”, which he likens to “carpet bombing”. That, more generally, is the source of many of the military’s problems nowadays.” The academy “disapproves of all sex, an attitude left over from the old days.”
This is “where the Marine colonels got the idea that it was up to them to use their personal views to police what a professor said in class”, as they did with Bruce Fleming. Any discussion of sex difference is taboo in the academy. In the military, any discussion of sex is fraud with danger. As Fleming’s example illustrates, merely acknowledging transsexualism and transgender identification is a new ideological threat to be extinguished.
“If you say women and men are exactly the same under all circumstances, you’re the one who has to justify that”, Fleming writes. “Men, at least straight men, at least straight white men, don’t see themselves as a marginalized group. In fact, they don’t see themselves as a group at all: each man is his own Rambo. So, the men aren’t listening.”
Fleming objects to “privilege”, the buzz word of the BLM era and Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi. For “it’s not true that people in the military are gender-neutral robots — they are men and women, and that makes things complex.” Intersectional feminist ideology bores them.
Still, what they are told is that everybody is part of a group that defines his/her/their essence (which most men do not accept), that being a man is an illusion or a way to enforce power because “gender is socially constructed” (which men do not accept either), and that everybody gets to choose his/her/their “gender”—which apparently means that men who think that God or nature got their gender right are simply wrong. My nuts were not added on to me. They are me. This means nobody is getting through to men, who simply turn off the sound and walk away, because there’s virtually no one expressing maleness as men see it. Feminism in all its various iterations, after all, is about women saying what women are and demanding that men listen — why should it be any different for men?
USNA wants “a subservient faculty, just as — I have repeatedly argued — they want subservient midshipmen.” At great cost to the taxpayer, this present academy produces disappointed young people, the kind who serve their sentence in service and then split for the civilian sector.
Overachievers “are attracted to Annapolis because they believed the hype that they would be surrounded by their kind. They are the most disillusioned because they had the highest expectations, and almost no one else is even near their level.” Even “the relentless machinelike physical and mental overachievers who run ultramarathons and become SEALs, EOD, or Marine infantry, and who never, ever give up” quietly feel their time at Annapolis has been wasted.
Identity-based admissions put “students who have lower predictors and lower performance with a constant stream of remediation that still doesn’t get them up to the level of the people we rejected”. Rather than resolve past racism, this requires everyone to lie and pretend no one was better-qualified for the job. The lie doesn’t actually raise the condition of any race or either sex, it merely empowers the academy administration.
Gender-blindness is another impossible ideological demand of the feminized Annapolis. Young men simply will not respond to women quite the way they do men, which has always required women with rank to be more aggressive, more assertive, more hierarchical than men. Military hierarchy limits the feminine impulse to coddle and exempt the special sailor.
The civilian academy has become notorious for doing the opposite, indeed Professor Fleming seems to not appreciate just how bad the average campus has become. Nor is his experience the end of the topic of cross-sex identification at Annapolis.
During a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in March, academy superintendents testified that West Point has stopped teaching both “Race, Ethnicity and Nation” and “Power and Difference” classes, while the Naval Academy has likewise ended two courses “Gender Matters” and “Gender Sexuality Studies” after a Pentagon review of their ‘diversity’ curricula.
Intersectionality demands representation. The class on transgender acceptance should be taught by a transgender person, according to the activist ideal, which is to say the civilian Queer Theory academic ideal. At the very least, it should be taught by an ‘ally’ with proper training and indoctrination in the absolute necessity of medical interventions, pronouns, and full access to female spaces for men.
In the military and its academy, as in the broader world, political transgenderism captures policy ahead of politics. ‘No debate’ is the ‘civil rights’ mantra of political transgenderism. At core, it is a special pleading. Far less onerous medical and psychiatric conditions bar Americans from serving in uniform. The US Constitution does not confer any American a ‘right to serve’ in the military.
Transgenderism is exactly where the academic culture becomes maximally incompatible with a military culture that is good at war. Junior officers do not need to think. They require direction. Fleming does not quite agree, but his book does.
How The Camel Conquered The Early Muslim World From India To Spain
Originally published August 2025.