By CDR Salamander  |  Substack

Institutional capture is very real. Regardless of what initial intentions are, if you create a program, a funding line, or an initiative, if you hand it over to the excessive ideological and political, they will gladly take it and use it to their means.

If you create something that looks ideological, comes from an ideological line, and is already being used for ideological purposes, but you bring it into being, hand it to the ideological and political and hope for the best, well, it is going to come back and bite you.

That is what happened to “Women, Peace, and Security” (WPS), and as we’ve documented since 2017, with each year it has only become something more and more foreign to the needs of our nation’s military.

It didn’t have to end this way, but those who were given WPS decided to weaponize it. They have no one else to blame.

WPS is being throttled back just in time. As you’ll see at the end of this post, it was becoming the supported philosophy at our war colleges, not a supporting area of study.

How does it happen?

You get what you promote. What you reward, grows. In the end, people are policy.

With what became the core subject matter and the hiring policies that followed, the WPS cadre skewed not liberal, but leftist…founded on critical studies and Marxism—but I repeat myself.

You could not have created a stronger system to distill a less intellectually and politically diverse area of study—as designed.

I assume most of you know about this week’s development concerning DOD’s WPS cadre. If not, that’s OK, I’ll get you up to speed on that first, and more.

This is about the fruits of institutional capture and this post will end with something you will not find anywhere else that will show you the extent of the problem that exists at the Naval War College (NWC).

Stick around.

Well, for regulars of DivThu, Tuesday started off with a banger from the SECDEF.

Of course, I included the Community Note. We’ll get to that later.

After the expected gnashing of teeth and rending of clothes, he had a follow-on:

OK, let’s back up here and make sure everyone knows how we got here.

As we started homing in on the WPS problem almost eight years ago on the OG Blog when we got hold of the email from then President of NWC, Rear Admiral Jeffrey Harley, USN “operationalizing” WPS at NWC.

WPS was just part of what was happening in 2017 at NWC, yes while DJT was President. They were given the opening, and they took it. It was bad before Biden became President because Navy leadership was already led by a leftist Admiralty and proud of it.

“We are continuing to make great strides in hiring and advancing a more diverse and robust work-force across the Naval War College. Over the last 5 years, 20% of our faculty hires have come from traditionally underrepresented communities, …

Although I am proud of the progress we’ve made in diversifying our College, this is an area that requires our continued and direct focus…we are not there yet.

We must proactively recruit, develop, and retain the absolute BEST talent that our Nation (and partner nations) have to offer and we need to broaden the aperture by which we, as an institution of higher learning, examine and affect our dynamic and uncertain world.

…

As we finalize our new hiring instruction, all hiring committees within the College will have a 25% composition of women/diverse faculty representation will a goal of getting to 50%.

Additionally, each hiring recommendation will include a review and certification by the committee members that ALL candidates were considered on a fair and equitable basis. These opinions will be reviewed by Provost, VPNWC, and PNWC before any offers of hire are made.

…

We have undertaken an extensive compensation review that I anticipate coming to completion shortly. Additionally, we will establish an annual compensation review to ensure we are institutionalizing equal pay for equal work.”

Red in tooth and call for discrimination in what is a zero-sum game. Read it all.

The reporting and commentary on this was been reactionary, inaccurate, and just plain lazy. One of the better reports, flawed as it is, came from The Hill.

“As the program is under federal statute and can’t be outright killed by Hegseth alone, he said the Pentagon would comply with the minimum requirements of the WPS and fight to end the program during the department’s next appropriations process.”

Correct. What is shocking to some, perhaps, are some of the names that brought this in to being in 2017.

“The 2017 Women, Peace and Security Act was penned by current Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, then a member of the House representing South Dakota, and Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.).

The Senate’s version of the law was co-sponsored by current Secretary of State Marco Rubio, then a Florida senator. Rubio lauded the Women, Peace and Security Act earlier this month, saying it was “the first law passed by any country in the world focused on protecting women and promoting their participation in society.”

