Did You See West Point's New Mission Statement?

The next generation of cadets trained by the United States Military Academy at West Point will learn under a new mission statement as the result of changes announced by 61st Superintendent LTG Steve Gilland.

While a visit to the West Point website this week still describes the "world's preeminent leader development institution" as one whose members "live by the motto 'Duty, Honor, Country,'" those three words are set to be dropped from West Point's mission statement.

"Duty, Honor, Country is foundational to the United States Military Academy's culture and will always remain our motto," Gilland stated in a letter to the "Long Gray Line" and all USMA supporters announcing that those three words would no longer be part of the institution's mission. "These three hallowed words are the hallmark of the cadet experience and bind the Long Gray Line together across our great history," the letter insisted while also arguing that the time had come to remove them from West Point's mission.

As Gilland explained, West Point's "responsibility to produce leaders to fight and win our nation's wars requires us to assess ourselves regularly" and therefore the academy's leaders spent 18 months "working with leaders from across West Point and external stakeholders" to review the "vision, mission, and strategy to serve this purpose."

The outcome: a recommendation to "senior Army leadership" that West Point's mission statement be changed to:

To build, educate, train, and inspire the Corps of Cadets to be commissioned leaders of character committed to the Army values and ready for a lifetime of service to the Army and Nation.

In MacArthur's address to West Point Cadets, the then-retired hero of World War II and Korea emphasized that "those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying point to build courage when courage seems to fail, to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith, to create hope when hope becomes forlorn," MacArthur said.

In a now especially prescient portion of his address at West Point, MacArthur addressed the "unbelievers" who "will say they are but words, but a slogan, but a flamboyant phrase. Every pedant, every demagogue, every cynic, every hypocrite, every troublemaker, and, I am sorry to say, some others of an entirely different character, will try to downgrade them even to the extent of mockery and ridicule."

Now some six decades after MacArthur's farewell to West Point in his twilight years, those three words — duty, honor, country — have apparently been deemed unnecessary to maintain in the institution's mission.

As Gilland's letter noted, the West Point mission has changed nine times in the past 100 years, and the words "duty, honor, country" were first added to the statement in 1998. But if, as Gilliand argued in his letter, that duty, honor, country are still at the foundation of West Point, then why remove the words from the mission statement? Is it so out of fashion to believe in and enumerate such things as the focus of America's first military academy in the spirit with which MacArthur commended them to cadets?

"Our updated mission statement focuses on the mission essential tasks of Build, Educate, Train, and Inspire the Corps of Cadets to be commissioned leaders of character, with the explicit purpose of being committed to the Army Values and Ready for a lifetime of service," Gilland further reasoned of the recommended change. "Our absolute focus on developing leaders of character ready to lead our Army's Soldiers on increasingly lethal battlefields remains unchanged," Gilland insisted.

But if nothing is changing about West Point's "absolute focus," then why change the mission?