Duty, Honor, Country

Duty, honor, country: The defining principle of West Point since it was founded more than 200 ago.

Its purpose is to produce a corps of professional officers. In those two centuries, the art of warfare has seen revolutionary change, from cavalry charges to cruise missiles.

Military establishments, historically, have been accused of always preparing for the last war, and West Point is no exception. But if West Point has been slow to change, it has also been quick to learn from its lapses. reports.

On the face of it, nothing appears to have changed. West Point is still the most demanding combination of physical and academic rigor in the country. But the cadets to graduate this year were freshmen plebes on Sept. 11, 2001, and only weeks into their education.

For them, and for West Point, everything changed on that day. They were still subject to the academy's oldest codes and disciplines: duty, honor, country -- and for the body, agony.

Twice-a-year tests, 42 push-ups, and 53 sit-ups in two minutes -- a two-mile run in under 16 minutes. Fail to meet the standard, and you're out. The school day is still completely regimented, from reveille at dawn, to formation before meals and speed eating for 4,000, all over in 18 minutes.

And on top of the course work is the military stuff, like the Sandhurst competition, an annual 8-mile obstacle course from hell, all designed to instill leadership. 60 Minutes talked to three about-to-be leaders: David Veney, Ray Ramos and Danielle Weaver.

"Where do you all expect to be a year from now?" asks Safer. "Iraq, do you think?"

"Good chance," says Ramos.

"What do you expect your mission will be?" asks Safer.

"Support the commander and chief," says Weaver. "I'm going to be an intelligence officer, so that will require me to collect as much intelligence to support my unit, which will be the 10th Mountain Division."

"Does the likely prospect of being in a serious combat zone, where there are no fronts, as in a traditional war, does that give you pause?" asks Safer.

"You definitely stop and look back and question whether or not you worked as hard as you should have to learn everything you need to," says Veney. "And you study that extra bit to make sure you're ready for that situation. But all you can really do is learn as much as possible. And prepare yourself for it."

And that's exactly what West Point is trying to do, as fast and as well as it can. The academy is trying to prepare cadets for a kind of war that neither the political nor military establishments anticipated, using technology for a generation raised on virtual reality.

Back in the dorm rooms, cadets exchange email with former upper classmen in Iraq, just back from patrol. It's real-time battle experience, transmitted in seconds, lessons that may be as valuable as anything learned in class. And in the classroom, it's back to the future.

"We also added obviously some courses to the curriculum. Counter insurgency, we actually we put that one back. That was a course when I was a cadet in the Vietnam era," says Brig. Gen. Dan Kaufman, the dean of West Point. He says that after the end of the Vietnam War, counterinsurgency had become passé.

"It had come out of the curriculum. It had, yeah, until frankly, 9/11," says Kaufman.

Now it's taught by a specialist, a special forces major who fought in Afghanistan. Another new reality: Arabic, a necessity in today's war, and probably tomorrow's war as well. And still there are other new subjects, like world religions, causes of terrorism and constitutional military law.

"What our cadets have done is become more focused. I mean, they know what they're confronting," says Kaufman.

On this battlefield of suicide bombers and invisible enemies, tactics are often being dictated from the lieutenants and sergeants on up, not from the generals and colonels on down.

"It's definitely a platoon leader's war," says Lt. Andy Blickhan, 28, from West Point Class of 2002. He's now a battle-hardened veteran of two tours in Iraq, a prime example of the new West Point model. Ten months after graduating from West Point, he led a platoon in the invasion of Iraq. No one knows more about fighting this war than junior officers like him.

"You describe that situation you were in as fighting a war in a Walmart," says Safer.

"If you imagine walking through a Walmart and trying to conduct combat operations. Bullets fly through clothes racks. As you try to restock the shelf, people try to blow you up," says Blickhan.

"But those bombs don't just hit the Americans. They hit everyone else who's trying to shop there. The mixture of people that you deal with, the complexities of them going about their daily lives in the same places you're conducting combat operations and the same place that there's a population that wants to kill you and wants very much for you to leave. But all at the same time, we've got to make this thing function."

He's just finished his second tour in Iraq, patrolling the streets of Baghdad and Mosul, and now he's back at his alma mater, as the old man offering battlefield wisdom to the next generation of lieutenants.

It's War in Iraq 101. Blickhan, and other junior officers like him, may be the shock troops of change for West Point. The academy brings them back to offer firsthand experience of moving fresh from the parade ground to a world of complexity and unpredictability unimagined by previous generations.