And Trump’s national security adviser, Mike Waltz, a former House member for Florida, was a founding member of the WPS Caucus when he was in Congress.

The Trump campaign website even cited the initiative as one of his top accomplishments for women during his first term.

The law ​​was intended to promote the participation of women in all aspects of overseas conflict prevention, management and resolution, as well as postconflict relief and recovery efforts, to be implemented at the State Department, Pentagon and other government agencies.”

It started that way, but as we will see, that is not what was done with it.

The defense from the House and Senate don’t survive the follow-on question.

“Every combatant commander who comes through my office highlights the strategic advantage WPS gives U.S. forward deployed forces,” (Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.)) said in a statement.

…

“The Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) initiative isn’t ‘woke’—it’s smart, strategic policy grounded in decades of research and bipartisan law, signed by President Trump in 2017,” (Rep. Lois Frankel (D-Fla.)) said in a statement. “Dismissing WPS as a ‘UN feminist plot’ is not just ignorant—it’s dangerous. It denies the reality on the ground, ignores our own defense and diplomatic priorities, and weakens our national security.”

OK. Now it is time to bring out the receipts.

Let’s bring things from 2017 to May of 2023 when WPS again broke above the ambient noise for me.

“To finish with a serious side note, the loss of focus in Newport is not something new in the last couple of years. This is a long standing drift of a few decades.

For this specific panel (Post-Conflict Development of Feminist Leadership: Peace Insights from Rwanda and Serbia.), these are all serious people and the argument could be made that they address serious issues, but is the Naval War College – and the finite money, people, and time that it has to serve the world’s second largest navy (still getting used to saying that) the correct venue?

Some assumedly well meaning people made decisions, purchased additional positions and departments, and headed certain directions that may have been more suitable at a different institution. I don’t know, Oberlin College? Maybe Bryn Mawr College … Brown University if you squint a bit … but again, I think it is very fair to ask if this area of study is really the highest and best use of the time, money, and faculty at the Naval. War. College.

The Naval War College, incidentally, of a nation whose military has not done a very good job of seeing threats, fighting threats, and winning wars in the last few decades – not to mention needs to think real hard about what it will mean to be the world’s second largest navy.

Winners have the luxury of vanity. Those on the struggle bus need to master the fundamentals and work harder.”

Four months later in SEP 2023 when I reengaged on what WPS had metastasized into.

When Hegseth mentioned that “Biden distorted” what he is referring to is the summer of 2022 memo we discussed in the SEP 2023 post linked above.

“The Women, Peace, and Security Act of 2017 (P.L. 115-68) (WPS Act) codified the United States Government’s decades-long, sustained commitment to the principles of the Women, Peace, and Security Agenda.”

As you’ll see, this did not start in 2017…2017 just gave it a hook for the left to grab hold of.

Department of Defense. The Department of Defense (DoD) WPS Strategic Framework and Implementation Plan (SFIP) established three Defense Objectives to support the WPS Strategy’s Lines of Effort (LOEs): (1) modeling and employing women’s meaningful participation in the Joint Force; (2) promoting partner nation women’s participation in all occupations in the defense and security sectors; and (3) ensuring partner nations protect women and girls, especially during conflict and crisis. In FY 2021, DoD spent $5.5 million to establish policies and programs to advance implementation of the Women, Peace, and Security Act of 2017 (Public Law 115-68), hire and train qualified personnel, and integrate WPS into relevant training curriculum and professional military education for the Armed Forces. In modeling women’s meaningful participation, Air Force General Jacqueline Van Ovost took command of U.S. Transportation Command and Army General Laura Richardson took command of U.S. Southern Command. The Department initiated use of $3 million from the International Security Cooperation Programs (ISCP) Account to conduct security cooperation (SC) programs that incorporate gender analysis and advance women’s participation in defense institutions and national security forces. This work was complemented by the Department’s efforts to support an Independent Review Commission on Sexual Assault in the Military, which prompted historic reforms to preventing and addressing sexual and gender-based violence across the force—reaffirming DoD’s commitment to advancing WPS goals within our military.

