USMA Admissions Site Needs An Update

This is a minor observation, but we’d like to help West Point keep its standards high. The admissions website is out of date. The “meet our cadets” section on the site (Link), as shown below, accessed recently, should be retitled “Meet our grads,” or be updated to show actual cadets and cadet video introductions. Ryan … Read more

Army Athletics Got A COVID Emergency Loan–Then Did Not Pay It Back

Back in January we wrote about the Army West Point Athletic Association’s (AWPAA) finances and business model. In this we noted that the AWPAA, while receiving massive government grants and other various subsidies and advantages of being at West Point, got a Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan by July, 2020. The auditor reported that AWPAA … Read more

John T Reed Says Nice Things

We saw a while ago that John T Reed gave us a nice mention on his military articles blog. High Praise – Thanks John! I just learned of an important blog about my undergraduate alma mater West Point. It is called https://usmadata.com/..A more complete title might be.• The Unofficial Web Site of the United States Military … Read more

Branch Composition and Preferences

In our recent post “Call for Sunlight…”, we outlined which groups went into which Army branches to put context around USMA’s stated need for preferences in admissions. Finding that certain minority groups were less represented in non-combat arms than in combat arms, we also speculated that one driver of the low number of minorities in … Read more

Resource Update – Center for Military Readiness

A reader sent us links to a recent Center for Military Readiness article “Army Scraps Gender-Neutral Standards Pushed by Discredited Social Engineers.” While our subject matter does not usually include the universe of topics related to the Army as a whole, we appreciate CMR’s similar theme that the Army’s focus should be on building a … Read more

Call for Sunlight: USMA OIR withholds Graduation, Commissioning, and Retention Statistics and Conceals Evidence of their Existence. Why?

“Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.” Brandeis, L. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously wrote in his 1913 article “What Publicity Can Do” that “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants,” discussed here and often cited by proponents of transparency in government. He was referring, apparently, to “the wickedness of people shielding … Read more

USMA Acceptance Rates: Who Didn’t Make It

Let’s conduct a thought experiment on the West Point acceptance rate. The question West Point is considering admitting two groups of candidates. Both groups contain 178 candidates and have been deemed 100% “qualified”. You get to decide which group is offered admission. Keep in mind, 178 candidates is about 15% of an entering class. Keep … Read more

Army Officer Testing Decline

We’re far from the only ones to note that West Point has lowered its entry standards and that this isn’t good for the Army. A group of authors studying officer accessions standards (Arthur Coumbe, Steven Condly, and William Skimmyhorn, two of whom are at West Point now) from the War College wrote in 2017 in … Read more