The troops that officers command may soon get the chance to weigh in on their supervisors’ promotion board process, a chance for junior officers and even enlisted troops to weigh in on their boss’ chance to make rank.
The changes will come to some — but far from all — military jobs in the five-year pilot program Congress is set to mandate.
The idea came from Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.), a former Marine Corps infantry officer, and was part of a package of negotiated policies by the House and Senate Armed Services Committees included in the fiscal year 2025 National Defense Authorization Act. The House passed the defense bill late last week and it heads to the Senate for a vote this week before the President can sign it into law.
A congressional aide for Moulton said there have been many efforts across the services to incorporate feedback from subordinates into training and leadership development programs for officers. But bottom-up feedback has never been part of the critical criteria for officers being promoted.
“In almost none of the services are those 360-degree evaluations considered as part of the promotion or selection process,” the aide said. “There’s a lot of evidence from the private sector that this is best practice to incorporate feedback from peers and subordinates because you get a much fuller picture of the way that someone leads when you have access to that information.”
Under the new policy, the five military services and Coast Guard will develop pilot programs that include anonymous evaluations by peers and subordinates that would be submitted as part of command selection or qualification boards for O-5 and O-6 paygrades, which are lieutenant colonel and colonel in the Army, Air Force and Marine Corps, and commander and captain in the Navy and Coast Guard.
Promotion to ranks in the O-5 and O-6 paygrades usually come with an officer’s “first big command position,” said Taren Dillon Sylvester, a research assistant for the Center for a New American Security’s Military, Veterans, & Society Program. In the Army and Marines, captains and majors or lieutenants and lieutenant commanders may have 100 to 200 soldiers answering to them, but at the lieutenant colonel or colonel positions, the responsibility includes battalion and brigades with thousands of troops under their leadership. In the Navy, commanders and captains are often in command of a ship.
“It’s multiple components who are answering to a single person so it’s important that they be able to lead effectively on a much larger scale and be accountable for and to those below them,” Sylvester said.
The congressional aide said that bringing subordinate feedback first into the O-5 and O-6 positions is a manageable start but that “the hope would be to expand this down the ranks.”
The pilot program would be limited to officers in specific career fields. In the Navy, surface warfare, submarine warfare, special warfare, or explosive ordnance disposal; In the Marines, infantry, logistics, or field artillery; operations or logistics in the Air Force; and space operations for the Space Force.
The aide said the negotiated career fields include combat MOSes “because that is where leadership is life and death.”
Army as a ‘model’
The policy did not specify career fields for the Army, however, the service already uses a similar program which Moulton’s office looked at as their model for the policy. The Army Commander Evaluation Tool, implemented in 2020, uses anonymous evaluations to assess commanders’ “observable behaviors” that are based on being able to fulfill leadership requirements and impact their unit’s mission.
Officials have used an algorithm to randomly select which peers and subordinates complete an officer’s assessment. However, the assessors must have worked with them within the last five years and were allowed to opt-out if they did not know the officer well enough. Maj. Gen. JP McGee, director of the Army Talent Management Task Force, said in 2020 that the anonymized feedback helped determine a majority of officers who were fit for command as well as others who were considered “counterproductive or toxic leadership.”
Congress doesn’t have “conclusive data” on how effective the programs are at selecting better leaders but that initial feedback is “incredibly positive from everyone involved, including the participants in the selection process,” the aide said. “The submarine community also already does something similar so it is certainly feasible.”
It’s not the first time that Congress has looked at using junior service members evaluations to select who is best fit to command. The fiscal year 2014 NDAA directed the Secretary of Defense to assess 360-degree assessments for performance evaluation reports which the RAND Corporation evaluated in a 2015 report and decided that it was “not advisable” at the time. However the RAND authors noted that some form of 360 reviews were already part of leadership development across the services.
In 2023, the Marine Corps instituted a 360 leadership review pilot program to help weed out toxic leaders but decided to use it as a “developmental tool designed for feedback and leadership growth” – not for use in performance evaluations or promotion boards, said Capt. Jacoby Getty, a spokesperson for the Marine Corps Training and Education Command.
The NDAA policy would require a 360 review be used for command selection but existing programs for development may continue, the aide said.
The RAND report also noted that anonymized information could be inaccurate or “slanted in an attempt to influence high-stakes decisions,” and requires more context that wouldn’t be accessible to the promotion board.
“I think every service will understand that this feedback is not valuable if it’s not anonymous,” the aide said. “I think we will continue to conduct oversight about how this is actually implemented and we will push back if we don’t like what we’re seeing from any particular service or community.”
Since the Army tools implementation, anonymous feedback has been used to select officers for colonel and battalion commander positions. In an article for Military Review, the Army’s professional journal, Maj. Carlos De Castro Pretelt wrote that the program’s “direct linkage between career advancement and the development of certain key personality traits” for the two command positions “may have finally created an impetus for officers to understand how they are perceived by subordinates.”
The battalion command assessment program, BCAP, recently came under controversy when a four-star general was relieved from his position earlier this month after the Army Inspector General’s office concluded that he had “improperly advocated” for a lieutenant colonel to be selected for command. The four star said that the process “fails to account for the psychological effects that systemic bias, discrimination, and overt racism can have on prospective officers.” The Army investigation found that the general’s explanation was not supported by his actions. The four star also contacted panel members who sat on the lieutenant colonels board and asked that she be re-paneled – the first time a candidate was re-paneled at the request of a general officer, according to Army investigators.
The Congressional measure calls for the services to implement an evaluation program within a year of the NDAA’s enactment and provide a briefing to the House and Senate armed service committees after the five-year pilot is complete.