Did the Biden team do this for the national disgrace that was our defeat in Afghanistan?

Partner-nation stakeholder teams should trend toward gender balancing as a start. When women are included in assessments, definition of problems, causes, and solutions can go beyond “abstract do-gooding with minimal connection to the battles [women] are waging . . . in their own communities.”44 Both SWOT and PMESII are flexible tools in which information vital to gender mainstreaming can be captured. Through these basic analyses, SC planners can understand what roles men and women play in the security forces, the government, or the ministry of defense, and how security issues affect men and women differently. The table presents a list of possible questions for inclusion in a PMESII analysis; however, its list is by no means exhaustive, and the type of information required is situation dependent. When possible, it is important to include sex-disaggregated data, which can provide important information on who benefits from what, how women are integrated into society, and how to best target SC activities for the purposes of integrating women. Sex-disaggregated information should also be tracked, to be included in subsequent assessments.

There is more in the SEP 23 post you can read if you want, but what happened next shows the full degree of the rot those who brought WPS studies to NWC injected into our Navy.

What happened a month after the SEP 23 Substack? That is right, the wholesale rape of women following the invasion of Israel from Gaza. That, combined with the organized and targeted murder of civilians, torture of children, and industrial scale kidnapping was one of the greatest examples of what the theory of WPS would address.

So, what did they do? From my NOV 23 Substack, I outlined a “Lecture of Opportunity” at the end of October, a few weeks after the attack titled, The Israel-Gaza War: A Strategic Overview:

“Dr. Alvi’s remarks in the second half? Well, she warns you at the 30:31 mark,

I’m going to preface my talk with mentioning that I do genocide studies here at the college and my presentation is from the lens of that particular discipline of genocide studies and that’s the way in which I’m analyzing this particular topic.

I would encourage everyone to listen to the whole thing, but especially considering Alvi’s putting herself out as the genocide expert, there is no mention of the fact what started this was the wholesale rape, child murder, torturing of entire families, slaughter of civilians, and kidnapping on a scale almost unimaginable the 21st Century American mind … simply because people were Jews. Not Israelis … but simply Jews.

This it completely ignored. Instead, Alvi quickly references Rand’s Raphael Cohen to push the point she brings up on a regular basis; it isn’t the unspoken Hamas genocidal attack that is the problem, it is Israel’s response to it (32:38);

…mowing the grass killing the perpetrators along with some number of civilians buying at least a few years of relative peace and fueling further long-term radicalization and so the cycle continues ..

You see, Israel is making Hamas act this way. Was their skirt too short? Did they talk back?

She then goes to former Israeli peace negotiator who was involved in the failed Oslo Accords who co-authored an op-ed with human rights lawyer Zaha Hassan who,

…stressed three points in their op-ed:

1. 1. Hamas’s attack on Israeli civilians was unconscionable
   2. Israel’s collective punishment of the people in Gaza notably the cutting off of water, food, and electricity as as well
   3. They make the point that the importance of addressing the context of occupation and apartheid in which this is unfolding

Amazing. That op-ed, especially point #3, is straight Hamas talking points and not even close to accurate. As if it needs to be said, there have been no Israeli citizens in Gaza since 2005. Arab Muslims and Christians, Druse & other minorities with Israeli citizenship, ~+20% of the population, have more voting and civil rights than Arabs in majority Muslim countries.

That framing waves away what Hamas did on October 7th and moves the discussion to how it is Israel’s fault.

You would think the WPS faculty at NWC would have something to say about rape as a weapon of war, kidnapping of hostages by non-state actors, intentional targeting killing of unarmed civilians based on ethnicity … or something. We don’t have a video lecture on that. Instead, we have this lecture on bothsidesism.”

Stick with me—things are accelerating. The “Woke Quickening” of 2024.

In January of 2024, I got hold of the call for papers for the next WPS conference in May of 2024.

