Military is dumbing down to the detriment of national security

This article is the latest installment in our Quincy Institute/Responsible Statecraft project series highlighting the writing and reporting of U.S. military veterans. Click here for more information.

This under-the-radar story from academia should concern anyone who cares about deterrence.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill plans to close all six of its area-studies centers in 2026. Whatever the local budget logic, the national security implication is straightforward: when universities dismantle language and regional expertise, the United States shrinks the “farm team” that produces the deep knowledge we later insist is indispensable in moments of crisis.

Much of that pipeline has historically been underwritten by federal Title VI programs, including the Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowships.

Political scientist Michael Desch reminds us why that pipeline matters. In his account of how universities supported U.S. strategy, he notes that “area studies … proved to be invaluable to policymakers” during World War II. Language and culture are not a nice-to-have. They are wartime enablers that cannot be conjured after a crisis begins.

Desch also makes the pipeline point sharply: the “deep historical, cultural, and linguistic expertise” the U.S. government needed as it faced the Cold War “could only come from universities.” When a flagship university closes the centers that build that expertise, it is not just an academic rearrangement. It is a strategic self-inflicted wound.

That erosion of area expertise is not confined to campus. Inside the Defense Department, the institutions that build and sustain regional expertise are also being treated as convenient bill payers. In a summer 2025 update, the Marine Corps’ International Affairs Program (IAP) — the community that manages Foreign Area Officers (FAOs), Regional Affairs Officers, and Foreign Area SNCOs — reported that DoD-level working groups were discussing major changes to language training at the Defense Language Institute, including the possibility of moving some language learning outside Monterey.

The same update flagged broader turbulence in regional education at institutions like the Naval Postgraduate School and warned that funding reductions were already shaping what the program could do.

What does this all mean in practice? The IAP newsletter highlighted an October 2024 visit to Norway by the Commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. Eric M. Smith. A delayed flight collapsed the schedule, and Capt. Sydney Murkins, a Marine FAO at the U.S. Embassy in Oslo, delivered a condensed brief between engagements so the commandant could still get the essentials — who matters, what the sensitivities are, and what can go wrong without proper context..

Senior leaders are briefed nonstop on global issues, but rarely have time to absorb the bilateral political and military dynamics of every partner; FAOs bridge that gap with trusted, context-rich insight.

That kind of expertise is built through training — and, critically, sustainment. Yet sustainment is being cut. The IAP update reports that joint FAO sustainment courses hosted by George Washington University and coordinated by the Defense Language and National Security Education Office (DLNSEO) will no longer be funded, ending a decade-long partnership.

The IAP newsletter described the overall grant program as having been “significantly cut” and said it was working with the services to identify an alternative set of options to keep critical regional training alive. That is the language of triage: the system is looking for workarounds after capacity has already been dismantled.

Sadly, the overall trend is not new. The Marine Corps has been slowly backing away from language, regional expertise, and culture (LREC) for years — shuttering its Center for Advanced Operational Culture Learning in 2020 and reducing successor efforts to a minimal footprint inside the Brute Krulak Center at Marine Corps University before deactivating the Regional and Culture Studies Program in 2024.

Along the way, the Marines let formal cross-cultural competence expertise (including a dedicated professorship) wither. And the priorities behind recent cuts are explicit: the same IAP update notes fiscal year 2026 program funding will be reduced by at least $345,000 to support higher-priority initiatives, chiefly barracks modernization, with the blunt warning that “math, not emotions” will drive what can be supported.

This isn’t an argument against fixing barracks. It’s an argument about what happens when LREC becomes the bill payer for everything else.

I have seen the value of cultural competence both as an operator and as a scholar. As a Marine Corps intelligence and international affairs officer with multiple global deployments — and later as a graduate student in Taiwan — some of my most durable strategic lessons from deployments and graduate study were human ones: who really has influence in a partner ministry, which signals are meant for domestic audiences, when an “exercise” is political theater, and when a provocation is designed to be read as a warning. Those judgments rarely come from hard intelligence data alone.

We have learned this lesson before. After 9/11, the intelligence community was criticized for assuming technical collection could substitute for human understanding. The 9/11 Commission’s warning about a “failure of imagination” captured a broader problem: we undervalued the cultural and human foundations needed to interpret intent. For a time, the system absorbed the lesson. Then memory faded.

Great-power competition makes this drift more dangerous, not less. Consider a Taiwan Strait crisis. The United States may track every ship, missile battery, and cyber probe with exquisite precision — and still misread intent. A PLA exercise designed as calibrated political theater might be interpreted in Washington as preparations for an imminent invasion. Meanwhile, U.S. signals intended as deterrence can be read in Beijing through a different historical and cultural lens, producing the opposite of what was intended.

The Korean Peninsula carries similar risks. Analysts track North Korea’s missile launches and deployments with remarkable fidelity, yet still sometimes struggle to interpret why Pyongyang chooses a particular day, phrase, or ritual. Sometimes a test is designed to reinforce domestic legitimacy, commemorate a revolutionary holiday, or manage internal elite dynamics — not to signal immediate conflict.

Without cultural literacy, the United States and its allies may mistake ritual for escalation, or respond in ways that create the escalation they’d hoped to avoid.

Reversing this trend won’t be easy, but it is not complicated. Three steps would make a difference:

Treat cultural competence as a warfighting requirement again. Tie language, regional, and culture education to professional development and promotion — not as a token checkbox, but as a meaningful signal of what the institution values.

Stabilize the training pipeline. If DoD and the services believe regional expertise is critical, then DLI and sustainment programs cannot be treated as convenient bill payers whenever budgets tighten. Cutting sustainment is the policy equivalent of buying a fleet and refusing to fund maintenance.

Balance technology with human insight. AI and cyber tools have their place, but they must be paired with analysts and officers trained to ask why adversaries behave as they do. Data can track movement; culture helps interpret meaning. One without the other can be dangerous.

Sun Tzu’s advice remains unfashionably relevant: know your enemy and know yourself. That requires the hard, human work of cultural understanding — work that cannot be automated, surged at the last moment, or conjured after a crisis begins.

If we keep dismantling the institutions that teach us how to see the world through an adversary’s eyes, the surprise won’t be what our rivals can do. It will be what we failed to understand.