He was mayor of a town in Iraq, and he says his job was to "resolve domestic disputes, keep the peace between farmers, unemployment. I had to try to find jobs for the folks. There was a lot of infrastructure work to be done. Roads, electric, phones, sewage."

Did he have time to fight the war? "Sometimes, you think they forgot to give us enough time to fight the war," says Blickhan.

"It's just amazing the responsibility we're putting on them. And it's beyond doctrine. It's beyond their training," says retired Col. Leonard Wong, a professor of military strategy at the Army War College and a West Point man.

The Pentagon asked Wong to study leadership among its junior officers. In Iraq, he discovered that those junior officers are already affecting the way the entire Army wages war, a discovery that has become part of the curriculum at West Point.

"In short, our recommendation was that we need to back off on our junior officers, to let them make decisions on their own, to take some risk and allow people to try, perhaps fail and then learn and try again," says Wong.

"We never taught them how to be a mayor of a small town. What they do is they fall back and they say, 'I remember when I was back at West Point that they gave me too much to do, with too little, and limited resources, and I still performed to a standard.'"

So just imagine Blickhan on his first assignment, two weeks into the invasion of Iraq: a green untested lieutenant assigned to take a platoon into combat in pitch dark. He can't even see the faces of his men.

"And I hear some grumbling in the hallway. It's the platoon sergeant. He can't believe that he's got to take a new lieutenant," says Blickhan. "Because I'm a cherry lieutenant at this point. And there's no assumption of competency."

They fought their way through the night, and when daylight came, the green lieutenant looked into the faces of his men, and confessed.

"I did mention, you know, 'Andy Blickhan, West Point graduate,'" says Blickhan. "And there was a moan of – an audible moan that came from the platoon. And I'm like, 'Oh great, what am I in for?'"

Both Blickhan and the men bit the bullet, and he took the 3rd platoon of B Company, 82nd Airborne, to the heart of Baghdad, followed by multi-tasking with the highest stakes, running a town while fighting a war. Wong says that experience has transformed West Point graduates like Blickhan into a new breed of leader: "It develops, in the junior officer corps, confidence, that 'Go ahead, give me something. I can handle it.' So, you're seeing this boldness, this audacity at the lower levels."

"Is there any danger of discipline somehow breaking down? Chain of command breaking down," asks Safer.

"This is still the Army," says Wong. "It's not anarchy. It's still, the people still salute. People still wear uniforms."

Kaufman is a stickler for discipline, but he says, "We, the Army, have got to be a learning organization, and accept how these youngsters develop themselves."

"It strikes me as the people who got to learn are the colonels and the generals," says Safer.

"Oh, the generals," says Kaufman. "Oh sure. Right, exactly. And we're getting there, more or less."

On May 28, the next elements in the long gray line will begin their journey to the front line. Lt. Blickhan will likely return for a third tour of duty, probably about the same time his wife, Lt. Natasha Blickhan, West Point Class of 2004, will be on her way back from Baghdad.

For him, the concerns of family and the burden of responsibility for 40 young men are not so different.

He lost two of his men in battle. What effect did it have on him? "I was devastated. It was one of the hardest and most personal things I'd ever dealt with," says Blickhan. "The men and I, we all put it together, packages for these guys. When your brother goes down, and these men were brothers, it's a family affair."

How did they die? "It was a roadside bomb. We were on a mosque-monitoring mission," says Blickhan. "Moving through a different platoon's area. A route that my guys had particular never taken before."

Did he catch anybody? "No," says Blickhan.

Back at West Point, there were other losses: 23 absent friends, officers like themselves who went to war and did not return.

"Do you ever take a half step back and say, 'Was this war really necessary?' Or you don't even go there?" asks Safer.

"No, on a daily basis. Because it's a responsibility I have to my soldiers, because they're gonna ask me those questions," says Blickhan. "And no reporter can put it as blunt as an American paratrooper. 'Why are we here? Why are we doing this?' And I've gotta be able to answer that. In my heart, I've found an answer that it's worth it. And I've lost soldiers, and Americans are dying over there, and Iraqis are dying, at a high rate. But we need to get through this, and we need to set them up. We've started this. Let's finish it."

"Do you think that too much is being asked of guys like yourself?" says Safer.

"No, and I'll tell you that because I look at my soldiers every day. They're the ones that are demanding the high standard from me," says Blickhan. "It's my responsibility to the soldier. And I'll pay whatever price necessary to take care of those men. Definitely."