On the Hamilton Affair

The Army, leadership selection, and bureaucratic resistance to change.

On March 19 of this year, Military.com broke the news that one of the Army’s four-star generals, Charles R. Hamilton, of Army Materiel Command, had blatantly sought to influence and interfere in the Battalion Command Assessment Program on behalf of one of his proteges. Days later, Christine Wormuth, the Secretary of the Army, would suspend Hamilton “pending the outcome of the DoDIG [Department of Defense Inspector General] review and assessment, and any subsequent investigation.”

To a wider audience, this may be very much an inside baseball story, but it resonates inside the institution. Further, I think there are important lessons to be drawn here about bureaucratic resistance to change.

The Battalion Command Assessment Program (hereafter BCAP) was largely brought to the Army by two officers, General James McConville, the Army Chief of Staff for the implementation period, and Major General JP McGee (just nominated for his 3d star as the Joint Staff J5). McConville looked at the Army’s legacy command selection process—which dated to Vietnam War-era reforms—and realized that lessons learned about leader selection were not being used. In particular, Special Operations forces—Special Forces, the Ranger Battalions, and other classified units—have for decades been using assessment programs of a few days to a few weeks. These longer, more detailed programs, involving some combination of cognitive tests, writing assignments, physical stressors and peer assessments, allow a more holistic view of a prospective leader. Further, SOF’s assessment approach was validated by decades of success and refinement. McConville would famously comment about these programs, “we spend more time [selecting] an enlisted ranger than we do… a battalion commander.”

So that the entirety of an officer’s career was not reduced to a small snapshot held over a few days, the legacy system was not entirely discarded but would be supplemented by the BCAP system. The legacy system—which nominally evaluated a candidate’s entire career file, but is widely considered to only evaluate performance in a few key jobs in the years immediately preceding—would continue, but would be blended with the BCAP score. Exactly what would be the weighting between these two systems (50/50? 70/30?) was a closely guarded secret.

BCAP immediately became controversial for several reasons. The first was its success in identifying officers that the legacy system passed over. In the beta test of the BCAP, which focused only on the “alternates” for command, the officer who walked in with the very lowest score from the legacy system, just barely scraping across the line, so to speak, ended up with the very highest rating under the BCAP process. “Worst to first” in McConville and McGee’s words. This anecdote powerfully illustrated that it is very possible for an incredibly talented officer who lacks influential mentors to find him or herself unable to break out of the pack in a way that impresses the legacy board system. Or, phrased differently, the inputs to the legacy system are—at least in a minority of cases—deeply unrepresentative of a candidate’s potential to be a talented commander.

The second reason for controversy was BCAPs emphasis on both strategic intelligence and on highlighting toxic leaders—the latter trait lately identified as a rampant problem. These foci struck a powerful strain in the Army, which had traditionally tolerated (if not glorified) abusive leadership styles and tended to downplay the importance of intelligence and strategic thinking.

Finally, and related, the emergence of a new system was an implicit critique of existing leaders. Every general had to ask him or herself whether they would have found themselves at their current rank and position had they been forced to go through the BCAP gauntlet as more junior leaders. Because the legacy system had obviously worked just fine for them, senior leadership tended to be deeply suspicious of any change. Particularly a change that promised to at least downplay the effects of patronage and nepotism within the service.

General Hamilton’s actions—if true as reported—are then a particularly virulent strain of this widespread resistance to the new system. Generals do not like to be told that their judgment about their proteges is biased or just plain wrong.

The Army Chief of Staff and Secretary of the Army should respond to this challenge at two levels. First, with regard to General Hamilton, if the allegations against him are substantiated, he should be immediately retired, at the rank at which he is determined to have last honorably served. Again, if substantiated, the actions of which he is accused should preclude his retirement at four-star rank. This would be both justice in this particular case, and an important instance of pour encourager les autres.

But second, both the CSA and SECARMY should step in to defend the BCAP system. It is important to the Army not only for the immediate good of having better battalion commanders (there is a similar system for brigade commanders called CCAP), but also for the incentives it produces throughout the force. For general officers, over time, each of them will be products of the BCAP system. While I do not believe any BCAP grads are yet generals, it is simply a matter of time before (virtually) all generals are. And with respect to younger officers, knowing that this key gateway looms in their future will contour behavior. If the Army is known to seek out non-toxic leadership styles and an ability to think strategically if you wish to be a senior leader, then junior leaders who aspire to such will need to monitor their leadership styles and educate themselves on strategy. Such officers will be far better equipped to lead the diverse teams—both landpower and joint—of the future, which may require adapting a style of warfighting that is difficult to picture today.

BCAP is endangered on two fronts, over time. The first is illustrated by the Hamilton affair—the possibility of senior leaders putting “thumbs on the scale” in what is ostensibly an objective, double-blind process (candidates at BCAP conduct their interviews behind a curtain, like an elite orchestra audition, to minimize favoritism for race or other visual characteristics).

It is hard to overemphasize how generals, and particularly 4-star generals, are minor demigods within the Army, and their actions difficult to critique. It is notable that while Hamilton’s actions were documented and reported, no one at BCAP had the power to stop his blatant interference.

But the second danger is more subtle and far more likely. BCAP could become a process that has little impact on final outcomes. Were BCAP results to become a negligible percentage of the outcomes relative to the legacy system—say less than 25% weighting—then the characteristics that BCAP is designed to screen out would be far more likely to appear in the final result.

To speak in even more jargony language for a moment, the latest (July 2023) guidance on command selection contains this relevant phrasing, “The Army convenes a Job Performance Panel (JPP) to evaluate the candidate’s performance file. The JPP generates a performance score, which is the most heavily weighted variable of the order of merit list (OML) formula…. The job performance scores, generated at the JPP, and CAP scored assessment results are used to calculate the OML.” So already, the Army is stating outright that the BCAP results are a subordinate input to the traditional selection system. And knowing the Army, if it is willing to explicitly admit that the traditional system (even if rebranded as a JPP) is “the most heavily weighted variable,” then it’s probably a very heavily weighted variable. Again, the bureaucracy—reflecting the distrust of senior leadership—is perfectly capable of marginalizing BCAP without confronting it directly.

Even in this outcome, BCAP would still have value. As one officer once told me, “BCAP doesn’t prevent the Army from promoting the cruel or the dim. It just denies the Army the ability to say it didn’t know it was promoting someone cruel and/or dim. There will be no deniability.” But far better to just screen out these “leaders” and deny them the ability to impact soldiers—a group which, you may have heard, the Army is having difficulty recruiting in sufficient numbers.

Perversely, without discounting the need to discipline Hamilton—again, if guilty—this incident may end up being a “happy fault” should it end up fortifying what promises to be a culture-transforming change in leader selection. This demonstration of senior leader malfeasance and nepotism highlights the need for the comprehensive process that McConville and McGee envisioned. The existence of BCAP, and its cousins, promise to deliver an Army with commanders selected for more strategic vision and humane leadership styles than the current system produces. But the danger signs that BCAP could be compromised or marginalized—both the explicit ones involved in the Hamilton affair and the more subtle ones displayed in the command guidance—are very plain.

The need for the Secretary and Chief to act is clear.