New Approach at West Point has Cadets Attacking Future War Problems

Wrestling with legal questions on how to use high-energy lasers to strike low-orbiting satellites. Designing and testing a hypersonic rocket test vehicle to cross the 100 kilometer line. These are key future warfare problems that need solutions. But it is not colonels or generals in the Pentagon or some underground research facility doing the work; it’s cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point piecing the puzzle together. The above scenarios, involving CDT Ashley Clegg '23 and CDT Mackenzie Arns '23 on lasers and law and CDT Josiah Gibson '23 on hypersonics, are only a sample of a list of complex work that cadets now undertake at the Army’s premiere university. The work has not-yet-minted Army officers looking deeply at technical and ethical questions and producing solutions, BG Shane Reeves '96, dean of the U.S. Military Academy, told Army Times. The institution continues with its centuries-old basic military leadership and liberal arts education, the foundations for critical thinking needed even more than in the past, he said. “We don’t intellectually coddle them, we can’t afford it,” Reeves said. Read More.