Colonel David F. Bedey, a professor at the United States Military Academy, recently published at Family Security Matters a pair of timely essays that—though ostensibly concerning a service academy—offer ideas germane to the role American higher education ought to be playing in our nation’s long war against Islamofascism.

In Educating Future Strategic Leaders, he argues that West Point’s present core curriculum is off track—an unacceptable situation given the threats our nation is facing in the 21st century—and goes on to propose a curriculum explicitly designed to prepare today’s cadets to become tomorrow’s generals. He suggests that such a curriculum would engage cadets in the question: What is my place in the world. . . as a mortal human being preparing for a career as an Army officer of the nation that stands at the forefront of Western civilization? Replace “career as an Army officer of the nation” with “citizenship in the nation,” and the implications for civilian education are clear.

In his second piece, A Matter of Will, Colonel Bedey discusses how events in Iraq have revealed that seemingly reasonable lessons drawn from our defeat in Vietnam and from our triumph in the Cold War have together led our national security establishment to disregard the primacy of “will” in the conduct of war. He goes on to point out how the service academies and the nation’s other colleges and universities can—and should—sustain national will in the face of a protracted war against a determined and barbaric enemy.

Colonel Bedey’s call for a reevaluation of the United States Military Academy’s curriculum is not likely to win him many friends at West Point. But this is not a time for complacency. And what is true for the academy is also true for the rest of our institutions of higher education.