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Grade the evaluators

Promotion boards are administrative battlefields where Marines are pitted against each other.

Hopefully you come armed with awards and citations, clean records, solid fitness scores and a picture worthy of a recruiting poster. You wear your performance evaluations like body armor, confident that stellar fitreps can keep you alive.

But if your commander has let you down by not filing your fitrep on time — a shockingly common scenario — you enter the fray without a vest, weak and vulnerable.

Last fall, the Corps’ sergeants major asked commanders to tighten up on the fitrep front, after 95,000 evals came in at least a month late, about half of all fitreps filed that fiscal year. Of those, a whopping 18,000 were late by four months or more.

How did commanders respond? Business as usual.

This year, nearly one-in-10 staff sergeants getting a look by the gunnery sergeant selection board later this month are missing their most recent fitrep. Many more have gaps in their records. The numbers for other ranks are still being tallied, but manpower officials predict they’ll fare no better.

Unfortunately, the Corps lays the responsibility to remedy these problems on the individual Marine, who has few options for prying a fitrep out of a lazy commander. Operating in a consequence-free environment, responsibility-shirking commanders get away with systematically failing to look out for the interests of their Marines.

Now, as the Corps switches from expansion mode into a steady state at 202,000 Marines, promotion boards will get more selective and competitive. The Corps must crack down on commanders who do not file fitreps on time. The way to do that: Score them on their own fitreps about how well they do in filing fitreps for their Marines.