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Four star general relieved for attempting to get a subordinate assigned a command

by thebesig••101
General Charles Hamilton attempted to influence a board to approve a subordinate for command. (Eben Boothby/US Army)

Army Secretary Christine Wormuth relieved General Charles Hamilton of his command. He was one of the Army’s 12 four-star generals. An inspector general report detailed how Hamilton intervened with an assessment board that reviewed candidates for command assignment. The beneficiary was a Black female lieutenant colonel. They initially voted 5-0 to not recommend her for command. However, Hamilton got them to hold a second review. Despite his talking to officers who potentially would be on the second review to discuss their voting parameters, the second board voted against the subordinate.

From Stars and Stripes:

According to officials and documents, Hamilton inappropriately tried to push an assessment board to approve a command assignment for a female lieutenant colonel, the Associated Press reported. He successfully persuaded the board to give the officer a second interview after a board initially voted 5-0 not to recommend her for command.

Before the second interview took place, Hamilton contacted senior leaders who could have been on her second panel to discuss their voting parameters and the candidates. The second panel also deemed her not certified for command, according to the AP.

The Army Inspector General Office’s investigation came after it received an anonymous complaint in December 2023 that Hamilton and the lieutenant colonel were having an “inappropriate, fraternizing, and likely sexual relationship,” the investigation said. Investigators subsequently found that though Hamilton and the lieutenant colonel had an “overly familiar relationship,” there was no “definitive evidence” that the two had a sexual relationship.

At first, the matter was referred to the Defense Department Inspector General’s Office, which closed the case in January after finding “insufficient evidence in the complaint to warrant further investigation.”

But the day after a news report in March that Hamilton pressured Army officials to select the lieutenant colonel for command, the Defense Department Inspector General’s Office referred the matter to the Army Inspector General’s Office for investigation.

Wormuth suspended Hamilton on March 22 and removed the lieutenant colonel’s name from the command selection list, according to the investigation.

Hamilton, who is Black as is the female officer who sought a promotion, wrote a letter to Wormuth in August asking to be reinstated as commander of Army Materiel Command, and he laid out his case in the lieutenant colonel’s promotion and his view on the Command Assessment Program, or CAP.

In the letter, he implored Wormuth to investigate why CAP deems few minority officers as ready to command and the barriers that exist that make qualified Black officers unwilling to subject themselves to the process.

Additional Reading:

Adams, M. (2024, December 11). Army secretary fires four-star general for meddling in promotion process. Stars and Stripes. Link.

 

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101 thoughts on “Four star general relieved for attempting to get a subordinate assigned a command”

            2. Hell yeah! One of the reasons I’m leaving Colorado for Alabama as soon as I can… they already have Yeungling!

      2. Kwitcherbitchin

        The three best kinds of beer are Free, Mne, and cold.

        I’m particularly fond of Straub’s fro St Mary’s PA, but Yuengling is a suitable substitute.

    2. The deck has always been stacked and lately the number of
      Jokers has increased. What we need is a new Trump card and
      that is exactly what we will get.

  2. Good example of how the General Officer selection process needs revamped. This guy had a major failure in his ethical thought process, and a serious lack of situational awareness. Why does the Army Material Command need a 4 star anyway? Seems like something a 3 star is over qualified for.

    1. The AMC umbrella covers a lot of ground (wayyyy too much in some folk’s opinion), and many of its subordinate commands are three-star billets. My job falls under AMC, and I’m one of those folks that say it’s too big. A hell of a lot of kingdom building going on. I’m thinking it’s a good place for DOGE to look at. Get Elon on the phone.

