Dazed and Confused: How Marine Corps Promotion Boards Keep Getting It Wrong

An old adage claims a marine’s career came down to the “two or three minutes of a promotions brief.” Turns out that was a little optimistic. In practice, the Marine Corps promotion system decides the institutional worth of a 20‑year career in about 12 minutes of board attention.

Imagine the National Football League compressing the seven primary drills of the Scouting Combine — the 40‑yard dash, bench press, vertical and broad jumps, three‑cone drill, 20‑yard shuttle, and 60‑yard shuttle — into a single 12‑minute window. No game file, no multi-day interviews, no medical deep dives. In 12 minutes, it would be impossible for any franchise focused on winning to make a defensible decision on a first-round draft pick. Yet, this is essentially the process the Marine Corps uses to select its officers for promotion.

After more than 20 years of meeting every institution demand — deployments, family sacrifice, physical risk, and the burden of command — your record is assessed by a board member who is afforded about the time it takes to fold a load of laundry to skim your life’s work, prepare a brief, and cast a vote.

In the most recent colonel promotion board — a six‑day sprint through 737 files — the math suggests the ideal of meritocracy was displaced over concerns of cost. While the board included a President charged primarily with providing procedural oversight and a portion of the cases prepared for voting, the heavy lifting of record preparation fell to only eight voting members. This structure creates a mechanical bottleneck where a handful of individuals must process the institutional worth of hundreds of 20-year careers.

If every eligible marine were treated equally, the process boils each marine’s future down to less than five minutes of consideration.

Promotion Actuarial: FY27 Colonel Selection Board

Category	Data / Metric
Total Population	737 Eligible Officers
Zone Breakdown	176 Above-Zone / 293 In-Zone / 268 Below-Zone
Board Duration	6 Business Days (3,600 minutes total)
Pace (All Records)	~4.9 minutes per case
Pace (In-/Above-Zone)	~7.7 minutes per case
In-Zone Total Time	~12.3 minutes per Marine (Includes briefing, deliberation, and voting)

Even if below-zone records are largely set aside after the initial scan, the in-zone and above-zone population receives roughly 12 minutes of attention per file — assuming 10-hour workdays, without breaks.

This tempo would be unacceptable in any serious corporate talent selection process that claims to optimize performance. Yet the Marine Corps insists this system identifies the “best and fully qualified,” while operating at a pace that virtually guarantees institutional convenience outweighs competence, character, and combat performance.

Dazed

To ensure an equitable distribution of the workload, board members are selected from across the globe. They fly in from the Middle East, Asia, and Europe, crossing five to nine time zones and — unless they take leave en route — typically begin deliberating 48 hours after their arrival. Officers competing for promotion, who have dedicated their entire careers to this moment, pay a perilous price for this: the total disruption of circadian rhythms in the very moments when board members are making career-altering decisions.

The logistical math is simply staggering when viewed through the lens of individual responsibility. A typical board of nine members must divide those 737 files among themselves. Because the Board President typically carries a lighter load to focus on procedural integrity, the remaining eight members are responsible for preparing the bulk of the cases. This division of labor means that the 12 minutes of boardroom attention is actually the result of eight people operating an assembly line under extreme time pressure, with each voting member responsible for 90–100 briefs to prepare and deliver over six days.

In practice, this means an individual board member must prepare and brief up to 15 nominees per day while simultaneously evaluating the 70–80 other cases briefed by their peers. This is not a deliberative process: It is an assembly line. Even the most conscientious board member is asked to perform beyond what the human brain can sustainably deliver.

A typical lieutenant colonel’s record can easily encompass 20 to 35 observed and non-observed reports, each consisting of several pages of dense data and prose. Consequently, for a colonel promotion board, a member may have to navigate up to 16 distinct reporting occasions from the candidate’s tenure as a major and lieutenant colonel alone. Board members often seek out award citations as a summary description of performance, but in doing so, may encounter twelve or more of these to pore through. Some marines, unknowingly, further complicate the matter by contributing letters of recommendation. Often authored by mentors or civilian colleagues outside the formal reporting chain, these letters provide unique insight — but add more weight to an already overloaded schedule.

Stacked together, a single in‑zone record can easily exceed 180 pages of dense material. To meet a 12‑minute benchmark, a board member would have to ingest, analyze, and synthesize that file at a rate of about 15 pages per minute — one page every four seconds — with no margin for reflection, cross‑referencing, or critical thought. The expectation is not simply demanding; it is operationally unrealistic. While other sectors turn toward automation or AI to navigate such data-heavy environments, the Marine Corps continues to bet the farm on purely analog processes. By eschewing digital experimentation in favor of traditional deliberation, the service places an immense — perhaps operationally unrealistic — burden on the individual board member to manually quantify a marine’s performance against institutional expectations.

Safety protocols strictly mandate rest during aviation and live-fire maneuvers, yet these standards vanish in the boardroom. Why? Military and civilian research has repeatedly shown that even one night of serious sleep loss degrades attention, memory, accuracy, and complex judgment, and pushes decision-makers toward rigid thinking and bad risk assessment. These are exactly the cognitive functions we claim to value in promotion deliberations.

