Chris @ThePope011

Hello Professor Nichols, You spent twenty-five years at the Naval War College. You taught the officers who would go on to run America's wars. Famously, you never served in any of them. In February 2003, you were at your desk in Newport when you wrote this, about Colin Powell’s presentation to the United Nations: “There is only one thing to say about Secretary Powell’s presentation at the U.N.: If this doesn’t do it, nothing will.” You were confident. You were expert. You were wrong. You acknowledged this twenty years later in The Atlantic — the invasion was, in your own words, “one of the greatest geopolitical disasters in American history.” You wrote that from the same institution you are now defending. The Senior Service Colleges produced the officers who managed the Afghanistan withdrawal. General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. General Kenneth McKenzie, CENTCOM commander. On September 28, 2021, both testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that they had recommended keeping 2,500 troops in Afghanistan. The recommendation was not followed. They did not resign or say a word publicly. Then 13 American service members died at Abbey Gate on August 26, 2021. Only after that did they testify. Your response, in The Atlantic, August 16, 2021: “Afghanistan Is Your Fault.” Not the generals your institutions trained and credentialed. Not the curriculum that built the career-preserving, NSC-deferring officer class that drove those decisions to their conclusion. The American public, with our short attention span and our SUVs. General Milley, whose career your institution shaped, secretly called his PLA counterpart twice, October 30, 2020 and January 8, 2021, and assured him the US would not strike China, and that Milley would warn him personally if an attack were ordered. You wrote “Trump Put Milley in an Impossible Position.” That's not all. Secretary Austin concealed a cancer diagnosis from the White House and Congress for weeks while incapacitated; the DoD Inspector General documented it. At his farewell address in September 2023, Milley publicly called his former commander-in-chief a “wannabe dictator.” You found none of this worth a column. Anthony Tata is a retired Brigadier General. He commanded forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. He led soldiers in both wars. And now he has been asked to conduct a 90-day curriculum review of the Senior Service Colleges. Your objection is that he lacks the credentials for the job. You wrote a whole book about credentials. The foundational knowledge of the average American is, in your assessment, “plummeting to aggressively wrong.” Institutions must be insulated from the ignorant. Expertise must not be questioned by those who haven’t earned it. The men who earned your institution’s credentials - over twenty-plus years of your tenure - presided over two of the longest military failures in American history. They managed those failures in line with everything the War Colleges taught them: subordinate military judgment to civilian direction, preserve the relationship, testify about it later. They retired with honors. That is what "expertise" means to you. The question Pete Hegseth is asking isn't whether the War Colleges have credentials. It's whether the credentials mean anything. After twenty-five years on your faculty training generals who only know how to lose war, Professor Nichols, you are the wrong man to answer that.