“Today, I am announcing the Joint Warfighter Evaluation.”– Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. The Military Times explains:
For decades, military officers seeking promotion to general or flag officer have been evaluated through their career records, including performance reports, command assignments, education and operational experience.
Now, the Pentagon is adding a new measure for advancement: how officers perform when presented with a military problem and required to make decisions under pressure.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Tuesday that eligible Army, Air Force and Marine Corps colonels and Navy captains screening for promotion to one-star will undergo a new Joint Warfighter Evaluation, or JWE. The assessment is intended to measure officers’ operational planning, decision-making and leadership under simulated combat conditions. It will supplement, rather than replace, existing service promotion processes.
Hegseth's initiative drew criticism from some lawmakers, military officers, and outside analysts worried about the Trump administration’s efforts to change the traditional promotion process. Besides: if something ain’t broke, why fix it? The trouble is that in war, by the time you know something is broken it is often too late to fix it. This is an old problem. Great armies historically struggled to pass competence to their successors. Military history is filled with "golden generation" armies whose successors suffered catastrophic failures due to complacency, rigid doctrinal decay, or the loss of irreplaceable veteran leadership. China has not fought a major war since a brief border conflict with Vietnam in 1979, leaving its current military leadership and forces without recent real-world combat experience. The United States has not fought against a true peer enemy since World War II. How will they fare against each other?
Thus, training officers for command is a problem that great nations, even the greatest empires, have never fully solved. Historically, the criticism that the Royal Navy lacked strategic training for flag rank—under the naive assumption that "the spirit of Nelson" would mysteriously descend upon an officer once he reached an admiral's rank—became a theme in the critique of the Edwardian and pre-World War I RN years. Nobody knew how the famous Royal Navy would perform in the age of iron when it had made its reputation in the days of sail.
Recognizing the problem, Nelson’s successors simply hoped for the best. Rather than teaching anything specific to the new generation, the Victorian and Edwardian navy condensed Horatio Nelson’s historically brilliant, highly adaptable tactical philosophies into maxims. Promotion to flag rank was strictly dictated by the Royal Naval List's rigid seniority system. Politics in other words. This system proved adequate until it was challenged by a peer – Imperial Germany – following the Dreadnought race. The reliance on the Spirit of Nelson led the RN to near disaster during the Battle of Jutland in 1916. Unlike Nelson—who could give broad autonomy to his "Band of Brothers" when the battle was confined to a few square miles of ocean, the WW1 Grand Fleet consisted of hundreds of ships that proved hard to control through centralized, complex flag signals. Subordinate officers faltered in the chaos.
Which brings us back to the Joint Warfighter Evaluation idea. Ignore the politics for a moment and empirically consider the question of whether simulations are in principle a good test of skill. What is the experience across professions in anticipating competence? Simulations are used in a range of serious domains with varying but definite success.
1. Aviation. Flight simulators are the closest thing to a gold standard.
2. Medicine and surgery.
3. Military and emergency services. Simulations are ubiquitous for readiness, gunnery, vehicle maintenance, and medical evacuation.
4. Business, leadership, and personnel selection. Think of the Case Method in the Harvard Business School as an example.
Experience shows training games and simulations actually work. The key problem is whether a test or simulation can be well enough designed to reflect the actual situation it is likely to encounter. The less fuzzy the profession and the problem scenarios it will encounter, the easier it is to simulate. Such situations are more well-structured: the relevant variables are known, the physics or procedures are relatively closed, success and error are observable, and the same situation can be replayed with controlled variation. But simulations may fare more poorly when facing the unknown. Recall Donald Rumsfeld’s taxonomy of situations:
Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones
One argument against the Joint Warfighter Evaluation is that the general officer rank command challenges are so general and fuzzy that no feasible test can anticipate whether the candidate can actually pass the test of war. Wars are often tumbled by revolutions in military affairs. One moment the battleship and tank may be king. The next era the drone and aircraft carrier rule. How can you simulate this? This has similarities to the "Ace Problem." The flying and basic air-combat maneuvering parts of being a fighter pilot are relatively well defined and therefore simulable. Becoming an ace is fuzzier, which is why air forces have never been able to pre-identify aces with high confidence.
Perhaps the biggest potential advantage of the Joint Warfighter Evaluation system is that AI-assisted computer based simulation can learn faster because of its technology than word of mouth and other methods of institutional diffusion. Word of mouth (and its institutional forms: debrief, tactics manuals, instructor folklore, “this is how Colonel X did it”) is a slow, lossy channel. That’s how they learned lessons after Jutland and to a certain extent how we always will. But it is after all the 21st century and faster-adapting technological methods are here to stay.
