The US military is set to change how it selects general and flag officers. Going forward, it will incorporate a “Joint Warfighter Evaluation (JWE)” into the selection process. Each service will develop its own form of the JWE, but the common idea is to put officers in demanding military problems, observe their performance, and use the results as a measure of fitness for senior leadership. Benjamin Jensen argued for this very thing in an article that we published last year, proposing that general officers be required to compete against each other in wargames, with the results informing selection of those officers for subsequent command and promotion. The JWE proposal takes the problem that Jensen alluded to seriously—namely, that the military says it values warfighting but has few mechanisms for observing and then rewarding warfighting prowess.
Introducing a new objective performance measure into a selection process that is mostly subjective seems sound, at first glance. However, a more objective selection process is not necessarily a better one, as it runs the risk of measuring the wrong thing more precisely, or failing to measure enough of the right thing(s). If our general and flag officers are much more than warfighters—which, recent American military experience suggests that they surely are—then we need measures that go beyond the JWE. Determining what these measures might be first requires understanding of what types of general and flag officers the current system selects.
Talent, Timing, and Tribes
In the Army, which is the service I know best, selection for general officer is the product of three overlapping factors that a past mentor (and currently serving general officer) once described to me: talent, timing, and tribes. The instrument of selection is a board of senior general officers sitting in some conference room. Talent gets you (or your file, to be precise) to the room, timing opens the door, and tribes determine whether you are ultimately selected by the board members.
Even being eligible for general officer in the Army is a tough cut, as candidates must have successfully completed brigade-level command (or equivalent) for their career fields and be joint-qualified per the provisions first set forth by the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986. One can only meet these eligibility requirements through sustained excellence—and, more critically, distinction from peers—in increasingly difficult assignments, with higher levels of responsibility, and in more competitive rating environments over the course of decades, thereby earning the confidence of the same senior leaders who could potentially sit on a future general officer selection board. Prospective candidates are also being developed as they navigate this course. Not only do they complete professional military education at prescribed gates in their careers, but they also get increasing exposure to the enterprise-level Army as they move up the ranks. So, assignments that make officers more competitive for selection to general officer can also broaden their understanding of the Army-as-institution and what type of leadership is required for it. Thus, mere eligibility for general officer equates to superior talent, and although files are what the board selects, the qualifications of the officer behind the file are hardly paper-thin.
However, the vast majority of eligibles are not selected for general officer, and timing and tribes help explain why. Eligible officers typically only have a two- to three-year window for primary consideration, and the competitiveness of their files can change considerably over that window based on who else happens to be eligible in a particular year, both within their career fields and across the eligible population as a whole. Institutional requirements are similarly dynamic. A career field may effectively have more selections available in one year than another, making an otherwise unchanged file more or less competitive simply because of a demand signal. Even if the timing is favorable for a particular officer in a particular year, selection remains unlikely. Recall that talent gets you to the room, but only the highest-scoring files make it into the room for deliberation. Once there, the board members can openly discuss the candidates, and tribes become the determinant for selection. Career fields have already developed their own assessments of their most promising officers, and board members bring those judgments into the deliberations. If the board members do not personally know and favorably view an officer or, alternatively, if the officer does not have a powerful, influential advocate who puts an invisible hand on the scale in his or her favor, then the officer’s prospects for selection are slim.
There is nothing inherently wrong with this selection process, despite its secretive nature and the seemingly decisive roles played by timing and tribes. Indeed, the tribes are as useful a mechanism as any to first cull and then differentiate the large body of similarly talented eligibles, and the Army offers no promise to eligibles about fair consideration. Nor should it. But we should be clear about what the current system selects: excellent past performers who have powerful advocates. It uses past performance and the mirror-imaging bias (well-earned and legitimate, granted) of board members as heuristics for whether the selected officers can actually lead at higher levels, inferring capacity for generalship rather than assessing it directly.
Can This Officer Fight?
The JWE promises to replace inference with observation, improving on the current system by putting prospective general and flag officers in situations approximating the problems they will face at higher levels of leadership. There is strong historical precedent for this approach, with the Louisiana Maneuvers perhaps the most obvious example (and the one that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth himself invoked in explaining the JWE). At the start of World War II, then–Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall led an Army that was expanding at incredible speed to meet the anticipated requirements of industrial interstate war. Officers who had spent most of their careers in the small(ish), peacetime citizen Army would soon be asked to command huge formations to fight abroad. Although the maneuvers also served essential purposes in training large formations and testing doctrine and equipment, they allowed Marshall and other senior leaders to observe which officers could actually fight at the next level and select them for higher command accordingly.
