Does the U.S. military need another service academy? Two former graduates of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point think so.
Michael LaValle, a former infantry soldier who now works in finance and retired Army Lt. Col. DeVan Shannon, who teaches at the Joint Special Operations University, envision a full-size military academy — akin to West Point or the U.S. Air Force Academy — dedicated to the military’s use of space, cyber, and robotics. The two believe those subjects will be vital to the military in the future but are given short shrift at current schools.
The two told Task & Purpose that a new approach to academy education would embrace officers learning simultaneously from the public and private sector, where innovation in space, cyber and robotics is moving rapidly.
“The academies aren’t moving fast enough in these directions or at large enough scale, and finally, they’re not recruiting the kids and the talent that are necessary to succeed,” LaValle told Task & Purpose.
The pair started to think about a whole new academy during business trips to Israel and Ukraine. LaValle was in Ukraine last week when he spoke to Task & Purpose.
Seeing operations in both spots, LaValle and Shannon said, made two things very apparent: the “incredibly” fast-paced evolution of technology in combat and the greater responsibilities of young people either driving the technological change or filling in military leadership positions.
“Something that DeVan and I have witnessed firsthand at the front lines in Ukraine and Israel is, much younger men and women are becoming generals. They’re becoming colonels,” LaValle said. “We have no education path or training path to create 30 to 40-year-old generals in America. A general in the cyber force or robotics force may end up being much younger than a general in the conventional forces today.”
They even pitched a home for the campus, which they call the “Frontier Academy”: just down the road from Silicon Valley, at the Presidio, a former Army post at the base of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.
If that location sounds familiar and you’re a sci-fi fan, it might be because the Presidio was the home of Starfleet Academy in the 1990s Star Trek movies, a connection that caught the eye of Elon Musk. The Space X founder called the tech-focused military academy a “cool idea” in a post on X, adding that “Starfleet Academy has a nicer ring to it though.”
But sci-fi nostalgia aside, being next door to Silicon Valley would be a major advantage.
“For example, they can go into the Reserves. A student can graduate [into] the Space Force and maybe work one weekend a month or two weeks a year in their Space Force unit, but they might also be working at Space X or rocket labs,” LaValle said. “Either they’ll find a problem in their unit, and maybe they’ll see an opportunity or learn something in their private sector company, and they can bring them to each other and bridge that private-public sector gap.”
The U.S. Air Force Academy, Naval Academy and Military Academy have all updated their curricula in recent years to offer degrees in cyber, robotics and space but LaValle and Shannon argue that there’s no way for emerging officers to learn simultaneously from the public and private sector, where a lot of the innovation is coming from.
“We’re talking about a concentration of thought leadership of the nation, and that doesn’t exist in these individual courses or disciplines that are being created at the academies,” LaValle said.
There are three traditional military academies in the Department of Defense. Two others — the U.S. Coast Guard Academy and Merchant Marine Academy — produce officers for their services but do not fall under Pentagon control.
Lessons from Ukraine
Shannon recalled meeting a Ukrainian brigade of engineers sitting in a basement with 3D printers, chemicals, computers and soldering equipment, who were adjusting drones, payloads and weapon systems at scale. All of them had worked in the private sector before the war.
“It hit me very fast that this is a completely different way than every other army is doing it, and that if this was in our Army, or any other ‘professional army,’ there would be such resistance, because that’s ‘somebody else’s job,’” Shannon said. “We consistently found with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that the guys on the ground can identify a problem but then the bureaucracy and the system takes two or three years to get to it, and many of [our] colleagues, friends and subordinates died because of that lag.”
The other problem they want to solve is the “type of officer” that the academies can produce.
LaValle said there’s no current flexibility to become a part or full-time officer after graduating from the academies, something that they think is crucial for the U.S. to get ahead and learn from private companies doing space, cyber, robotics work.
“Whereas when we’re looking at space and cyber, that is a whole different leadership set and there’s no connection between the conventional world, where there’s tons of cyber activity going on — if they want to serve, there’s no way to connect it,” Shannon said. “Getting young people, where their minds are very wet at a point that they want to do something, and then connect them to the system and then put them into a Reserve status after graduation, or soon after graduation so there’s a constant interplay, will create a hybrid fusion that currently doesn’t exist.”
Revamping military innovation
The pitch for a fourth service academy comes amid broader discussions about how to revamp military education and innovation pipelines in a similar urgency that the federal government did during the Cold War. The idea is one drop in the bucket for the large-scale innovative shake up that the private sector, think tanks, and former American military leaders have advocated for in order to transform the multi-billion dollar bureaucracy that is the U.S. military for the fast-changing, technological wars of the future.
The most recent large-scale change occurred when President Donald Trump established an entirely new military branch in 2018, the U.S. Space Force. But change-makers want more: Congress has called for setting up a drone corps for instance, but Army leaders have said they prefer that the technology is dispersed throughout its formations. LaValle pointed out that the United States’ two major adversaries, Russia and China, as well as Ukraine and Poland already have drone-focused forces.
