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The U.S. Army, the country’s largest military branch, will no longer allow military commanders to decide on their own whether soldiers accused of certain serious crimes can leave the service rather than go on trial.

The decision comes one year after ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and Military Times published an investigation exposing how hundreds of soldiers charged with violent crimes were administratively discharged instead of facing a court martial.

Under the new rule, which goes into effect Saturday, military commanders will no longer have the sole authority to grant a soldier’s request for what is known as a discharge in lieu of court martial, or Chapter 10, in certain cases. Instead, the newly created Office of Special Trial Counsel, a group of military attorneys who specialize in handling cases involving violent crimes, must also approve the decision. Without the attorneys’ approval, charges against a soldier can’t be dismissed.

The Office of Special Trial Counsel will have the final say, the Army told the news organizations.

The new rule will apply only to cases that fall under the purview of the Office of Special Trial Counsel, including sexual assault, domestic violence, child abuse, kidnapping and murder. In 2021, Congress authorized creation of the new legal office — one for each military branch except the U.S. Coast Guard — in response to yearslong pressure to change how the military responds to violent crimes, specifically sexual assault, and reduce commanders’ control over that process. As of December, attorneys with this special office, and not commanders, now decide whether to prosecute cases related to those serious offenses.

Army officials told the news organizations that the change in discharge authority was made in response to the creation of the Office of Special Trial Counsel.

As far back as 1978, a federal watchdog agency called for the U.S. Department of Defense to end its policy of allowing service members accused of crimes to leave the military to avoid going to court. Armed forces leaders continued the practice anyway.

Last year, ProPublica, the Tribune and Military Times found that more than half of the 900 soldiers who were allowed to leave the Army in the previous decade rather than go to trial had been accused of violent crimes, including sexual assault and domestic violence, according to an analysis of roughly 8,000 Army courts-martial cases that reached arraignment. These soldiers had to acknowledge that they committed an offense that could be punishable under military law but did not have to admit guilt to a specific crime or face any other consequences that can come with a conviction, like registering as a sex offender.

The Army did not dispute the news organizations’ findings that the discharges in lieu of trial, also known as separations, were increasingly being used for violent crimes. An Army official said separations are a good alternative if commanders believe wrongdoing occurred but don’t have the evidence for a conviction, or if a victim prefers not to pursue a case.

Military law experts contacted by the news organizations called the Army’s change a step in the right direction.

“It’s good to see the Army has closed the loophole,” said former Air Force chief prosecutor Col. Don Christensen, who is now in private practice.

However, the Office of Special Trial Counsel’s decisions are not absolute. If the attorneys want to drop a charge, the commander still has the option to impose a range of other administrative punishments, Army officials said.

Christensen said he believes commanders should be removed from the judicial process entirely, a shift he said that the military has continued to fight. Commanders often have little to no legal experience. The military has long maintained that commanders are an important part of its justice system.

“They just can’t break away from commanders making these decisions,” said Christensen, who’s been a vocal critic of commanders’ outsize role in the military justice system. “They’re too wedded to that process.”

The Army told the newsrooms that additional changes to DOD and Army policy would be required to remove commanders entirely and instead give the Office of Special Trial Counsel full authority over separations in lieu of trial.

The news organizations reached out to several military branches to determine how the creation of the Office of Special Trial Counsel will affect their discharge processes. The U.S. Navy has taken steps similar to the Army’s. In the U.S. Air Force, the Office of Special Trial Counsel now makes recommendations in cases involving officers, and the branch is in the process of changing the rules for enlisted members. The U.S. Marines confirmed to the news organizations that it has not yet changed its discharge system.

Carla Coulson, a deputy assistant Army secretary overseeing housing and residential partnerships, spoke with Army Times on March 19. She expressed optimism for the Irwin pilot program, but emphasized that privatized barracks are not an economical housing solution at most Army installations.

