Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has announced a review into how officers will be promoted and selected for command that will be led by former Marine Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller, who was punished after he criticized senior military leaders for the Afghanistan withdrawal.
“America’s sons and daughters who serve in our military deserve the best leaders commanding them, which is why we need to reform the promotion system at DoD — how we get those leaders,” Hegseth announced on Sunday in a video in which he appeared with Scheller.
Hegseth said he has asked Scheller — whom he referred to as “my friend” — to oversee the assessment, which was ordered last month by Jules W. Hurst III, who was performing the duties of undersecretary for personnel and readiness at the time.
In a June 20 memo, Hurst directed the service secretaries to review how officers are evaluated as well as the processes for promotion selection boards, command selection boards, and the impact of professional military education on assessing officers. The memo also named Scheller as the point of contact for the effort.
No further information about what the review will entail was immediately available on Monday.
“Both Stu and I think about the possibility of our kids serving one day,” Hegseth said in the video. “And we want to ensure that we have the best of the best leading them. We have to get this right, and with Stu leading it, we’re going to get it done.”
Scheller, who has been working for the Defense Department since April, was court-martialed after posting videos while in uniform demanding that senior military leaders be held accountable for the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal. In October 2021, he was sentenced to receive a punitive letter of reprimand and forfeit $5,000 of one month’s pay after pleading guilty to showing contempt toward officials and related offenses.
“You had the courage to speak up when no one else would,” Hegseth said to Scheller in the video. “And we need to have officers who understand where their compass is, they’re not risk-averse, they’re not playing the game, they’re not simply checking the box to get to the next level, which creates all the wrong incentives. We’re reviewing the whole thing, because we’re here to make institutional change that brings warfighters to the top, and this is a historic opportunity.”
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In the video, Scheller said he believed the effort to change the officer selection and retention process will “lead us to victory in the next war.”
“Having the ability to go after and identify talent and bring them to the top, there’s nothing more important that we could do,” Scheller said.
Scheller also posted on X, saying that unless systems adapt to changes, they become rigid, stifle innovation, and lead to declining performance, causing people to focus on avoiding mistakes rather than producing results.
In May, Hegseth announced that Scheller would also take part in a separate Defense Department review into the Afghanistan withdrawal. That effort is being led by Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs and Senior Advisor Sean Parnell.
Parnell told reporters earlier this month that the Afghanistan review could lead to changes in how both enlisted leaders and officers are promoted.
“If you think back to my time in Afghanistan as a young commander, giving battle update briefs as a captain to my battalion commander, if I were constantly saying that my area of operations was a disaster, it didn’t have the ammo or troops that I needed to accomplish the mission, the likelihood of me getting promoted was probably not great,” Parnell said during a July 2 Pentagon news conference. “So, how do we set the conditions in the [Defense] Department to create a sense of honesty where our officers are reporting what they believe to be accuracy — they’re concerned about maybe their area of operations; they’re concerned about the truth and, maybe, less about their careers.”