There is no real rest for the weary. A promotion board member’s home station, ostensibly relegated to background noise, continues to occupy their minds. Whether sourced from the United States or overseas, life-and-death matters still seek their attention in the form of texts, phone calls, emails, and virtual meetings squeezed into breaks or after hours. The board member is not only tired: They are mentally divided between the 737 files and the urgent note their chief of staff just sent from Okinawa. The 12 minutes per marine is rarely 12 minutes of undivided attention.

Simply put, the Marine Corps expects senior officers to make the most consequential decisions of their subordinates’ careers under enormously difficult conditions. Institutional standards would never permit an overtired surgeon to perform a high‑risk operation, but the promotion process remains comfortable, assuming someone similarly fatigued can render judgment over hundreds of pages of complex evaluations.

Confused

The party line, repeated during annual road show briefs to marines across the force, is that this rushed, opaque, and inconsistent process is the gold standard for identifying “the best and most fully qualified.” Before going further, it is worth pausing to ask whether fields like neuroscience and organizational psychology offer any insights about how experts think under pressure.

Research suggests that the best teachers don’t just step to the front of a room: their brains light up when they teach something they truly understand and care about. Studies of high-performing educators show far greater activation in brain regions linked to motivation, attention, memory, and emotion when they work with their own students on familiar material, compared to when they are given anonymous work with little context. In other words, when experts are given the time, context, and relationships, their brains can fully engage.

Similarly, Marine Corps promotion board members come from the top percentile of their profession. But, instead of being placed in conditions that let their expertise light up, the board process places senior leaders in front of a mountain of unfamiliar careers and hands them a stopwatch. The institution does provide informational products describing idealized career paths and field-specific considerations to help members understand different professions. Informing board members of idealized career paths comes with risk, however, as any time dedicated to deep diving and truly learning the nuance of each occupational field eats into the already thin margin provided to review and prepare cases for arbitration.

Constrained to roughly 12 minutes per in-zone marine, layered on top of hours prereading and days of cumulative fatigue, the brain does what it always does when resources run low: It reaches for heuristics — simple shortcuts that feel like judgment but are actually just pattern recognition. This aligns with Daniel Kahneman’s framework in Thinking, Fast and Slow: When cognitive resources are depleted by fatigue and time pressure, even experts default to System 1 thinking.

Instead of tracing a marine’s arc from a top-1 percent captain to a tested lieutenant colonel — or truly grappling with the trajectory of a career they do not know — board members are often forced into “blink assessments.” The first of these shortcuts is an escalating “adjective arms race” fueled by euphemistic vocabulary. Indexed phrases such as “truly one of one,” “hands down the best,” “water walker,” or “eye‑watering performance” compete for attention across an entire file of reports. The danger in this environment is that language inflation, rather than underlying performance, becomes the primary signal the board receives.

This linguistic inflation is often compounded by a form of professional nepotism, the halo effect of ”known quantities.” The presence of a prestigious reporting senior’s name can act as a mental shortcut, substituting a Who’s Who list of evaluators for a deeper dive into the marine’s actual record. This subtly privileges those serving in high-visibility commands, allowing the reputation of the evaluator to overshadow the performance of equally capable peers serving in less luminous billets.

Perhaps most damaging blink assessment is the “single blemish” phenomenon — the “Out, damned spot!” of the personnel file. Under extreme cognitive load, board members frequently fall victim to anchoring bias, where a lone mid-pack fitness report from a decade prior becomes a gravity well. This single anomaly pulls the evaluator’s attention away from years of subsequent excellence. In a 12-minute sprint, it is arguable that a board member is forced to look for a reason to say “no” instead of  “yes” simply to manage the clock. Because there is no time to cross-reference or investigate the anomaly, it becomes easier to discard the file than to solve the puzzle. Over time, the system conditions intelligent, well-intentioned officers to behave less like engaged master teachers whose minds light up around their own students and more like overworked graders cycling through unfamiliar exams. Rules of thumb become the only sustainable strategy when even the best board members face a mountain of records and a kitchen timer deadline.

Administrative shortcuts are an inevitable response. Members end up scanning the last two or three observed occasions and calling it sufficient. Who has the time — or the cognitive fuel — to dig back a decade to find the reviewing senior who first staked their reputation on this marine’s future?

By the time a marine is considered for promotion to colonel, their record typically includes thirty or more reporting occasions, most of them “observed” — reports covering periods of ninety days or longer in which the evaluator has meaningful personal contact with the marine in a standard work setting. This is an odd design choice. The evaluation system insists on meaningful personal contact as the prerequisite for a valid or observable report, yet the promotion system stacks those reports together in such quantity and moves so fast that a board member’s “meaningful contact” with a career that spans decades is practically impossible.

