OAN’s Brooke Mallory
3:56 PM – Wednesday, March 13, 2024
The superintendent of West Point has announced that the U.S. Military Academy will no longer include the motto “Duty, Honor, Country” in its mission statement. General Douglas MacArthur famously underlined this phrase in a speech in 1962.
From this point forward, the famous phrase will be replaced with a simple line that reads, “Army Values.”
The shift, which many view as West Point becoming more progressive, was authorized by Army Chief of Staff Randy George and Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth.
“Our responsibility to produce leaders to fight and win our nation’s wars requires us to assess ourselves regularly,” Lt. Gen. Steve Gilland wrote in a letter to cadets and supporters on Monday.
“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.”
“As a result of this assessment, we recommended the following mission statement to our senior Army leadership: 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,” he added.
The mission statement of West Point has undergone nine revisions, according to Gilland, who also pointed out that “Duty, Honor, Country was first added to the mission statement in 1998.”
The commander stated that “Army Values include Duty and Honor, and Country is reflected in Loyalty, bearing true faith and allegiance to the U.S. Constitution, the Army, your unit, and other Soldiers.”
The previous mission statement was, “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.”
Randy DeSoto, a West Point alumnus, claimed in The Western Journal that he was one of the “entire Corps of Cadets” that viewed a video of MacArthur’s 1987 speech commemorating the school’s 25th anniversary.
“The general closed by telling the cadets, ‘In the evening of my memory, always I come back to West Point. Always there echoes and re-echoes: Duty, Honor, Country,’” DeSoto wrote.
“Hopefully, the same will be true for today’s West Point cadets, even with ‘Duty, Honor, Country’ no longer in the mission statement.”
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