The US Military Academy announced that the iconic phrase, "Duty, Honor Country," will be scrubbed from its official mission statement.

The phrase was originally taken from General Douglas MacArthur's 1962 speech during a visit to the academy just before his death.

"A lot of warriors and heroes are weeping from their graves today," one anguished critic wrote on social media.

Lt. Gen. Steven W. Gilland, the academy's superintendent, announced the change in a message this week to West Point's alumni, known as the "Long Gray Line."

"Our responsibility to produce leaders to fight and win our nation's wars requires us to assess ourselves regularly," he wrote in a letter distributed Monday. "Over the past year and a half, working with leaders from across West Point and external stakeholders, we reviewed our vision, mission and strategy to serve this purpose."

The academy's previous mission statement was: "To educate, train and inspire the Corps of Cadets so that each graduate is a commissioned leader of character committed to the values of Duty, Honor, Country and prepared for a career of professional excellence and service to the nation as an officer in the United States Army."

Randy DeSoto, a West Point graduate and a longtime friend of The Todd Starnes Show, wrote in The Western Journal that he was among the "entire Corps of Cadets" who watched a movie of MacArthur's speech on its 25th anniversary in 1987.

"The general closed by telling the cadets, 'In the evening of my memory, always I come back to West Point. Always there echoes and re-echoes: Duty, Honor, Country,'" DeSoto wrote.

"Hopefully, the same will be true for today's West Point cadets, even with 'Duty, Honor, Country' no longer in the mission statement."

Without duty, honor, or country all we are left with is disloyalty, dishonor and treason...

Following, is the full letter that was sent to West Point graduates and their supporters:

To the Long Gray Line and all USMA Supporters:

Duty, Honor, Country is foundational to the United States Military Academy's culture and will always remain our motto. It defines who we are as an institution and as graduates of West Point. These three hallowed words are the hallmark of the cadet experience and bind the Long Gray Line together across our great history.

Our responsibility to produce leaders to fight and win our nation's wars requires us to assess ourselves regularly. Thus, over the past year and a half, working with leaders from across West Point and external stakeholders, we reviewed our vision, mission, and strategy to serve this purpose. We believe our mission binds the Academy to the Army – the Army in which our cadets will serve. As a result of this assessment, we recommended the following mission statement to our senior Army leadership:

To build, educate, train, and inspire the Corps of Cadets to be commissioned leaders of character committed to the Army Values and ready for a lifetime of service to the Army and Nation.

Both the Secretary of the Army and Army Chief of Staff approved this recommendation.

Our updated mission statement focuses on the mission essential tasks of Build, Educate, Train, and Inspire the Corps of Cadets to be commissioned leaders of character, with the explicit purpose of being committed to the Army Values and Ready for a lifetime of service. The Army Values include Duty and Honor, and Country is reflected in Loyalty, bearing true faith and allegiance to the US Constitution, the Army, your unit, and other Soldiers. In the past century, West Point's mission has changed nine times. Many graduates will recall the mission statement they learned as new cadets did not include the motto, as Duty, Honor, Country was first added to the mission statement in 1998.

Our absolute focus on developing leaders of character ready to lead our Army's Soldiers on increasingly lethal battlefields remains unchanged.  Subscribe for free to Breaking Christian News here

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