The recently announced Joint Warfighting Evaluation (JWE) will fail to produce the next Marshall and Eisenhower for two primary reasons:
Firstly, the JWE will integrate a digital wargame that ostensibly assesses the decision-making ability of Colonels. However, wargames haven’t and won’t be fully embraced by Army Senior leaders because doing so will highlight their poor decision-making skills.
Secondly, the Army does not possess the cultural or institutional capability to develop strategic leaders
The recently announced Joint Warfighting Evaluation will integrate digital wargaming as a method of evaluation for promotion to Brigadier General. This should cause considerable anxiety for the Army as an institution due to hesitation of senior leaders to fully embrace wargaming, and not a similar method of modeling or simulation, like a Rehearsal of Concept (ROC) Drill and Tabletop exercise (TTX). This hesitation arises from senior leaders’ fear of being exposed as failing in their primary duty, making decisions. This problem is further compounded by the Army’s inexact usage of language relating to wargaming.[1] This inexactitude allows for the abrogation and diffusion of responsibility and dilution of wargaming’s efficacy.
Across the Army, soldiers use wargame, which is a highly specific term, interchangeably with similar activities, like a ROC Drill and TTX. These activities are related, but different. Like any good process or tool, it must be properly used to derive maximum benefit. This conflation and misuse of the word wargaming have led to a misunderstanding of its purposes. Even Army doctrine commits this error.[2]
The conflation of wargame with ROC drill and Tabletop exercise serves the purpose of senior leaders because they diffuse responsibility. It allows the leader charged with decision-making power to say, “The operation didn’t fail because of my poor decision making, it failed because my subordinate commanders and staff didn’t properly coordinate.”
So what exactly is a wargame?
Field Manual 5-0: Planning and Orders Production, defines wargaming as “a disciplined process with rules and steps that attempt to visualize the flow of the operation, given the force’s strengths and dispositions, the threat’s capabilities, and possible friendly COAs.” This definition is useful because it enables a Brigade or Battalion level staff to visually depict and externally process their plan and how they intend to employ their forces, which in-turn enables the Commander to decide, which is the true purpose of wargaming.
Dr. Peter Perla was one of the leading intellectuals in the field of wargaming, and his theories continue to influence many of the leading professional wargame designers. Perla defined a wargame as “a model involving people making decisions in a synthetic environment of competition or conflict, in which they see the effects of their decisions on that environment and then get to react to those changes.”[3]
Perla’s definition cuts to the heart of the matter, wargames are about human decision making and seeing the consequences of those decisions. Perla goes on to state that wargaming is also used to conduct research, explore concepts, develop and test hypotheses, and dynamically communicate insights to inform, educate, and train individuals and organizations.”[4]
Providing a decision maker with decisions is a futile exercise if they choose not to decide, or worse, overestimate their own decision-making skills. As stated by Perla, the real secret to wargaming is that leaders evaluate the consequences of their decisions in real-time or slightly delayed real-time, allowing for the consequences of decisions to be keenly felt.
Extending this further, the best way to get better at doing something is to do it frequently. If leaders only conduct one digital wargame and never have to do any work to sustain their decision-making skills or update their mental frameworks, then this is all for naught. Many wargaming professionals will tell you that wargaming provides the most value when it is an iterative, self-reflective process.
At the institutional level, the Army doesn’t force Commanders to think through their decisions and go through the mental exercise of conceptualizing operations. That process is conducted by staff officers and then presented to the Commander, who decides on a plan developed by the staff.[5] These very same commanders will find themselves in the JWE unprepared to make decisions under pressure.
To give credit where it is due, the Army does sponsor and execute wargames to explore concepts and train individuals and organizations. The Army War College’s Department of Strategic Wargaming and the Center for Army Analysis perform these functions for the Army. Additionally, wargaming is being used more frequently in ILE and SAMS. However, the officers currently attending ILE and SAMS will not be eligible to promote to Brigadier General until at least fifteen years from now.
Expanding this point further, the SecWar may be surprised to learn that few Brigadier Generals in the Army will eventually promote to the level of having an operational level command.[6] As the Army has shifted back to focusing on large scale combat operations, the Division has been designated as the primary tactical maneuver unit, which is commanded by a Major General. This has prompted me to pose several questions that the Army should attempt to answer:
Is there a plan to evaluate these generals after their selection?
Will this digital wargame evaluate decision-making at the tactical or operational level?
I also find it highly telling the SecWar is misapplying history and conflating the definitions during his recent JWE announcement. Hegseth explicitly mentioned that the Army’s famous Louisiana Maneuvers and the Navy’s large fleet exercises that were conducted prior to and during World War II helped surface leaders like Eisenhower, Nimitz, and Bradley.[7]
There are several problems with his line of thinking, the primary one being that these events somehow “surfaced” officers who were already known quantities in their respective services.[8] In this article written by Robert Citino, the most notorious Army officer to emerge from the Louisiana Maneuvers was George S. Patton, who violated the rules of the exercise and had a history of committing war crimes.[9] Additionally, the Louisiana Maneuvers also served as a method of winnowing out officers that Marshall thought were low performers.[10] I don’t think it is wrong to speculate that the JWE might be designed to serve that same purpose.
