Former Secretary of Defense and Marine Corps General James Mattis once observed that “the most important six inches on the battlefield is between your ears.” Yet, recent efforts to foster intellectual depth remain fragmented. The recent release of the Marine Corps commandant’s annual professional reading list features Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. A cultural thunderclap upon its 1987 release, the University of Chicago professor’s tome raced to the top of the bestseller lists. The book’s scathing indictment of higher education’s lack of focus, leading to relativism, is a curious entry in the strategy category of the reading list. The inclusion of Bloom’s book identifies the need for intellectual depth but ultimately falls flat given the unfocused nature of both the reading list and the Marine Corps’ broader educational offerings.
The Closing of the American Mind portrays higher education as adrift, abandoning the Western canon in favor of classes guided by ideological trends, not universal truths. As a result, pupils no longer pursue lofty aims like the quest for justice, truth, and beauty, settling instead for the low-hanging fruit of moral relativism. As Bloom warns, “We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part.” Bloom contends that “the failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency—the belief that the here and now is all there is.” Casting aside great books had the opposite effect: “Openness used to be the virtue that permitted us to seek the good by using reason. It now means accepting everything and denying reason’s power.” Bloom’s warnings proved prescient, as the trends he identified in the late 1980s are today the focus of criticism not only of colleges and universities but even K-12 curricula. However, the complexity of Bloom’s work risks readers not grasping its intended meaning, especially in a self-directed program without guided discussion.
The inclusion of The Closing of the American Mind under the strategy category prompts questions about how the book will improve strategic outcomes. The reading list describes the book as “a provocative analysis of America’s intellectual decline and its impact on culture, education, and leadership.” Even more puzzling is its placement alongside other titles in the same strategy category, such as Simon Sinek’s The Infinite Game, John Lewis Gaddis’s On Grand Strategy, and Lawrence Freedman’s Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine. The eclectic mix of books, blending dense cultural critique with modern leadership guides and operational histories, mirrors the fragmented university curricula that Bloom scorches. The rotation of titles on the professional reading list attempts to keep suggestions fresh, but the changes often disorient, contributing to this lack of thematic cohesion. A serious reading of the book identifies the problems of modern education, yet the Marine Corps supplies no remedy—instead, it exacerbates them. Such a collection of titles, with little commonality or complementary attributes, does not build an intellectual foundation but further fragments attention.
To be sure, a self-study reading list will almost inevitably be characterized by some degree of a scattershot quality, by virtue of being what it is—a reading list, rather than an educational framework. The risk, however, is that that same scattershot quality that focuses institutional attention on a wide variety of intensely current subjects absent historical context—precisely what Bloom warned against—manifests elsewhere in a military service’s identity. Just over a year before releasing the updated reading list, at the Reagan National Defense Forum in December 2024, the commandant emphasized US advantages over China: “The advantage lies with us because our last combat was captured on somebody’s iPhone 14. [China’s] last combat was captured on oil and canvas, and they should not forget that.” He added, “I would not undersell the value that our combat experience brings to this fight.” While this was likely intended as motivational rhetoric, the remarks prioritize the vivid here and now. The Marine Corps must be careful about doing so at the cost of nuanced historical engagement—precisely the tendency Bloom warned would enfeeble strategic vision.
Bloom’s book serves as a critique of modern education, including the offerings of the US military. The pedagogical trends that Bloom identified in the 1980s now permeate its professional military education. For officers, these courses focus on preparing them for their next assignment rather than fostering lifelong learning. Just as in the ivory towers of civilian academia, military professional military education institutions mistake classroom hours for rigor and the number of pages read for depth. The decision to confer master’s degrees sought to professionalize these courses—and reflects a proliferation of master’s degrees in American society as a whole. But it also reveals a normative expectation among the US armed services that promotion to field-grade ranks and above is associated with earning a graduate degree, even if it is not a statutory requirement. In the case of professional military education, the resulting bloated curricula and added seat time transformed military education into just another credentialing exercise. By watering down the master’s degree while depriving students of genuine intellectual rigor, the military instilled false confidence in its officers through the hollow validation of an advanced degree. The résumés of military officers grew longer, but intellectual growth retreated. This is the very process Bloom diagnosed decades ago. James Burnham, in his 1941 The Managerial Revolution, foresaw this trend toward credentialism as the emerging managerial class focused on the bottom line and, in a professional military context, not leading those on the front line. The process risks turning leaders in the profession of arms into a managerial class in combat boots.
Bloom’s prescription—the close, disciplined reading of great books—has never been more accessible. Podcasts, YouTube lectures, online reading groups, and widely available digital editions now place the classical education Bloom championed within easy reach of any motivated Marine. The Marine Corps should seek to facilitate this learning. It could consider, for example, partnering with St. John’s College in Annapolis, which focuses its liberal arts curriculum on great books, to bring these to its Marines. Ancient texts such as the Iliad, the Odyssey, the works of Thucydides, and Plato’s Republic offer insights and spur self-examination for students, particularly those facing danger, risk, and uncertainty.
In his initial guidance to Marines upon being nominated to serve as commandant, General Eric Smith declared, “We prepare for the worst-case scenario—the pacing threat. If the day comes that we must face that threat, we will be ready.” That pacing threat remains China. Should the grim casualty estimates for a potential conflict with China prove accurate, the Marine Corps will only be as ready as its leaders at all levels. It will need leaders who have spent hard hours training in the field, but who have also spent evenings around a seminar table wrestling with enduring works, gaining the intangible qualities on which victory has so often depended: historical understanding, moral clarity, and the resolve to endure.
Major Benjamin Van Horrick is a Marine officer based in Virginia.
The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense, or that of any organization the author is affiliated with, including the United States Marine Corps and Department of the Navy.
Image credit: Spc. Christopher Brecht, US Army
