At the war college, Kurth was chairman of the Strategy and Campaign Department, an advisor to the Chief of Naval Operations Strategic Studies Group, and the recipient of the Department of the Navy Medal for Meritorious Civilian Service.
Kurth is a decorated veteran, having served in the Navy in the 1960s on the USS Saint Paul (CA-73), the flagship of the United States Seventh Fleet where he was a deck and gunnery officer.
Kurth is also a critic of immigration and feminism (he has denounced feminism as a key factor behind what he calls the "decay of Western civilization" and, in particular, American hegemony),[1] and "suggests that it is perhaps only the influence of the Catholic Church that might curb the excesses of modern liberalism".
Kurth is an evangelical Protestant as well as a traditional social and political conservative; he is an elder at Proclamation Presbyterian Church in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.
He objected to Operation Iraqi Freedom and the broader U.S. push to promote liberal democracy in the Middle East; instead, in "Splitting Islam," Kurth recommends that the U.S. utilize the division between Sunni and Shi'ites to distract radical Islamists from attacking America and the West.