    3. LTG Christopher Mohan AMC deputy commander, w/ the possible exception of the director of the joint staff, is the most powerful 3 star in the whole US military. He’ll be acting commander of AMC for going on 300 days. No small potatoes as AMC is monstrously huge & complex. It has easily the largest budget of all the army 4-star commands. As others have mentioned – it’s probably way too big, and – maybe corrupt.
      Christopher Mohan – Wikipedia

      2. I don’t know about corrupt, I have zero visibility on that. But I do see a lot of high-level fucktardery. Hey, maybe LTG Mohan will get an impact LoM for his 300 days…

        1. Welp, the good general will be occupying the acting role for a while longer. Don’t think there is enough time to confirm a replacement commander before Trump takes over. Problem w/ being an acting commander is you work ridiculously long days, but don’t have the authority to initiate policy or get the pay.

  3. Having a good amount background information on this one, I would offer to the assembled crowd, it was not a race thing. Hamilton is well known as a great mentor to leaders of all races. This was an inappropriate relationship that led to a bad decision.

    I know several people who know the young officer and have worked with her and openly state she is a bad leader with toxic, non-productive leadership traits, and BCAP got it right…both times.

    If you ever saw a picture of her, you would make some immediate non-racial assumptions.

    This was a sad Army day and the termination of a good Army story and career.

    2. “If you ever saw a picture of her, you would make some immediate non-racial assumptions.”
      Uhh….she looks like an ugly dyke? Is that it?

    3. Thanks for the intel. Always good to have a first hand account. The good, the bad, and the ugly. Was the Gnrl just doing what he had done before (mentoring younger ossifers) and wanted the board to take another look, or was there something else? And it’s one thing to have one or two folks state her toxic “leadership”, but another to have “several” with the same opinion. We should be working on picking the most qualified for any position and not consider various “boxes” to check.

      From various news sources, I’m seeing reports that there is a considerable amount of concern about the new administration coming in and cleaning house. We may see a big uptick in various ossifers “putting in their papers”, you know…to spend more time with the family and so on.

    4. How ate up are you if two assignment boards and a good word from a four-star couldn’t get you past the finish line?

        1. So she is a ” Didn’t Earn It ” officer, and the general tried to advance her even further.. maybe his reasons were more personal than DEI advancement, but it doesn’t really matter, because it’s still a fuck up on his part, a d would still have the same result..

          1. IMHO she JUST HAD to be more ate-up than a chocolate dildo in a crowded gay bar on Valentine’s Day to be that low on the pole, low enough that DEI couldn’t even budge her!

        2. Reminds me of the old joke, “What do you call the guy who graduated last from medical school?”

          Doctor.

    5. ” she is a bad leader with toxic, non-productive leadership traits”

      And yet she was promoted four times.

    6. It is sad to see a guy who did a lot of good step on his record with a shoe covered in dog feces.

      There’s an old East Texas parable that speaks to that I may have to share it sometime.

      1. I’m not so sure it was his record he stepped on. It would appear the good general hath trod upon his foreskin.

    7. He let it go way too far and she manipulated the shit out of him. It is very sad and he should have stopped it. But, he didn’t, and here we are. Another example of her selfish toxicity.

      1. I hope he tapped it. He’s being punished for it, it’d be a shame if he hadn’t reaped all the benefits first. No, I’m not condoning his (or her) behavior.

  4. “He was one of the Army’s 12 four-star generals.”
    Really? Twelve 4 stars? Those that might have more information please tell me, is that too many? Sounds like a lot. Too many a lot.

    1. How many tribes were there in Israel? It might help to see an organizational chart to understand what these folks are responsible for and how they interrelate, if they do interrelate.

      Yep, sounds like a lot.

  6. Good. The Sec Army got this right. The new (well relatively new) BCAP process is doing pretty well and this idiot sticking his oar in is exactly what command selection does not need.

    I had the opportunity to observe it at close hand for one whole round and I became a believer. It is working. If they assessed her as not ready, they were correct.

    The senior leaders serving as panel members joked they wouldn’t, themselves, have made it through the scrutiny. Anything which creates distrust in the process (such as, you know, attempts by a four-star to undermine it) should be ruthlessly hammered.

    This one well-deserved sacking will do more to preserve the process than any other message could have. Well done, Army.

    Shame on the general for trying to make it about race, instead of owning up to his own failure to abide by the spirit of the process. May he go down in ignominy and his carcass be displayed as a warning to all other GOs who may be tempted to interfere.