With little time to spare, the middle 80 percent of reporting senior and reviewing officer prose turns into background noise-filler between the opening hook and the closing salvo. The system technically offers 1,056 characters for the reporting official and 616 for the reviewing officer, but what actually moves the needle are the first and last 15 to 30 words and their coded adjectives: “absolute must,” “without comparison,” “hands down,” “truly exceptional,” or, in its most stripped down form, “a 6” — or, failing to adequately express talent according to the traditional rubric, a “6+.” The nuance, the growth, the hardship tours, and the difficult billets are often crushed into white space. Only a handful of signal phrases make it into a breathless narrative drafted by a tired promotion board member trying to make it through their docket for the day.

The same compression happens with additional military occupational specialties. The Marine Corps recognizes hundreds of additional career field designations, from highly competitive task force planner and weapons and tactics instructor qualifications to legacy skills from prior enlisted service that may no longer be operationally relevant. Under pressure, it becomes easy to subconsciously reward quantity of codes or familiar prestige designators, rather than carefully weighing the current value and context of each one.

What Can Be Done: Prioritizing Precision over Pace

The current system makes it hard for even the best officers to think clearly. The solution is not to blame well-meaning board members for employing heuristics to cut corners. Rather, it is to redesign the process so that rigor is possible.

First, the Marine Corps should be willing to incur the logistical and financial cost of time. As seen in the May 2025 board, relying on just eight voting members to conduct the primary analysis for the entire population creates an avoidable bottleneck. Whether by adding more voting members to reduce the individual file load, extending the board’s duration to allow genuine deliberation, or both, the investment is negligible compared to the cost of losing a generational talent to a 12‑minute oversight. Crew rest is a mandate for pilots and it should also be a given for board members. That might mean building in mandatory cognitive reset periods, structuring the day to avoid major votes late in the afternoon, and ensuring that no one is expected to sustain double‑digit case preparations every day of a weeklong board. This solution comes with ‑cost, a price worth paying to enable the deliberate review and selection of the Marine Corps’ best and most fully qualified people.

Second, the Marine Corps should develop doctrinal career pathways and standardized, high‑fidelity quantitative prescreens that allow quantitative and qualitative assessment before the first day of the board. With digitized data visualization, board members could gain a baseline understanding of an officer’s evaluation history — tailored to the specific demands of each occupational field — before the first record is ever briefed. Instead of sifting manually through dozens of paper reports to discern a pattern, members could see clear, standardized depictions of performance across grades, billet types, and major commands, with obvious outliers highlighted for closer review. Interactive data dashboards save invaluable time and would normalize reporting senior grading curves in real time. This isn’t about letting an algorithm decide: It’s about using technology to clear the administrative fog so the humans in the room can focus on the nuance of character and leadership.

There is a paradox here: Technology is the easy lift, despite its cost. The true friction is cultural and requires the Marine Corps to reconcile the esteem for a well-rounded officer with the reality that the increasingly technological character of warfare makes specialization the norm. The goal is not to let an algorithm decide or simply count cards — tallying awards, pull-up scores, run times, or the number of additional occupational skills in a marine’s record. Indexing talent ought to go deeper than annual training statistics or generic administrative milestones. While numerical values can be assigned to the grade and type of a marine’s assignments, those numbers should measure whether an officer followed a viable pathway for their field, not whether they matched a one size fits all template.

These numerical pre-board readouts should not become the sole deciding factor. Instead, they should filter noise so that board members can reserve limited cognitive energy for the hardest, most ambiguous cases and careers that do not fit neatly into any standard mold.

Finally, the sanctity of the room has to be protected. Board members should be legally and administratively blacked out from their home stations for the duration of the board. If an officer is senior enough to sit on a colonel’s board, their command is robust enough to function without them for two weeks. Manpower and Reserve Affairs should implement a “total immersion” protocol. Board duty should be treated like deployment. If the institution values the board’s output, it should protect the board member’s bandwidth. Temporary additional duty orders should explicitly shift day‑to‑day authority to deputies and instruct home units not to contact board members except for true emergencies. That policy would not only protect the officers on the board: It would signal to the entire force the gravity of these decisions.

The expectation that a board member can accurately judge a career in 12 minutes is not simply demanding: It is operationally unrealistic and fundamentally incongruent with Marine Corps doctrine. Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 1, Warfighting, testifies that “human will, instilled through leadership, is the driving force of all action in war.” If leadership is indeed the Marine Corps’ most potent weapon, then institutional reluctance to modernize how those leaders are selected remains a glaring vulnerability.

Each colonel the Marine Corps promotes represents an annual commitment of $307,900 in total composite pay, yet existing promotion processes evaluate their 20-year arc at a rate of one page every four seconds. If the Marine Corps truly believes in the human dimension of warfighting, the institution can no longer justify spending billions on hardware and platforms while spending only pennies of time on the people who command them.

Stephen McNeil is a Marine Corps officer. He is a career adjutant and manpower officer with combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. His leadership experience includes command of Headquarters Battalion, Marine Corps Base Hawaii, and key staff roles within I and III Marine Expeditionary Forces and Headquarters Marine Corps. He is a graduate of the Army War College and lives with his wife and three sons.

The views and opinions presented here are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Marine Corps, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.

**Please note, as a matter of house style War on the Rocks will not use a different name for the U.S. Department of Defense until and unless the name is changed by statute by the U.S. Congress