The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools
When I was coming up, the Army was in an intellectually humble place. Because of the unforeseen (or at least not fully anticipated) challenges posed by OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM, the Army was in the midst of learning all about what it didn’t know. At the time, this was counterinsurgency. All the lessons we thought we had learned from past conflicts (or the ones we had previously learned and then deliberately forgotten) were re-assessed and we had a process of re-learning. Everyone was reading How to Eat Soup with a Knife, watching a film about the French experience in North Africa, and digesting the latest nuggets of wisdom from General Petraeus and John Nagl.
We tried to develop “design methodology”. We established a school to teach Red Teaming. We encouraged outside of the box thinking.
Then the worm turned. At some point, the institutional imperatives switched back towards building an Army suited to linear combat operations, and the focus again became size and effectiveness in large-scale combat operations. The foundations of counterinsurgency warfare—learning about the cultural parameters of the locales in which we were to operate—came to an end. Red teaming faded away. Learning from the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the heroic defense mounted by the Ukrainians, imperatives in modern combat appeared to revolve around space-based detection and communication systems, the ability to scale up manufacturing of defense materiel, and adapting off of the shelf commercial technologies for wartime use.
Then the worm was pulled out of the ground and vaporized. Early in 2025 the Department of Defense started exercising very specific controls over what could and could not appear on Army web pages. Many of the institution’s own leading web pages for professional discussion—such as the Army War College’s site and their War Room professional blog—went completely dark. This was initially just a ten-day social media “pause”. It then recurred for a longer period as editors and others decided how to comply with the new guidance. The guidance, I am told, was changing rapidly and was often unclear. Several sites went dark, apparently forever (a friend implored the Sergeant Major of the Army to “blink three times if he was under duress” as we watched his post on X—now deleted—where he announced that his social media content was being consolidated (read “shut down”)).
While perhaps there is an argument that the Department of Defense has some legitimate interest in harmonizing its outward-facing messaging to align with larger Departmental goals or imperatives, this was not that. We all know the difference between the public affairs mission (or, more nefariously when speaking in a domestic context, information operations) and the accurate and unvarnished information needed for staffs to complete their work thinking things through for the commander. This action by the Department affected both outward-facing sites as well as sites, like that of War College, primarily intended for audiences inside the profession of arms and geared towards professional learning and discussion. It appeared designed to regulate what was being said, as opposed to pushing a unified message or maintaining good order and discipline.
As such, this Departmental action seems to conflict with the entire notion of the Army as part of a “profession of arms” where some notion of free intellectual enquiry underpins the notion of a profession that must define itself, school itself, and police the values and principles applied by its members. These actions seemed more like attempts at centralized, Napoleonic control and less like efforts to husband and grow a cadre of self-aware, thinking leaders ready to innovate and overcome novel strategic, operational, and tactical problems on the modern battlefield.
As such, these actions appear to be, at best, counter-productive.
What is to be done? As a preliminary matter, professional discussions and intellectual enquiry can always occur outside the Army’s intellectual ecosystem. There are plenty of fora for professional discussion which exist outside of official channels. There is a vibrant non-institutional military press.
Even though we can continue to further professionalism and the free enquiry that necessarily underpins that endeavor outside of the military ecosystem, should we? When General Washington originally took command of the Continental Army (and before he realized the error of his ways), the New England states largely ignored his order not to field racially integrated units. Although we pride ourselves in following orders and on military subordination to the civilian authorities, we also have twin doctrines which pull in the other direction: diverting from the letter of the commander’s order when necessary, for example, in order to better fulfill his or her ultimate intent or if the order is really stupid as well as the notion that requirement to follow an order only applies to orders that are themselves lawful. Some orders require opposition, albeit this course entails some personal and professional risk.
In a profession which requires you to kill enemy soldiers in wartime or risk being killed by them in furtherance of your values, nobody said that doing the right thing would be easy.
Garri Benjamin Hendell
Garri Benjamin Hendell is a lieutenant colonel in the Pennsylvania Army National Guard. He has served three overseas deployments to the CENTCOM AOR, various training deployments to Europe, and served in 2022-2023 as the brigade task force S3 responsible for land forces in support of border operations. He is currently assigned as the Red Team Chief, 28th Infantry Division.