I had to dive deeper in to the history. As this is going to be a close to a TLDR post, I’ll summarize.

Anyone who tells you WPS started in 2017 is either ignorant, lazy, or gaslighting you…or all three.

• To understand why NWC was all wrapped up in Gender Studies, you need to go back to the United Nations in 2000, where WPS started.
• It accelerated on 19 December, 2011 with the person on point for the project, SECSTATE Hillary Clinton. That morning President Obama signed an Executive Order launching the first-ever U.S. National Action Plan on Women, Peace, and Security – a comprehensive roadmap for accelerating and institutionalizing efforts across the United States Government to advance women’s participation in making and keeping peace. NWC did not wait until 2017 to set the conditions in Newport, here’s a lecture from 2012 worth a view. (NB: see how this is properly done? Follow up an EO with a law. It took them six years, but they did it.)
• On October 6, 2017, the Women, Peace, and Security Act of 2017 was signed into law (Public Law No: 115-68) by President Donald Trump replacing the existing NAP framework. … A government-wide strategy on Women, Peace, and Security is required by the Act and will be implemented through interagency coordination, policy development, enhanced professional training and education and evaluation, among other approaches.

It was a three step program…that started with the UN. Take that in any way you wish.

Remember that “Call for Papers” for the May 2024 WPS conference? Well, they made me write about it again…specifically this bit:

Again…the rape of the Israeli women by Gazan men was only seven months old. So, what did they cover in the conference on the topic?

Nowhere. It is nowhere to be found.

Nothing. Zilch. Nil. Zed. Zero.

They were focused on other things.

How can you defend WPS after this? For this reason alone, it should have been disestablished, but that isn’t what happened. No. Newport doubled down.

Just last week, this is what the Naval War College Provost put out all the reasons you could want to get WPS out of NWC:

“From: Mariano, Stephen J., CIV, NAVWARCOL [redacted]

Sent: Thursday, April 24, 2025 3:49 PM

To: Walker, Darryl L., RADM, NAVWARCOL [redacted]

Cc: Halvorsen, Peter F., CAPT, NAVWARCOL[redacted]; Griego, Abel J., CMDCM, NAVWARCOL[redacted]; _NWC Staff and Faculty

Subject: SITREP: Provost/Chief Academic Officer, 14-18 April 2025

Sir,

Please see below for the weekly SITREP. Even during the Spring Recess period, there’s a lot going on at the College!

Dear Faculty and Staff,

Hope you find these AI-enabled SITREPs useful. We’re still working on calibrating for the right level of detail, so apologies if some of your important work isn’t reflected. Please let LCDR Millen and I know what you think.

And thanks again for doing what you’re doing every day!

Best Regards,

Stephen

Stephen J. Mariano, Ph.D.

Provost

US Naval War College

[redacted]

Provost / Chief Academic Officer SITREP: Week of 14-18 April 2025

Top Trend Items: Resident course students in the JPME I and II/Master’s Degree Programs were on Spring Recess, and so many faculty and staff took well-deserved leave; the College continued academic operations, however, and had a productive week with resource reallocation continuing to dominate leaders’ time; leaders are exploring innovative ways to accomplish the College’s mission.

Activity Highlights:

Resource Management and Planning: Senior leadership engaged in extensive planning to address reprioritization of College functions, tasks, and resources. Discussions focused on identifying efficiencies and reimagining how the college might achieve its mission with fewer resources, or under significantly different resource allocations within the College; e.g., that College might take capability reductions in some areas while growing its capacity in others. Efforts to reduce the cost of the International Seapower Symposium (ISS) were also undertaken.

Curriculum Review and Development: Curriculum development remained a priority, with efforts focused on reviewing the Joint Maritime Officer (JMO) syllabus for the Fleet Seminar Program (FSP), the Naval War College@Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) program, aligning the annual Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) Symposium with core curricula, and preparing for a Summer Seminar in Maritime History.