“At some locations … we could use a privatized barracks solution,” Coulson said. “But it’s not going to work everywhere.”

The housing official said most installations are not a good fit due to a combination of inadequate housing allowance rates, population instability due to deployments, low projected demand, or a lack of suitable land for the project.

By comparison, Fort Irwin, home to the National Training Center, is an ideal place to explore privatized barracks because of its relative isolation, population stability and high housing allowance rates, Coulson argued. The remote southeastern California base’s housing allowance rates rival those of some major metropolitan areas: a captain with dependents receives $2,688 per month at Fort Irwin, while the same officer would receive $2,568 per month in Atlanta.

The pilot privatized barracks project is undergoing staff assessments at the Defense Department level and requires final approval from budget officials before it can begin, but Coulson is optimistic the approvals will come quickly. After that, the service will negotiate a lease with the Michaels Organization (which administers existing privatized family housing at Fort Irwin) and complete an environmental assessment before breaking ground.

Tentative plans for the Irwin development call for approximately 500 soldiers’ worth of two-bedroom suites, organized into roughly company-sized buildings. Under the current plan, Coulson said, each suite will have its own kitchen and living area, and the complex will have amenities including a business center, a swimming pool and a fitness facility.

Coulson said the pilot project’s success will be gauged via tenant satisfaction surveys, command feedback, occupancy rates/waitlist length and whether financial projections hold up. Privatized housing projects self-fund their eventual renovations through a mandatory reinvestment account that collects a large portion of the partner company’s revenue on the project.

Should the model prove successful at Fort Irwin, Coulson said the Army can reallocate military construction funding that would have gone to building Army-owned barracks there (and at the few other potential sites for privatized barracks projects.)

“In this case, we’re going to be able to use about $250 million in military construction [funds] … to [build] somewhere else where we’ve got a greater need,” Coulson explained.

Critics of the privatized barracks proposals point at endemic problems with privatized on-post family housing projects. The Army has struggled to implement effective oversight and inspection mechanisms for those homes, auditors found last year.

Coulson argued, however, that the service’s existing privatized unaccompanied quarters — primarily intended for single officers and noncommissioned officers — consistently score very well in the service’s housing satisfaction surveys. A September 2023 watchdog report that largely blasted the condition of barracks buildings across the DOD found that all privatized barracks it inspected exceeded quality standards.

The housing official added that soldiers in the privatized barracks will enjoy protection under the DOD’s Tenant Bill of Rights when it comes to their relationship with the company administering the project.

Ultimately, Coulson said, the privatized barracks pilot represents just a small part of the efforts underway to solve the Army’s barracks quality problems.

“We’re doing an awful lot of work … to understand how we can provide a better [barracks] inventory for our soldiers as quickly and as effectively as we can,” she said. “Privatized barracks is but a tool in the toolbox of the things that we can use.”

Maj. Russell Gordon, a spokesperson for the 1st Special Forces Command, confirmed that 3rd Special Forces Group elements formerly used the “unofficial” emblem, which was “banned in 2022 by 3rd Special Forces Group leadership when it was brought to their attention.” Leaders banned the logo because of “its historical use,” added Gordon, whose command oversees 3rd Group.

It’s unclear how long the patch was in use with active duty Green Berets, nor is it clear how many teams adopted it or similar imagery in their local logos.

The command previously announced an investigation into “the use of symbols and patches depicting historic images of hate,” after the 20th Special Forces Group’s official Instagram account posted a photo featuring a soldier with a patch depicting a Nazi SS Totenkopf.

The stylized skull-and-crossbones logo was the namesake of the “Totenkopf” 3rd SS Panzer Division. The Nazi high command originally assembled the formation in 1939 from concentration camp guards and SS Einsatzgruppen death squads that systematically murdered Jews in Poland. The division later went on to massacre British and French colonial prisoners of war.

In response to comments on the since-deleted Instagram post, the 20th Group page administrator said “it’s a 3rd group team patch taken out of context.”

