The United States Military Academy (West Point) has updated its mission statement to leave out the words of its iconic motto, “Duty, Honor, Country.”
“Our responsibility to produce leaders to fight and win our nation’s wars requires us to assess ourselves regularly,” Lt. Gen. Gilland wrote. “Thus, over the past year and a half, working with leaders from across West Point and external stakeholders, we reviewed our vision, mission, and strategy to serve this purpose.”
The previous West Point mission statement read: “To educate, train and inspire the Corps of Cadets so that each graduate is a commissioned leader of character committed to the values of Duty, Honor, Country and prepared for a career of professional excellence and service to the nation as an officer in the United States Army.”
The new one, which school leaders spent the past year and a half to revise, reads: “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 professional excellence and service to the Army and Nation.”
The superintendent said the revision has received the blessings of Chief of Staff of the Army Randy George and Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth, the service’s top civilian officer who oversees its $186 billion budget.
“In the past century, West Point’s mission statement has changed nine times,” Lt. Gen. Gilland told cadets and alumni, noting that the “Duty, Honor, Country” motto was not included until 1998.
“Duty, Honor, Country is foundational to the United States Military Academy’s culture and will always remain our motto. It defines who we are as an institution and as graduates of West Point,” he said.
The motto is perhaps most famously associated with the late General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, who played a prominent role in the victory of the Allies in the Pacific in World War II and the reconstruction of post-war Japan. In 1962, he delivered a speech to the graduating cadets of the school from which he, too, had graduated and served as a superintendent, encouraging them to live up to the expectations of those words.
“‘Duty, Honor, Country’—those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be,” said the legendary commander. “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.”
West Point Allowed to Use Race-Based Admissions
In a decision handed down last month, the U.S. Supreme Court is allowing West Point to continue considering race in admissions while a lawsuit challenging such practice is pending.The justices on Feb. 2 rejected an emergency appeal by Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), whose years-long efforts resulted in a landmark Supreme Court victory declaring racial preferences in college admissions unconstitutional. The advocacy group now seeks an outcome similar to that of its successful challenges to Harvard and the University of North Carolina’s admission policies.
In its complaint, filed last September with a federal court in New York, the SFFA described West Point’s admissions policy as “racial balancing,” whereby the academy sets “desired percentages ... of blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities’ for each incoming class.”
“The Academy sets specific racial goals for each incoming class and adjusts them year over year to balance the racial demographics of each class with the racial demographics of the general population and enlisted corps,” it stated.
“Every day that passes between now and then is one where West Point, employing an illegal race-based admissions process, can end another applicant’s dream of joining the Long Gray Line.”
The Supreme Court has made clear that its decision in cases from Harvard University and the University of North Carolina did not cover West Point and the nation’s other service academies. The justices told the SFFA not to see the rejection as “expressing any view on the merits of the constitutional question,” indicating that they could still review the case in the future.
West Point graduates make up about one-fifth of all Army officers and nearly half the Army’s current four-star generals. The Biden administration has written a brief asking the high court to leave the academy’s current policies in place, arguing that having a racially diverse student body is a matter of national security.
“For more than forty years, our Nation’s military leaders have determined that a diverse Army officer corps is a national-security imperative and that achieving that diversity requires limited consideration of race in selecting those who join the Army as cadets at the United States Military Academy at West Point,” wrote Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, the Biden administration’s top legal advocate in the Supreme Court.
