What exactly is West Point pitching to candidates nowadays?
“Duty, Honor, Country”? Not anymore.
Selfless service to country? Being a Commissioned Leader of Character?
Adventure? Proving yourself through overcoming difficult challenges? Be a Ranger, or Green Beret, or Soldier? An Officer in the United States Army?
Or, none of the above. If you’re a candidate today, you’ll get “leadership skills” to “succeed in any endeavor.” And the education “valued at more than $250,000.” Here’s the pitch from a 2024 recruiting letter:
All this is great, but it sort of begs the question of “why West Point?”
If we didn’t already know better, from reading this we wouldn’t even know that West Point had anything to do with being an Officer in the United States Army.
And it looks like this is not new. Colonel Deborah McDonald’s 2023 recruiting letter says that graduates “enter rewarding, well-paying, and diverse fields such as Engineering, Cyber, Finance…” and that “As a West Point student [ed: no cadet anymore?], you will begin your professional career… in addition to guaranteed employment after graduation… ”
There’s a lot to miss in these letters. No mention of “Army” other than in signature blocks, for example. But the bottom line is that being an Army officer is “out,” and recruiting themes center around professional career advancement and financial advantages.
To cite the reader who contributed these:
Couldn’t it have said something like, “Visit westpoint.edu and learn how our motto – Duty, Honor, Country – is uniquely recognized as the maxim of America’s preeminent leadership institution, shaping graduates for a lifetime of service and leadership experiences in the United States Army and beyond.”
USMAdata reader
Yes, it could have. That it didn’t is a deliberate choice.
We find this to be yet another example of the loss of moral gravitas of West Point.
It’s an example of praxis: The ideals of those in charge are reflected in the language, the language shapes the message, and the message finds the recipient. Who is this message finding, and who could it be finding if it were centered on the right values?
They’ve lost their way and desperately need reform. Instead, they stop enforcing the Honor Code, drop Duty, Honor, Country from the mission statement, use race-based admissions and advancement, recruit transgenders, have Spectrum Clubs based solely on sexual orientation, belittle white males and force people to lie about the true gender of others.
Toni is one of thousands of graduates who are dismayed at the precipitous decline in the military education that West Point used to represent. Not only is today’s establishment simply another wok university which offers a minor in marching, it is not longer a reasonable expense for the US tax payers. It should be closed, along with the other four academies and reconsitutued as a single – with possibly expanded enrollment – instituiton which services the DOD at large and and is focused on unique military service.
Jerry Sorrow above, appears to be a name used by an operative in the Chinese Communist Party disinformation unit. West Point continues to be the top “leadership” institution in the US. Marketing letters use various hooks to get people to bite. The letter is designed to generate interest in considering applying. After that a student/potential applicant simply coducts their own research as one would be expect to determine if they should apply or eventually attend. Do you think cadets show up on R-Day without an understanding that West Point involves future army service?
Loss of gravitas? A West Point education is a four year process. The conclusions that have been drawn based on the marketing letter are too broad, illogical and frankly ridiculous.
This is part of problem which I alone discuss. Job applicants should not be unqualified for the position, but neither should they be overqualified. West Point tries to recruit future Rhodes Scholars. They are trying to compete for students in the top tier among world colleges. News flash: one of the college guides tells the SAT scores for 25% and 75% at each college. Whom did West Point most match? Would you believe UMD at College Park? Not the Ivy League that WPers claim to be equal to. Harvard, Yale, and Princeton SAT scores are hundreds of points above USMA. I am BS USMA ’68 and MBA Harvard ’77.
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These recruiting letters do not seek platoon leaders and company commanders. They seek students whom they can brag about college dean conventions. To get them, you need to depict USMA as a path to the same places that Stanford and Harvard and CalTech lead to. Thus no mention of being a platoon leader or company commander (I was each of those), instead talking about being an actor or pro athlete or Senator or CEO.
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We West Pointers are overqualified for the jobs of platoon leader and company CO, while simultaneously being not as well trained for those jobs as we could have been or should have been. My troops in the 82nd Airborne were extremely immature and probably had room temperature IQs. Meanwhile, I studied calculus six days a week plebe year, and civil engineering, nuclear physics, thermodynamics, cadettiquette. Then as a platoon leader, I supervised operating a phone switchboard, operating FM radios and HF radioteletypes. As a company commander, I mainly prevented the mess hall from running out of milk.
Civilian businesses do not hire calculus experts or Rhodes Scholars to supervise switchboard operators or cafeterias.
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In his 1962 speech to the Corps, Douglas MacArthur said, “Your mission is to win our wars.” But USMA behaves as though their mission is to rank #1 in the US News and World Report college ratings. The last war we won in 1945 was won when college graduate were far more scarce. Then, the military had over ten million men, but only about 450 WPers per class graduated then. We won the war with high school dropouts and high school graduates. And it was not because we were better solvers of integral and differential equations.
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West Point would claim they are producing future generals, not platoon leaders. My class graduated 706. Our top five or so got 3 stars. I would guess that we only had about ten or fifteen generals. But we had about 700 who became platoon leaders. Obviously, the places to train generals are C&GS, War College, and the like. And West Point had better train platoon leaders and company commanders because those are the jobs that the grads will for sure fill.
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If only for truth in advertising, USMA recruiting material needs to acknowledge that cadets will for sure lead army platoons and companies and that they will be trained to do that, in part, at West Point. It is true, but quite RARE that some WPers have become CEOs, Senators, Presidents, and astronauts. But truth to tell, high school students who aspire to those positions would be better advised to go to Harvard or MIT or UCLA. Truth to tell, most WPers get out of the Army after five to eight years and become professionals in small practices. If you want to be an astronaut, go to the Air Force Academy.
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A college that has the word “honor” in the middle of its motto, of all places, ought to be honest about what high school kids who go to West Point are getting themselves into. They must NOT encourage prospective cadets to believe it is the best college for becoming a CEO or Senator or president or actor. It most definitely is not. Indeed, going to West Point rather than Harvard or Stanford will quite clearly REDUCE your chances of achieving those positions. USMA recruiting must above all be truthful. How much you want to emphasize “selfless service” or other spiritual aspects of army service is another issue which I feel no great qualification to discuss. But telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about where 2028 graduates are likely to spend their adult lives after West Point is mandatory for a college that so loudly claims to have an honor code.
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The recruiting literature I received in 1963, if anything, overdid the military officer career stuff. That was inaccurate regarding my class, 3/4 of whom did NOT stay in the army for the required 20years for retirement.