On February 25, 2025, members of West Point’s Vanguard Initiative, an advanced military skills development program, met with two dozen visiting Israeli graduate students from Reichman University’s Argov Scholars Program in Leadership and Diplomacy. The Argov Scholars’ visit is an annual event tied to the Peace and Dialogue Leadership Initiative, a joint Yale/West Point fellowship program that promotes civil-military relations, conflict resolution, and leadership development through the lens of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and includes two weeks of “boots on the ground” in Israel and the West Bank. This event was not recorded.
Many of the Argov Scholars are veterans of the ongoing war in Gaza and were eager to share their perspectives on that conflict with the West Point cadets. With moderation by Dr. Charles Faint from the Modern War Institute and Dr. Ruth Beitler from West Point’s Department of Social Sciences, the Vanguard cadets and Argov students participated in a MWI War Council discussion centered on leadership, cross-cultural communication, and the Israeli students’ experiences as combat leaders on the ground during recent military operations inside Gaza and Lebanon. Also included in the program was a briefing exchange about West Point and the Argov Scholars programs and a cadet-led campus tour. Several of the Vanguard cadets who participated in this War Council will also attend an upcoming conference on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in New York City that will feature leading voices from both the Palestinian and the Israeli sides, as well as high ranking US diplomats and military leaders. The featured speaker for the upcoming conference is General (Retired) Joseph Votel.
The War Council Series is made possible by the gracious contributions of the Class of 1992 to the Modern War Institute at West Point. MWI’s mission is promoting informed debate and discussion among military and national security professionals, policymakers, and academics to prepare the Army, as part of the joint, combined, and interagency team, to win tomorrow, by shaping the Army today. MWI War Councils provide a valuable opportunity to broaden Cadet education by bringing in leading experts from around the country to discuss current national security problems as they relate to strategic studies theories. These valuable engagements also attract an audience from other faculty and students and are published later via the MWI website. MWI continuously generates new knowledge and adapts extant theories about the study of war, which it then integrates across the United States Military Academy, the Army, and the joint, combined, and interagency partners.