The Pentagon Should Carve Out MIT

(Photo by Scott Eisen/Getty Images)

War Secretary Pete Hegseth has done what no recent predecessor would attempt. He looked at the rot inside America’s most prestigious universities and stopped sending our best officers and our taxpayer dollars to feed it. His Feb. 27 announcement cancels Department of War sponsorship of graduate-level education and fellowships at Princeton, Columbia, MIT, Brown, Yale, and others starting in academic year 2026-2027. The Secretary calls these institutions “factories of anti-American resentment and military disdain.” On the broad point, he is right. The Hegseth Doctrine reflects an overdue correction. I support it. I want it to succeed.

I also want to make a narrow case. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) should sit in a category of its own.

I write this as a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, an AC-130 gunship combat aviator, a former Air Force Special Operations Command drone squadron commander, and a graduate of MIT. I founded VICTUS Technologies out of MIT to build resilient autonomy for the GPS-denied battlefield, the kind our adversaries already create with cheap jammers and spoofers. I assembled the technical core of my company from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. The talent base and the operational seriousness of MIT made VICTUS possible. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: University Hit With New Complaint After Dean Confirms Hidden DEI Curriculum)

My time on campus from 2023 through 2025 reinforced that view. As a veteran, I encountered respect for my service alongside some of the most demanding technical and academic........

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