Despite the historical precedent and Secretary Hegseth’s invocation of it, it is important to recognize that the immediate problem that Marshall was trying to solve through the Louisiana Maneuvers does not translate to the contemporary setting. As we have established, today’s prospective general officers have been assessed in increasingly demanding positions, including command, across an Army that is significantly larger than the pre–World War II one, and that has been employed operationally for the better part of the past twenty-five years. The implicit question that Marshall had—can this officer fight—does translate, however, and it is the same question that the current general officer selection system mostly assumes away. Thus, the JWE is an opportunity to add an essential data point to an already substantial performance record and, to the extent that the objective is to privilege warfighting prowess in the selection of general and flag officers, the JWE is a sensible instrument for doing so. But prioritizing warfighting prowess is not the same thing as establishing it as the principal attribute lacking in our current general officer corps, or that selecting more proficient warfighters will necessarily produce better generals.
The Rest of Generalship: Can This Officer Think?
Recent American military experience shows why the distinction between good warfighting and good generalship is important. Although the US military did not perform flawlessly at the tactical and operational levels in either Afghanistan or Iraq, our principal failures in those conflicts centered on poor strategy formulation and policy judgement, not bad warfighting. So, if you assign blame for those failures to general officers—even if only partially—then you must conclude that while warfighting prowess is perhaps necessary for good generalship, it is hardly sufficient.
It is in the name, after all: General officers are supposed to be generalists (this also explains the US Army custom that general officers do not usually wear branch insignia). Sure, they command large formations in warfighting, but they also run institutions, develop capabilities, work with allies and partners, and advise civilian policymakers across the interagency—all the things that constitute the “increasingly difficult assignments” and “higher levels of responsibility” discussed earlier. As such, the higher a general officer rises, the less likely it will be that his or her hardest problems will have exclusively military solutions. This places a premium on the intellectual ability to solve these types of problems, so a complete evaluation and selection of a prospective general officer should measure this characteristic as well.
Fortunately, there is another historical model available for this: the Prussian (and later German) Kriegsakademie. Performance at “war academy” helped identify officers for the German General Staff and higher levels of responsibility. The model was hardly perfect—see the competition of various cults of the offensive that disastrously led to World War I. But how the Germans saw the utility of the Kriegsakademie is instructive: a setting to identify and further cultivate the habits of mind required for service at higher levels. Student officers who wanted to ascend to flag rank had to first affirmatively answer, through their academic performance, the question that the German model explicitly posed to them: Can you think?
The US military has its own war academies—its war colleges—but my experience as a student in one of them was almost the inverse of the German model. The recurring message from college leadership was to take a knee, spend time with family, and recharge before the Army inevitably ran us ragged again in our next assignments. Many of us had already been selected for brigade command or would be before the academic year concluded, thus making our academic performance effectively meaningless toward future promotion and command selection (although it is not likely that it would have meant anything regardless, as Army boards prioritize job evaluation reports over academic ones). A good number of my peers nevertheless pursued academic excellence on their own initiative, recognizing the value of the war college experience in preparing them for future senior leadership. But this was an ancillary outcome that was unevenly distributed across the student cohort, and academic excellence was not a point of institutional emphasis because that was not what the Army was demanding and emphasizing. The Army thus missed an opportunity to assess the intellectual potential of officers approaching senior leadership, despite having the resources to do so. My experience is admittedly only one data point, from one war college almost a decade ago. But the larger institutional question remains: To what extent do our war colleges systematically assess intellectual potential, differentiate among officers on that basis, and ensure those assessments inform subsequent decisions about senior leadership? If the answer is that they do so only marginally, then we are leaving a potentially valuable measure of generalship largely untapped.
I am not suggesting that the US military war college experience should become another promotion board, or that general officers be selected based on GPA. Nor is wholesale curricular reform necessarily required. The opportunity lies in making rigorous assessment of intellectual performance an institutional priority, with faculty evaluating how officers think, learn, argue, and adapt over a sustained period of academic work. Crucially, those assessments must become meaningful inputs into subsequent decisions about senior leadership. Otherwise, even the most intellectually demanding war college experience would remain disconnected from the process of identifying future general officers.
JWE is a welcome addition to general and flag officer selection, but we should resist asking it to do more than it can or seeing its value as some kind of revolutionary change. Its value lies in giving the services another opportunity to observe prospective future senior leaders directly rather than infer their potential entirely from past performance and relationship quality. The challenge with the JWE’s implementation is ensuring that, in our understandable desire to make selection more objective, we do not simply measure one essential dimension of generalship more precisely while leaving the others unmeasured.
As such, none of the mechanisms discussed here are sufficient by themselves, but together they give us a more complete picture of an officer’s suitability for generalship. The current system tells us whether an officer has performed. The JWE can help determine whether that officer can fight at the next level. War college should help determine whether that officer can think at the next level. If we want to produce good generals, rather than simply select successful colonels to become them, then we should probably know the answer to all three.
Patrick Sullivan, PhD is an academy professor and director of the Modern War Institute at West Point.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Image credit: David Poe, Fort Bliss Public Affairs Office