The SecWar’s desire to create leaders and have them serve as some sort of “deus ex machina” to solve the United States most vexing strategic problems overlooks one key point: the U.S. Army lacks the cultural and structural design to produce an Eisenhower or Marshall.
I want to assert one point right up front; Marshall and Eisenhower benefitted tremendously from their personal connections to powerful superiors.
In 1919, George Marshall served as aide-de-camp to John J. Pershing, who went on to be the Army’s Chief of Staff. Years later, Pershing served as best man at Marshall’s wedding. When considering candidates for Chief of Staff, President Franklin Roosevelt nominated Marshall based on the recommendation of Pershing and others, and first-hand experience with Marshall’s political agnosticism and willingness to speak truth to power.[11]
Yes, Marshall served in numerous staff and teaching assignments that firmly grounded him in doctrine and the institutional processes of the Army. However, his connections to Pershing and support from Roosevelt should pose an uncomfortable question:
What was the primary reason Marshall was promoted to Chief of Staff? Demonstrated merit, or “pleasing the boss?”
Some people assert that military promotions are merit based, they are not, especially to General. Generals select colonels to become generals. Do we really think they are incentivized to select the most deserving and best qualified officers, or rather the ones they like?[12]
Some readers may disagree, but I would ask you to consider this point: What do former Army Chief of Staff Randy George and acting Chief of Staff Christopher Laneve have in common? They both served as the senior military assistant to the Secretary of Defense, specifically to Lloyd Austin and Pete Hegseth and were then nominated by those men to lead the Army. Are these men the most qualified officers to lead the Army or the best at pleasing the boss?
Additionally, it is worth pondering the fact that the Army’s best officers are leaving and this trend has been ongoing for years.[13] So are the Colonels being considered for promotion truly America’s best or America’s rest?
One final point for consideration is the fact that under Secretary Hegseth numerous high-performing Generals and officers have been removed or had their promotions blocked and the JWE will likely be used to add a veneer of meritocratic legitimacy to a process based on subjective favoritism. Hegseth has made no secret of his desire to remove “woke” Generals from the military but hasn’t provided any evidence that the officers he removed were “woke.” Much like George Marshall’s infamous “little black book”, the JWE will be wielded as an instrument to confirm the preexisting biases of the selectors and allow them to promote ideological fellow travelers.
[1] This article published by Army University Press uses the RAND Corporation’s definition of wargaming, which omits decision making. https://www.armyupress.army.mil/journals/military-review/online-exclusive/2024-ole/wargaming-the-laboratory-of-military-planning/. This article asserts that “Wargaming is the disciplined act of picking a fight with your own plan to expose its strengths and weaknesses.” https://www.army.mil/article/288736/the_discipline_of_what_if_setaf_af_wargames_crisis_scenarios.
[2] Department of the Army Headquarters, Field Manual 5-0: Planning and Orders Production, 111 (Army Publishing Directorate, 2024).
[3] Peter Perla, “Wargaming and The Cycle of Research and Learning,” Scandanavian Journal of Military Studies 5, no. 1 (2022), https://doi.org/10.31374/sjms.124, https://sjms.nu/articles/10.31374/sjms.124.
[4] Perla, “Wargaming and The Cycle of Research and Learning.”
[5] This process is akin to the one shown in The Simpsons Movie when the President doesn’t read any of the “unthinkable options” presented to him and just chooses blindly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s99ZeamF7J0
[6] If the Division has replaced the Brigade Combat team as the primary tactical maneuver force on the battlefield, then the first time a General will have an operational level command is when they are a Lieutenant General commanding a Corps.
[7] Hegseth compared it to Gen. George Marshall’s pre–WWII Louisiana Maneuvers and the Navy’s Fleet Problems — large, realistic exercises that exposed who could actually command under friction and helped surface leaders like Eisenhower, Nimitz, and Bradley. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ySf6xsuYgI.
[8] Craig L. Symonds, Nimitz at War: Command Leadership from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2022), 8-13.
[9]Angus Wallace; James Ellman, Patton Reconsidered, The WW2 Podcast (Wallace, Angus, 2026), 320.
[10] Jennifer Mcardle, “Simulating War: Three Enduring Lessons from the Louisiana Maneuvers,” War on the Rocks (17 March 2021). https://warontherocks.com/simulating-war-three-enduring-lessons-from-the-louisiana-maneuvers/.
[11] Andrew Roberts, Masters and Commanders: How Four Titans Won the War in the West, 1941-1945, First ed. (New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 2010), 26-28.
[12] Tim Bakken, The Cost of Loyalty: Dishonesty, Hubris, and failure in the U.S. Military (New York, New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020), 75-103.
[13] Tim Kane, “West Point graduates: Why our best officers are leaving early,” Christian Science Monitor (5 January 2011 2011). https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Growthology/2011/0105/West-Point-graduates-Why-our-best-officers-are-leaving-early.