However, an Army Special Operations Command spokesperson told Military.com that the soldier pictured is a member of the National Guard’s 20th Group, rather than 3rd Group.

Army Times could not confirm whether or when the soldier was a member of 3rd Group, nor whether he was aware of the patch’s iconographic roots. The Alabama National Guard, home to 20th Group’s headquarters, told Military Times that the state is assisting in the investigation.

On Wednesday morning, an Army Reddit user posted a photo reportedly of a Fort Liberty, North Carolina, training building’s door featuring a sticker with a similar Totenkopf logo. The logo read “ODA 3321,” indicating that the unofficial emblem belonged to a team of Green Berets in 3rd Battalion, 3rd Special Forces Group, which is headquartered at Liberty.

The team’s logo, which includes a similar SS Totenkopf to that seen in the National Guard unit photo, also incorporates the distinctive palm tree featured on the seal of the Deutches Afrikakorps. The Africa Corps fought against British and American troops in North Africa before it was cornered and destroyed in May 1943. The skull-and-crossbones, placed atop 3rd Group’s distinctive beret flash, replaces the swastika in the team’s design.

Service members in the past have occasionally adopted Nazi imagery in their visual materials. In February, the Montana National Guard apologized for including marching Nazi soldiers in the background of recruiting posters. The Marine Corps’ top officer publicly apologized in 2012 after Marine scout snipers were photographed posing with a flag emblazoned with the Nazi SS’s lightning bolt-style flash. A Marine Corps spokesperson at the time said that an ensuing investigation found that the “SS” was intended to signify “Scout Snipers.”

But Defense Department officials have maintained that such incidents are isolated, and that the troops involved in such scandals are largely unaware of the images’ ideological and historical context.

A Pentagon-commissioned research study released in late December “found no evidence that the number of violent extremists in the military is disproportionate to the number of violent extremists in the United States.”

Yet the military’s efforts to root out extremism, launched in the wake of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, faced criticism from both the political left as a performative box-checking effort and from the political right as a purported witch hunt against conservative troops.

As originally designed, the force generation model called for a two-year cycle divided into three eight-month phases — modernization, training and mission. But experts and soldiers interviewed by think tanks feared it was inflexible and couldn’t account for inherent differences between unit types.

Now, the service is announcing changes to the model for armored units after an Army Times report revealed elevated suicide rates in some of those formations. Army leaders say they are exploring options for “tailoring” ReARMM for other types of units as well.

Maj. Gen. Charles Lombardo, a senior Army headquarters official overseeing training plans, told Army Times in a March 18 interview that the service recently “expanded ReARMM phase lengths from eight months to 12 months for the Armored Brigade Combat Teams.” Deployments will remain eight months in length; the lengthened mission phase now accounts for equipment transit. Lombardo, a career armor officer, discussed other service initiatives intended to alleviate strain on the Army’s armored force as well.

Army Times also spoke with force structure and force management experts, as well as soldiers familiar with executing the training model.

Michael Linick, a retired infantry colonel and RAND researcher with expertise in force management, penned a December 2023 report about the ReARMM model’s intersection with other Army systems and its impact on soldiers. He said there is a “disconnect” between Army senior leaders’ rhetoric on “taking care of people, long term investments and human capital” and how operational- and tactical-level leaders are incentivized to deliver readiness above all else.

Lombardo and Army leaders aim to close that gap, both by reining in overambitious commanders and adjusting systems to set units up for success.

Changes for armor units, reducing ‘mission creep’

Restructuring ReARMM for armor brigades is a key step toward keeping soldiers in their own beds between deployments, Lombardo argued. The longer phases are just a start.

The original eight-month model had little room for error. Unexpected delays could derail the modernization or training phases, and units often lost their final weeks of training in order to ship their vehicles overseas for deployments.

