FIRST ON FOX: The Pentagon is raising the bar on who gets promoted to general by rolling out a new battlefield-style assessment requiring senior officers to demonstrate how they would solve complex military problems. It's the most significant change in decades for how future generals for every branch are selected. Internal documents obtained by Fox News Digital show every military service has developed its own version of the new Joint Warfighting Evaluation (JWE), a standardized assessment intended to measure operational planning, decision-making and leadership under simulated combat conditions.
The Pentagon says the assessment will supplement existing performance evaluations and become an additional metric considered by promotion boards beginning with the fiscal year 2027 cycle. The effort grew out of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth's push to overhaul military evaluations and promotions, with a focus on identifying officers who can perform in combat rather than simply build strong career records. PENTAGON FIRES BACK AFTER MARK KELLY ACCUSES PETE HEGSETH OF TARGETING WOMEN AND BLACK MILITARY OFFICERS "People figure out they don't have to be the best at their job, they have to be the best at making sure their boss thinks they're the best," Stu Scheller, the senior Pentagon adviser leading the effort, told Fox News Digital.
"And those are actually two very different things." Under the current system, officers accumulate evaluations from their superiors throughout their careers that become a central part of the record considered by promotion boards. 'WOKE' MILITARY ACADEMIES TARGETED IN NEW BLUEPRINT FOR SWEEPING WARFIGHTING OVERHAUL "Right now in our current system, we have people that are very good at navigating their careers," Scheller said. "We have very good, I want to be clear, very good military personnel and leaders across the military, but there isn't a stand-alone function that can truly assess the best military commanders on the battlefield." Scheller said these performance reports will remain the "bedrock" of promotion decisions, while the JWE will give boards a separate measure of how well an officer can solve the kinds of military problems they could face in command. What that assessment looks like will vary by service.
The Pentagon has developed six versions — one for each of the five military services and another through the Joint Staff — ranging from online simulations to hours-long, in-person wargames, the documents reviewed by Fox News Digital detail. In some versions, officers will be presented with a military problem and forced to make decisions as an AI-powered adversary reacts to their moves. Another will bring officers into a war college for an in-person wargame, where evaluators will watch how they respond as an enemy counters their decisions in real time.
"You make a move, enemy makes a move, how I react based on a time environment," Scheller said. The service plans obtained by Fox News Digital show just how different the evaluations will be. The Army plans to put roughly 900 eligible colonels through a remote written assessment followed by a digital wargame, while roughly 1,330 Air Force colonels will take a two-hour online analysis test followed by a one-hour interactive simulation.
The Space Force will use the same basic format for roughly 125 officers. The Navy's version is considerably more intensive. Roughly 308 captains in the unrestricted line and information warfare communities will travel to the Naval War College for a three-hour written assessment followed by a two- to three-hour wargame.
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