The issue at the heart of the Frontier Academy vision to capitalize on the minds of young innovators to help solve military problems is something that other programs, like Hacking 4 Defense, have tried to address. Hacking 4 Defense, H4D, is a class sponsored by the Defense Department and offered at 20 universities, like Stanford University, to work on military and intelligence community problems and come up with commercial solutions
“It’s not a bad idea. It’s half of an idea,” Steve Blank, one of the H4D founders said about the academy pitch. “Let’s say you build this, where do these people go and why will they not just be sucked up like the system already does? Unless you fix the talent assignment process and personnel management in the DoD, we will then create another cadre of misused people.”
Blank said he’s learned from his H4D course that “human beings in their 20s are looking for things that are mission-driven,” and that an unexpected number of students have gone on to work for defense contractors or even become military officers. However, he said, those who grow their technical 21st-century skills while working in the Department of Defense can find better opportunities in the private sector.
“The military incentive system is still ‘we’ll give you $25,000 to stick around for another tour’ when in fact they could be making a quarter million dollars or more a year,” Blank said. “What’s the point?”
Recruiting new cadets
To identify a pipeline of students who would be interested in the Frontier Academy, LaValle and Shannon brainstormed an idea of federal high schools, modeled off of the way Israel recruits high schoolers for unit 8200, its highly classified intelligence corps.
“Israel gathers the most brilliant youth in the nation between the ages of 17 and 21 and they consolidate them in one unit, and then they set them free to innovate and think. That is something that America doesn’t do,” LaValle said. “They [Israel] find these kids when they’re 12 and 13, and every student in the nation aspires to make it into unit 8200 and we have no channel for our youth in the same manner.”
There are of course fundamental differences between the U.S. and Israel — which has a population of 10 million, roughly 3% the size of the U.S., and has mandatory military service for its citizens once they turn 18.
Shannon said there’s a lot of interest among bright young people to attend top schools like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Caltech but that the U.S. military is missing out on absorbing the talent that chooses to go into these schools over the military.
“What’s extremely important about the Frontier Academy concept is it being an inspirational avenue to bring together some of the most brilliant people from the robotics competitions around the United States, the math elites and things like that, in a way that they’re not being addressed right now,” Shannon said.
Retired Col. Peter Newell, co-founder of H4D and former director of the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force, a now-defunct forward operating innovation cell, wrote an opinion piece last week about the American “struggle” to create a “unified system for cultivating entrepreneurial thinking.” Newell wrote that military and civilian education still “treat innovation and entrepreneurship as abstract concepts rather than mission-critical skills.”
Newell also advocates for working within existing systems, like expanding STEM education funding like the U.S. did during the Cold War; establishing national security innovation and entrepreneurial degrees at civilian universities and a masters degree at the National Defense University; introducing “hacking government challenges” driven by scholarships at high schools and junior colleges; and establishing a new GI-Bill-like fund for veterans and “rising technologists” to attend defense-focused entrepreneurship programs.
Newell also called for senior national security leaders to have mandatory “hands-on” experience for innovation and entrepreneurship training, similar to what LaValle and Shannon envision for the Frontier Academy requiring private-sector work for its students.
Current academies
LaValle originally shared the idea in a LinkedIn Post, asking for feedback on the pitch. LaValle, who is currently the founder of a venture capital firm, said he has no financial interest in the formation of the academy and that it would still be a military academy funded by the federal government.
“It would operate in exactly the same way as our other three academies,” LaValle said. “All of our ideas are for the public sector. It’s possible that there could be private funding that helps it, but this is in the same way that an endowment helps the military academy, an endowment might help the Naval Academy, but there’s no investor component.”
As graduates from the academies themselves, they expect resistance from the three institutions but said that the problem set for future warfare requires a new talent pipeline and way of training future officers.
“The Air Force Academy produces great pilots and people that support pilots. West Point creates great ground fighters and the Naval Academy creates people who understand the nautical domain,” Shannon said. “We don’t have that right now in the cyber and space domain and we definitely don’t understand how robotics and computer programming works all that together.”
The Air Force and Naval Academies officials declined to comment. West Point officials did not respond to inquiries.
But those academies have updated their curricula in recent years, offering new majors and courses which are “dependent completely on the needs of the service,” Naval Academy Superintendent Vice Adm. Yvette Davids told Task & Purpose in December. Naval Academy students can now major in robotics or data science, for example.
At West Point, cadets can take courses on computer science and data or get a major in AI.
At the Air Force Academy, students can take courses in cyber science, space warfighting, and robotics and autonomous systems to name a few.
The pair’s vision also comes from a growing criticism, which they agree with, that the U.S. education system is based on an “industrial model,” a way to produce skilled labor, versus creativity and entrepreneurship that the Frontier Academy could produce.
“There’s education over here, and you get a degree and you do a project, but you didn’t get the leader education. Whereas the academies, you get good, solid general education, but it’s focused on being leaders,” Shannon said. “In the space, cyber, robotics world of the technological future that we’re moving towards, we need those two things to come together.”
LaValle noted that it’s been more than 70 years since the U.S. started a brand-new academy.
“It’s a very rational pace for America for every half century or three-quarter century to create a new academy for the new styles of warfare that are coming,” LaValle said. “This has been our history. We’re not deviating from anything, and the need is crystal clear for a new way to educate our leaders.”
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