US air force cancels promotions over grading error in security test

‘Highly unprecedented anomaly’ meant 135 people given incorrect scores and wrongly informed of promotions

The air force has canceled the promotions of dozens of service members after discovering what it said was a grading error in a test of their security knowledge.

The “isolated and highly unprecedented anomaly” was announced in a press release on Tuesday, which said 135 airmen and women had been awarded incorrect scores on the security forces specialty knowledge test (SKT) and been wrongly informed they had earned promotion.

Senior officers blamed the error on an “outdated scoring key”, and said the group that was subsequently told they had not made the cut would be replaced by 135 others after the service completed a rescore of all 2,285 candidates who sat the exam.

The quota of 586 available promotions to technical sergeant for eligible security forces airmen remained unchanged, the press release said.

“We owe it to those affected to address it immediately,” David Wolfe, chief master sergeant of the air force, said in a statement. “This is going to be hard for everyone impacted.”

The episode comes amid scrutiny of Pete Hegseth’s meddling in the elevation of officers in the air force and other services. Most recently the defense secretary removed nine candidates , notably women and Black officers, from a navy promotion list.

In March, he reportedly intervened to block two women and two Black men from becoming one-star army generals.

Hegseth has railed against diversity and so-called “woke” in the armed services, but the defense department has repeatedly asserted that all promotions are based on merit.

“The [defense] department will never consider the color of a service member’s skin or their gender as a factor in promotions,” Sean Parnell, the chief Pentagon spokesperson, said in a statement last month.

The mistake on the grading key, according to the air force, was “the result of human error”, and no artificial intelligence products were used in what it called an erroneous promotion cycle process.

Wolfe said the air force had taken steps to avoid the situation happening again, including him hosting a call of wing command chiefs to discuss the failure.

“We owe it to our airmen to own the mistake and to take the necessary actions to not only make it right today, but to prevent future issues,” he said.

The air education and training command and air force personnel center have “strengthened their internal processes”, the press release said, without giving details.

Those affected, Wolfe said, had already been informed about the change in their status, and had access to a hotline to air force leadership to answer questions about why they were incorrectly selected for promotion.