TONE DEAF AT WEST POINT – ONCE AGAIN, THE ARMY FAILS TO “READ THE ROOM.”
Articles
Tue, 03/19/2024 - 9:32am
Tone Deaf at West Point
Once again, the Army fails to “read the room.”'
By Martin Stanton
I wasn’t commissioned out of the United States Military Academy / USMA (given my habitual truancy and dismal academic record in high school, I wouldn’t have been accepted even if I’d applied) but I have a lot of respect for West Point as an institution. Sadly, it’s gotten to the point that whenever I see that the USMA is in the news, I inwardly cringe before I even read the story. Watching West Point step on rake after rake these past few years has been painful. Nobody likes to see an old friend fallen on hard times.
The latest public relations debacle is taking “Duty, Honor, Country” out of the school’s mission statement.
Granted, “Duty, Honor, Country” is still the motto of West Point and it’s carved into all sorts of edifices up there and on uniform patches and for all I know it’s embroidered on each cadet’s underwear. “Duty, Honor, Country” isn’t going away.
So why take it out of the school’s mission statement and replace it with “Army Values”? Sure, mission statements get re-written from time to time, but why drop the school’s motto from the mission statement? It’s three words and two comma’s – they couldn’t have been that hard up for space on the document. Here’s the change:
“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”.
https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/tone-deaf-west-point-once-again-army-fails-read-room
