Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has stood up yet another review process -- this time focused on officer promotions. It will be run by a Marine officer who rose to fame slamming the Biden administration over its Afghanistan withdrawal, according to a video and memo released Sunday[1].
"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," Hegseth said in the video, while offering no specifics on what he believed the problems were.
This review is just the latest of several that Hegseth has ordered since taking the top military post. Since January, the defense secretary also has ordered the Pentagon to review combat standards[2], disqualifying medical conditions for military service[3], physical fitness and body standards[4], homeschooling support[5], and the withdrawal from Afghanistan[6].
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The memo, which was posted online[8] Sunday alongside Hegseth's video, said that the promotion and selection review will look at officer evaluations, promotion and command selection boards, and how professional military education is conducted "in order to enhance the lethality of the force."
The memo was dated June 20, 2025.
Officials at the Pentagon wouldn't offer any further details on what the department felt needed changing among those topics, but the man charged with leading the effort has previously said that the military had "weak leadership" that needed "eliminating."
Running the review will be one-time Marine Lt. Col. Stu Scheller who gained fame in 2021 amid the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan[9] for his public videos in which he sharply criticized other senior military officers and leaders in the Biden administration. In one social media post, Scheller said that he would make a public recommendation of charges of dereliction of duty against Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, then the head of U.S. Central Command.
"Unlike the Marine generals who failed you in the previous administration, my generation will not fail," Scheller said in his post while referring to President Donald Trump.
In October 2021, Scheller pleaded guilty to six charges that stemmed from four videos and other posts he uploaded to social media sites. The charges ranged from disrespecting public officials to conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.
At his trial, Scheller argued that his videos and critiques were "about Americans and not about divisions, to include Republican and Democrat."
"This is about accountability of my senior leaders, not about politics," Scheller said in court.
Yet in a blog post made Jan. 20[10], Scheller took a much more partisan tone against the Biden administration.
"I am sure the national security situation left by the incompetence of the last administration will monopolize [Hegseth's] time," Scheller wrote.
Scheller joined the Pentagon after Hegseth's confirmation and has been working as a senior adviser to Jules Hurst, the man performing the duties of the under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness.
"We need to have officers who understand where their compass is," Hegseth said in the video posted Sunday, adding that such officers are "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."
Hegseth described Scheller as someone who "had the courage to speak up when no one else would."
However, Scheller declined to talk to Military.com about his role in overseeing the newly announced review, and he has previously declined to talk about his role in the Pentagon's ongoing review of the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Broadly, the military's promotion process has had complaints from officers over the years.
A Government Accountability Office report from last year[11] did find that, while each of the services generally incorporated the same practices into the promotion process, such as training and guidance, they varied in their implementation of those processes.
Most senior officers charged with rating their subordinates have only a limited amount of top blocks to dole out, and while that may promote competition among junior leaders to get those coveted ratings, it has led to many complaints about a system that values inflated evaluation criteria and politicking.
The memo released Sunday made no mention of any deadlines for a report or a summary of conclusions. Each of the military services had until Monday to provide Scheller a point of contact for the review.
-- Drew Lawrence contributed to this report.
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