The service began revising ReARMM for armor units around a year ago, Army officials said. One lesson that likely informed Army leaders: the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team took roughly 18 months (10 longer than the previous modernization phase’s length) to field new tanks, according to a release.

Mark Cancian, a retired Marine Corps officer and force structure analyst for the Center for International and Strategic Studies, said “eight [months] is too fast to be sustained for the long term.” Cancian said the Army’s shift toward 12-month ReARMM phases is “headed in the right direction” for tank units.

Lombardo, the two-star general, said that Army headquarters is taking deliberate steps to “slow down the tempo at home station” for those troops as well. Training progressions, which climb from crew-level gunnery through successive echelons to the brigade level, can wear down soldiers and their vehicles when executed in rapid succession.

The Army also wants to start sending units on combat training center rotations at more optimal times in their mission preparation, Lombardo added. An Army official said that armor units may also see streamlined training requirements in the future that could eliminate some redundant standards and reduce the amount of time spent in the field banging up their vehicles.

According to Lombardo, Army headquarters officials are also stepping up their oversight of lower-level training exercises in an effort to reduce troops’ time away from home and limit the strain posed by maintenance.

By carefully managing what units should be accomplishing and when, the Army aims to “eliminate or reduce the mission creep from commanders and … lock in requirements” to ensure that training calendars have predictability and so-called “white space,” he said.

Linick, the RAND researcher, said that such space on unit calendars plays a critical role in achieving people-oriented goals such as mandatory trainings, building unit cohesion or even taking care of issues at home. But he and his coauthors cautioned in the December report that such open time on a unit’s calendar can lead “higher-level headquarters [to interpret] that as excess capacity and … fill that white space with additional taskings or requirements.”

Lombardo added that spacing out training events across the lengthened modernization and training phases of ReARMM should empower armor unit commanders to “provide programmed, deliberate maintenance operations” that keep their vehicles healthy and reduce the amount of work rolling down onto maintainers.

Another avenue for cutting down the maintenance workload, according to Lombardo, will be the Army’s plan to do an “operational reset” — or depot-level maintenance overhaul — of a “limited amount” of the service’s oldest tanks on an annual basis. The move could allow maintainers to focus on their most capable vehicles rather than pouring time into decrepit ones. Linick and Cancian also suggested that poor recruiting has made it challenging for units to keep all of their crews at full strength as well.

“We’re fighting hard at the department level to rebuild and reset this [tank] fleet … so they can truly just focus on fighting and training and not be overwhelmed with the maintenance activities,” Lombardo said. Other measures — including increased funding for spare parts and mechanic training — also aim to alleviate maintenance stress.

Different units, different needs

Other types of units may also require tailored versions of ReARMM in order to optimize their readiness-building path, Linick argued.

Citing focus groups of Army officers and noncommissioned officers assembled for the December report, Linick and his coauthors said “several interviewees clearly articulated that ReARMM seems to be a brigade combat team-centric model that does not fit well with units that either have limited modernization needs or have significant and ongoing missions.”

Members of specialized support units, such as expeditionary military intelligence brigades, said a cyclical model doesn’t make sense for their formations because their members are in constant use.

One senior training staff member told RAND researchers that eight months may actually be too much modernization time for light infantry units in some cycles.

“In light infantry, our modernization does not impact us as much. It’s very small,” he said. “You’re going to get a new radio, OK.”

A division-level planner, who asked that Army Times not publish his name because he was not authorized to speak to media, criticized the model as “overly prescriptive” and “one-size-fits-all.”

Lombardo (and Forces Command officials cited by Linick in the RAND report) said the service is aware of the need for adjustments. He said the Army is continuing to analyze and adjust the cycles for specific unit types — armor units were merely the first on the list.

“The next unit cohort we’re looking at is Combat Aviation Brigades,” said Lombardo. The Army’s flying units have been in high demand for many years, and their modernization and training needs are complex — and potentially dangerous if executed too hastily.