External Engagement and Collaboration: Faculty engaged with external organizations through U.S. Strategic Command’s DEGRE Wargame game reporting, the USNAVEUR Operation NEPTUNE conference planning, Halsey engagements with the 75th Ranger Regiment, an after-action review for the Leadership Mess Executive Course (LMEX), the CyberSec 2025 conference in Taiwan, and the Joint WPS Academic Forum.

Internal Reviews and Preparations: Preparations continued for the “Restoring America’s Fighting Force” (RAFF) visit and implementing other policy changes. Internal reviews included discussing faculty concerns about academic freedom, the impact of the Executive Order pausing Foreign Assistance, and the Foreign Assistance Review on International Military Education and Training (IMET).

By Lines of Effort:

Education:

Spring Recess reduced in classroom work, but operational level of war courses continued apace. Grading and curriculum reviews continued, however, for courses such as Perspectives on Modern War (PMW), the “Foundations of Moral Obligation” elective, and Joint Military Operations. Also evident last week were Integration of emerging topics like WPS into core curricula and electives, faculty professional development through the Summer Seminar in Maritime History, a relook of Fleet Seminar Program credit hours, and an exploration of innovative teaching methodologies.

Research:

Faculty researched a diverse portfolio last week, ranging from exploring the role of women in peace and security and ensuring ethical research practices through the Human Subjects Research Program to analyzing emerging technologies through the Cyber and Innovation Policy Institute (CIPI). Other research areas included examining the complexities of contingency operations (with partners like the 75th Ranger Regiment), developing and refining gaming techniques through the War Gaming Department’s support to exercises like DEGRE & Euro-Atlantic 25, and contributing to the understanding of the law of armed conflict through workshops and publications.

Outreach:

College faculty and staff emphasized strengthening relationships with a wide range of stakeholders, including the Peruvian Naval War College, the Royal Thai Navy, the OPNAV N5, Alumni (adding members to the database), and the ever-popular International Cuisine Night. Engagement with professional organizations like the Joint WPS Academic Forum and CyberSec 2025 were also key activities.

Some notes:

• They were looking for savings for the now cancelled International Seapower Symposium. Too bad they held two WPS seminars in the last year and used up all that money. Priorities, priorities.
• “Curriculum development remained a priority, with efforts focused on … aligning the annual Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) Symposium with core curricula“
• “Faculty engaged with external organizations through … the Joint WPS Academic Forum.“
• “evident last week were Integration of emerging topics like WPS into core curricula and electives, faculty professional development through the Summer Seminar in Maritime History, a relook of Fleet Seminar Program credit hours, and an exploration of innovative teaching methodologies.“

In this SITREP…just a week ago…there are—from the Provost of the Naval War College—three pushes for WPS. Nothing about the People’s Republic of China. Nothing about the shipbuilding industrial challenge. Nothing about the ongoing conflict in the Red Sea. Nothing about the Russo-Ukrainian War. Nothing about trade economics. Nothing about homeland defense.

Priorities. Priorities.

Note the use of “College”. As I titled my May 2023 Substack, Our Navy Needs More of the War, Less of the College. To be fair and balanced, back in 2018, Jen Mittelstadt, the Harold K. Johnson Chair of Military History at the U.S. Army War College, wrote an article titled, Too Much War. Not Enough College. So, you can read that article if you need some balance.

It is almost as if those who are given the charter to run our Naval War College find the task distasteful and worthy of embarrassed contempt.

Read the above and then, again, compare what we are having our Navy’s leaders study at our Naval War College, to what the People’s Liberation Army Navy is having their leaders study at their war college.

As you will see in the final link there, we have serious professors doing serious work at our Naval War College. Our money, effort, and study time should be focused on them and their work germane to the profession, not socio-political vanity projects like WPS.

Congress, time to act to fix the 2017 mistake.

As a final note, the “Every Command Must Have a Gender Advisor” effort it no longer moving forward, correct?

I don’t think everyone is up to speed as to what year this is. More work to do.

First published on CDR Salamander’s Substack