    2. Odd how this black man, who made it to four stars via the process, now complains that the process is biased.

      1. He’s suffering from the same oppression as Oprah and Michelle. I gotta get me some of that oppression. My white privilege card no longer works.

      2. Maybe he thought him having to work hard to get where he was, set a bad precedent and it needed to be easier.
        Either that or someone, possibly the LTC, had been letting him know how it should be easier and he felt he needed to agree…to get what “he wanted”!

  7. If it was actually about race and not about promoting a fuck buddy (no definitive evidence means they were seen going into a room together but there were no cameras catching them in the act) the good general would have tasked the IG’s office to oversee the process and outline parameters for the data to be collected so there would be something to prove his concern about race either way…

    Instead once he was relieved it was suddenly a discrimination concern that he’d had….

    Fortunately no one seems to be falling for the bullshit this time.

    1. Being that she was in the bottom 1% of 800 candidates, she must have a significant redeeming quality aside from skin color for the good General. (Just going from how Petreaus approached a similar situation, you understand… )

  8. Another article mentioned that of 800 candidate officers, she was ranked in the lowest 1%. So at minimum 792 better candidates.

  9. If you read the attached IG report to the S&S article, you’ll find that this whole thing started when the good GEN awarded the unnamed LTC an IMPACT LEGION OF MERIT (for a one-month period) back in 2023 when she was yet a Major.

    1. I’m wondering just how many times in the history of the US Army that an impact LoM was awarded to anyone. That should’ve been a yuge red flag.

      1. How about never (as far as I know). Highest ever impact award I ever saw was an MSM. The LoM was my retirement award after 23 some years of service and that was a high bar to get over.

        2. Retirement and PCS award for O-6s and E-9 (CMD) types. Definitely not awarded to O-4s, it is a Legion and they protect their own. Never heard of an impact award above ARCOM…until now!

    3. That’s crazy. I’d love to see the “achievements” on that DA638.

      On a good note, though, he himself got an impact firing….

      2. The IG report says there was no citation write-up, he just gave her the Impact LoM because she was a part of the planning group for his Change of Command when he took over AMC.

    2. The general could push his luck and stay in, hoping that his name doesn’t end up in front of the warrior board for review.

      1. In theory.

        More about the play.

        Does that shit still roll in the Army? It was overlooked for years.

  12. Paging Pete Hegseth. Bring your broom, mop and other cleaning supplies. The last tenants were pigs.

    1. And complete incompetent idiots. They left tons of our gear (and possibly Americans) behind in Afghanistan. Even more than was left when we got the hell out of Dodge with Vietnam.

      1. And the Vietnam run-away was duenronthe dems as well, refusing to fund further operations.. it’s almost like there’s a pattern

        1. Ooof! So, the left can meme, but in the sense of giving their opposition material to work with. I will laugh my ass off when this still is used in response to lefties doubling or tripling down on da stoopid.

      3. The only time we took our toys and brought them home was cleaning out Udorn. Every jet was taken back and buildings cleaned out. Air America left some T-29’s, most of those were worthless anyhow. I heard stories of American POW’s in Laos and Vietnam. ????

  13. Goes 5 and 0 and you jump in there for…?

    Look, not everyone is leadership material. Some people are of good moral character, smart, caring, motivated, but still lack the personal skill set to accomplish Flag Officer shit.

    It happens.

    And now you’ve further sullied your reputation and cast a shitty light on the Army.
    Good job, dickface.
    Good job.

  14. I knew from the photo without having to read this that he was meddling to get another diversity hire promoted.

  15. Army times says “it was his previous subordinate and was a lieutenant colonel and was his military assistant and assistant executive officer. “

    “Google SAYS……” (imma go Ole Skool!!!)

    “ It’s your chance to steal!!!!”

  16. Same Good ol’ boy/girl system that’s been happening forever. Now just happens to be on the darker green side in this instance. It ain’t right no matter what skin tone is doin it!

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