Such haste to meet training benchmarks may have contributed to two deadly mid-air collisions in early 2023, according to the Army’s aviation chief.

The head of the Army’s aviation branch, Maj. Gen. Mac McCurry, told Army Times in October 2023 that “some units were out-training their level of experience” when trying to tackle unit-level training progressions that outstripped the typical two-ship missions that personified the branch’s operations during most of the Global War on Terror.

Lombardo is bullish on the Army’s ability to get force generation right.

“The ReARMM model, when followed … is going to provide predictable lifecycle windows,” he said. “We … have to continue to be willing to look at ourselves and assess and refine [the model].”

But despite the Army’s apparent willingness to adjust in whatever ways it deems necessary to make the ReARMM cycle more efficient for its units and soldiers, some service members remain skeptical that soldiers will see the benefit.

“Whether they’re calling it ReARMM or something else, it’s all the same, right?” said one soldier, whose identity was withheld in the report, to RAND researchers. “You come into work thinking you’re going to do something and then something else happens, what you have to do changes, and you get on with it.”

The 20th Special Forces Group, headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama, posted the photo Sunday along with the caption, “That weekend feeling. Enjoy the rest of your weekend. Don’t stop training. Don’t get complacent.”

The post was then deleted after it garnered comments criticizing the patch, which was visible on the back of one service member’s helmet.

“The use of symbols and patches depicting historic images of hate is not tolerated and a clear violation of our values,” said Maj. Russell Gordon, spokesperson for 1st Special Forces Command. “We are aware of the situation and are currently investigating the matter.”

The Alabama National Guard is assisting 1st Special Forces Command with the investigation, said Mack Muzio, a National Guard spokesperson.

Gordon confirmed the unit deleted the post. However, a screenshot of the image was shared by individuals to other social media sites in subsequent days, where hundreds of people have criticized the unit and commented on the historical significance of the image.

The Totenkopf is listed in the Anti-Defamation League’s hate symbols database, where it’s described as the symbol adopted by the SS-Totenkopfverbande, a branch of the SS that guarded concentration camps. Since World War II, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists have adopted it as a symbol of hate, the database states.

The investigation comes just one month after the Montana National Guard issued an apology for its use of photos in recruiting materials that showed Nazi soldiers marching during World War II. Those images, too, sparked outrage online.

This story was produced in partnership with Military Veterans in Journalism. Please send tips to MVJ-Tips@militarytimes.com.

By 2030, Army Cadet Command plans to establish or expand at least 13 Reserve Officer Training Corps units at colleges and universities across the South and Southwest, where four-year college enrollment rates have sharply increased in recent decades. The program, known as ROTC, brings in more than half of the branch’s new officers across all components annually.

The command will keep the moves resource-neutral by merging some existing programs, said spokesperson Maj. Dan Lessard, who added that “no Senior ROTC program will close, and no Senior ROTC cadet will be required to transfer to a new school.” The initiative will impact 18 existing units by downgrading them from standalone host programs to slightly smaller “extension units” that maintain their identity, on-campus classes and resources, according to planning documents reviewed by Army Times.

Cadet Command calls the initiative “ROTC Reset.” Lessard argued the moves will help the command “keep pace with long-term trends in higher education and shifting college age populations and demographics.”

The 18 programs downgrading from host to extension unit status are mostly located across the Northeast and Midwest, regions with declining four-year college enrollment, said a Cadet Command planning official who requested anonymity to detail the pending changes. The planner added that the merging programs largely “have not met” commissioning quotas “for the majority, if not all, of the last 10 years.”

But by maintaining the existing units at the “extension” program level, planning documents said, the command believes they can continue the Army’s relationship with the affected institutions.

According to the planner, selecting locations to start or supplement programs was largely a data-driven decision. In addition to aligning with large-scale trends in college enrollment across the country, Cadet Command considered numbers such as institutions’ freshman student retention rates and graduation rates.

