If you want to win "hearts & minds" so you can get occupied territories to go along with your plans while spending fewer bullets, fewer bombs, and fewer of your own soldiers' lives: study sociology, foreign languages, religion, culture, literature.
If you want to understand how foreign countries & leaders are likely to interact with each other, when they will betray you, when they will betray each other, and what principles they hold most dear: study economics, politics, history.
If you want to be respected abroad, show you respect other countries by learning a bit about them and listening to them when they tell you their concerns. Learn philosophy, communication, journalism, debate, rhetoric, writing.
If you want to have world-class engineers and scientists devote themselves to building you better weapons, better armor, better communications, and better intelligence systems: show them they don't have to be muscle-bound violent thugs to have your respect. Talk to them as equals. Learn a bit of their disciplines.
If you want to have a military which is a large fraction of the population, and which commands the respect of the people, drop the culture-war scapegoating of their friends, family, and romantic relationships.
Sure, the ivory tower is occasionally out of touch with the needs and priorities of soldiers. Most professors have never fought for their lives, and most would rather have nothing to do with personally serving in the military. But if the money's good and they've got a chance to both learn & teach, without compromising their own ethical codes, most professors will jump at the chance to work with soldiers and officers. They're not going to become _more_ relevant to the soldiers by being walled off from them.
Many conservative talking points are decades old, and have been examined at great length in academia. The effects of the "blood & soil" nationalism of Trump & Miller have been measured and compared throughout history. The ideas of a superior race, of American exceptionalism, of "might makes right", of the gold standard, of tariffs, of colonialism, of feudalism, of unrestrained capitalism, of climate change, of economic imperialism - they have _all_ been examined in great detail, by many people with different viewpoints and different metrics. When uneducated folks like Trump & Hegseth show up shouting nonsense and refusing to understand the extensive research that informs universities' "woke" ideologies, they're not being innovative or insightful or useful. They're brandishing ignorance like a club and pretending it’s not worth knowing anything that can't be understood in five minutes while screaming "I can't hear you."
Most senior military staff understands all the above. Most politicians and academics understand all the above. If you _don't_, and if you're proud of not being "woke" to such ideas, take a few college-level courses. It doesn't really matter which ones. The point of an academic education is to give you the tools to learn things, to engage in reasoned debate, and to have extensive fact-based arguments about the best way to pursue common goals.
The fact that Hegseth & Trump don't want the military to have those skills speaks volumes about their own priorities: Neither is interested in the US being strong, respected or capable. They want unquestioning obedience from people who are too poorly educated to understand that there are better options.