Planning documents said the move will provide more than 200,000 undergraduate students access to ROTC on their respective campuses. Such units often also act as community ambassadors, the planning official noted, and the new and expanded programs will bolster the Army’s presence in Los Angeles, central California, San Diego, Dallas-Fort Worth, and the greater Miami area.

The two program expansions located outside of the deep South and Sun Belt are slated for historically Black institutions, or HBCUs: Tennessee State University in Nashville, Tennessee; and Delaware State University in Dover, Delaware. The Cadet Command planner said both universities have a growing population, and such programs are important for ensuring the Army’s officer corps better mirrors the demographic profile of the enlisted force.

Lessard provided a list of pending shifts to Army Times, but cautioned that some of the planned expansions still require the Army and the host university to negotiate agreements before they can take place. A portion of the expansions are already approved. The planner said that establishing or expanding an ROTC unit requires careful consideration of building space, facilities access and supplies — the process “takes 12 to 18 months to finalize,” typically, and “the university gets a say in this process.”

Cadet Command officials assess the move will allow ROTC to catch up to demographic trends and recruiting market shifts that planning documents candidly say the Army “has not kept pace with.”

The Army’s top leaders have adopted similar messaging about the major reforms unfolding across the Army’s enlisted recruiting enterprise as well. Cadet Command, as part of the initiative, now reports to Recruiting Command, which also aims to target prospective enlisted troops who have completed some post-high school education.

Those efforts remain underway at the Fort Knox, Kentucky-based command, which is also gaining control of the service’s marketing arm.

Maj. Gen. Marcus Evans, who serves as both the 25th Infantry Division commander and the senior commander of all Hawaii-located Army installations, praised local civilian officials and community members for their assistance in avoiding a total system failure.

“The tremendous work and partnership by the [state] Board of Water Supply and the community of Wahiawa was instrumental in ensuring that our community never lost potable water during this period,” Evans said in a statement to Army Times.

The issue began March 19, when three of the five potable water pumps serving Schofield Barracks and Wheeler Army Airfield “malfunctioned,” said 25th Infantry Division spokesperson Maj. Jeff Tolbert. A fourth pump went offline at the central Oahu installations March 21, despite “conservation measures” adopted across the post after the first malfunctions.

The Army is “still assessing the exact cause of the malfunctions,” said Tolbert. He added that only a handful of homes at Wheeler Army Airfield lost water, and that was a deliberate shutoff of “less than 30 minutes” on March 23 for critical system maintenance.

The conservation efforts, which Evans detailed in a recent town hall address, included “prohibiting the use of water for non-essential tasks like lawn care or washing cars,” Tolbert said. The measures will remain in place until the pumps are restored via “around the clock” emergency repairs.

To reduce stress on the remaining pump, garrison officials established water distribution points “throughout the installation,” the spokesperson noted. The garrison also quickly obtained additional potable water from a neighboring down and rented a portable water pump.

The situation is slowly returning to normal, according to Tolbert and official social media announcements. “We are expecting a return to normal operating capacity within the next 24-36 hours,” the spokesperson said in a Sunday evening statement.

The water pump failures are the latest in a series of utility failures that have impacted soldiers and families assigned to installations on the Hawaiian Islands.

An hours-long power outage hit Schofield Barracks and Wheeler Army Airfield on March 21 amid the water problems, and smaller outages have occurred on numerous occasions this year despite maintenance efforts from both Army and civilian utility crews. Fort Shafter, an installation in south Oahu near the city of Honolulu, also experienced unscheduled power outages on March 5 and March 1.

Wormuth’s spokesperson, Col. Randee Farrell, said the secretary first learned this week of allegations that “Gen. Charles Hamilton, commanding general of Army Materiel Command (AMC), interfered in the Army’s Command Assessment Program (CAP) process last fall.” Military.com first reported the alleged misconduct.

Farrell added that the Army has referred the matter for review by the Defense Department’s inspector general.

“Secretary Wormuth has temporarily suspended General Hamilton from his duties as AMC Commander pending the outcome of the DoDIG review and assessment, and any subsequent investigation,” she said.

The Army will also review “the entirety of the command selection process to determine what additional steps may be needed to ensure maximum fairness and integrity in the … process,” Farrell said.

Hamilton came under scrutiny after a Nov. 1 memorandum surfaced from Col. Robert O’Brien, the Command Assessment Program director, that chronicled Hamilton’s alleged interference in the Battalion Command Assessment Program process for his former assistant, who assessment officials unanimously deemed “not yet ready” for command.

O’Brien declined an interview request through an Army spokesperson, and Hamilton, through a command spokesperson, declined to answer directly emailed questions.

The Army has boasted of the assessment program’s seeming success to Congress and others since its establishment in 2019. The service has also created similar programs for selecting brigade commanders, senior enlisted leaders and high-level chaplains.

The assessment culminates in a double-blind interview, during which time a panel of Army leaders anonymously interview the candidate and consider their performance across a series of physical and mental tests, subordinate and peer feedback from previous assignments, and an evaluation by a psychologist.

Service officials have claimed the program will reduce toxic leaders in the force and improve soldiers’ experience. The program’s own guide says it is “fair … [and] will neither advantage nor disadvantage any candidate based on their past experiences or current assignment.”

But the allegations against Hamilton threaten to undermine that credibility. Farrell said Wormuth, who ordered the review of the command selection programs, “is committed to the integrity of the CAP process as it matures and develops.”

According to O’Brien’s memo, the four-star general repeatedly asked BCAP officials to furnish him a summary of the subordinate and peer evaluations for a lieutenant colonel who had previously served as his military assistant and assistant executive officer. Such evaluations are considered extremely sensitive in order to encourage respondents to provide honest feedback.

Hamilton then “specifically requested to observe” the lieutenant colonel’s interview at the Fort Knox, Kentucky-based event. Army Times is not naming the lieutenant colonel because the memorandum does not accuse her of any wrongdoing.

After observing her final double-blind interview, Hamilton purportedly told Col. Townley Hedrick, the program’s chief of staff, that he thought the psychologist’s briefing to the panel was “too negative” and “may have biased the panel.” O’Brien said that assessment officials disagreed with Hamilton on the matter, and the voting members of the panel unanimously cited “counterproductive leadership” as their reason for rejecting the officer.

The four-star then pressured Hedrick to grant the officer a re-do, according to the memo. O’Brien recalled granting the second chance “solely based on General Hamilton’s request,” which Hedrick attributed to “technical issues” when notifying the lieutenant colonel of her new interview for the following day, Nov. 1.

Before the second interview occurred, Hamilton reportedly called three general officers who were part of the pool of interview panel members to discuss their “voting parameters” and the lieutenant colonel. It’s unclear from the memorandum whether any of the three officers — Maj. Gen. Jeth Rey, Maj. Gen. Trevor Bredenkamp and now-Maj. Gen. Hope Rampy — sat on either of the lieutenant colonel’s interview panels.

Hamilton allegedly called and texted Hedrick and O’Brien throughout the day in search of updates on his former assistant’s performance. She again was found not yet ready for command, this time by a 3-2 vote.

The lieutenant colonel, despite her unfavorable results, was ultimately selected for battalion command, according to a selection list obtained by Army Times. It is unclear how she appeared on the list, but she won’t take command — Wormuth ordered that “no officer assessed by CAP as not yet certified for command” will do so this year, Farrell said.

Lt. Gen. Chris Mohan, Army Materiel Command’s deputy commander, will assume Hamilton’s duties during his suspension, Farrell said.

Hamilton has benefited from other senior leader misconduct in the past. He earned his third star and became the Army’s deputy chief of staff for logistics in 2022 after an investigation found that his supervisor, retired Maj. Gen. Duane Gamble, “displayed counterproductive leadership.”

Parker Allen Gibson, who records say was a retired intelligence noncommissioned officer assigned to the secretive unit, had similar charges against him dismissed in 2022 due to a dispute over who had access to a North Carolina storage unit where various military gear was recovered. His then-wife, according to a 2022 transcript, is a special operations warrant officer.

In the first case, prosecutors claimed Gibson had stolen live grenades and stored them alongside various Delta Force memorabilia. The storage unit also held special operations ammunition and approximately 20 surveillance drones ranging in size from small DJI copters to fixed-wing units with a 10-foot wingspan.

Prosecutors filed new charges against Gibson on Feb. 23, and the retired soldier was arrested March 12. The Assembly, a North Carolina news outlet, first reported the new indictment.

His new charges include four felony counts related to the grenades and one charge of unlawfully retaining classified information. The indictment did not detail how prosecutors resolved the first case’s evidentiary shortcomings.

The Delta Force veteran medically retired in 2021 after a career that included a stint as a combat engineer before entering the special operations realm. He earned two Bronze Star Medals and received a Purple Heart, according to court records.

Gibson was released pending trial on conditions including limited contact with his spouse, travel restrictions and GPS monitoring.

The policy, which technically expired in November but is still part of the department’s force management guidance, includes a waiver process for units to revert to the mandatory minimum 1:2 deployment-to-dwell ratio, but the numbers on waiver requests and approvals are classified, Army Maj. Grace Geiger said.

“The Department has multiple processes in place to identify, approve, and track individuals and units not meeting the goal,” she added, including oversight from the services, the Joint Staff and the defense secretary’s office.

The Pentagon had not answered follow-up questions seeking details of these oversight processes as of Friday afternoon.

Questions about the Pentagon policy emerged following an Army Times investigation last week that found that members of Army armor brigades — units that largely have not met the dwell time goals over the past decade — were twice as likely to kill themselves than other active duty soldiers in recent years.

Long periods of high operational tempo can increase a service member’s suicide risk, according to Craig Bryan, a psychologist and mental health researcher at Ohio State University who spoke to Army Times.

Bryan, a former Air Force psychologist, was a member of the suicide prevention independent review committee convened by the Pentagon in 2022.

That committee found that “training demands and requirements … [are] primary sources of stress, burnout and demoralization.” Other common stressors include shoddy computers, byzantine promotion policies, unsupportive leaders and poor housing.

Army tank brigades have flirted with or broken the dwell threshold in recent years.

The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team returned from a nine-month South Korea rotation in August 2021. But the Raider Brigade rapidly deployed to Europe six months later in February 2022, when Russia expanded its invasion of Ukraine. The brigade’s families were furious about the move, detailing the hardships they faced during a March 2022 town hall with the Army’s then-top noncommissioned officer at Fort Stewart, Georgia.

This month, the Fort Carson, Colorado-based 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team of the 4th Infantry Division, deploys to Europe approximately 16 months after returning from an eight-month Poland mission in December 2022.

Former officials argue that the sustained operational tempo has harmed units as well.

Retired Gen. Robert “Abe” Abrams, who led Army Forces Command before retiring in 2021, previously told Military Times that the Army’s armor units struggle with a 1:2 deployment-to-dwell ratio at current resourcing levels and “cannot sustain that tempo indefinitely.”

“That’s what’s crushing them,” he said.

Other communities, such as air defense, have faced high deployment rates as well.

The Navy has also dealt with a bruising tempo in recent years, with an ever-increasing assortment of missions. The COVID pandemic only exacerbated that pace, as pre-cruise quarantines and zero port calls became the order of the day.

The aircraft carrier Nimitz and its strike group spent an historic 11 months at sea from April 2020 through February 2021.

Precisely 22 months later, a perfect 1:2 dwell ratio, they were back on deployment. Policy dictates they would have needed a waiver to deploy again that quickly.