Modern four-star officer appointments are governed by the unified officer promotion framework established by the Defense Officer Personnel Management Act (DOPMA) of 1980, as amended.

In 2017, Congress began separating military space activities into a standalone service, culminating in the Space Force Act of 2019 that redesignated Air Force Space Command as the United States Space Force, the first new military service since the Air Force was spun off from the Army in 1947.Act of December 20, 2019 [United States Space Force Act] ().

History

Appointment

Four-star appointments

Starting in 1981, four-star officers were appointed under the unified officer promotion framework established by the Defense Officer Personnel Management Act (DOPMA) of 1980. An officer could be promoted to a maximum active-duty grade of major general or rear admiral, a rank-in-person that was carried to any assignment. Three- and four-star grades were rank-in-position that could only be held on active duty while serving in positions designated to carry those grades.

All four-star appointments required nomination by the president and confirmation by the Senate. In July 2019, a month after being confirmed by the Senate to be the next chief of naval operations (CNO) but before taking office, Admiral William F. Moran declined the appointment and retired upon being investigated for using his personal email to conduct official business with a former staff member who had been fired by the incumbent CNO for inappropriate personal conduct.

Appointments Clause

Under DOPMA, officers advanced through grades in order up to major general or rear admiral, with each promotion requiring a certain amount of time in grade. On rare occasions, the president would bypass the rigid DOPMA rules by nominating an officer for direct appointment to a grade under an alternate authority, the plenary presidential appointment power granted by the Appointments Clause of the Constitution (Article II, Section 2, Clause 2).

In 2025, a retired Air National Guard lieutenant general, John D. Caine, was nominated to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a position required by law to be filled by a regular officer of the armed services, not a reserve officer like Caine.The law allowed the president to waive other statutory restrictions, including the requirement that the chairman have served as a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or combatant commander, but not the regular officer rule. Acts of August 10, 1949 [National Security Act Amendments of 1949] (), and October 1, 1986 [Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986] (). To make him eligible for the job, he was nominated under the Appointments Clause to be appointed to the Regular Air Force in the grade of major general, its highest permanent active-duty grade, which the Senate voted to confirm immediately before confirming his nomination to be chairman.Nominations of John D. Caine to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff () and major general in the Regular Air Force (), March 10, 2025. A similar mechanism had been used since 1977 to appoint civilians as three-star surgeon general of the United States (and, later, four-star assistant secretary for health), a position originally reserved for career commissioned officers of the Public Health Service, by simultaneously appointing them to the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps in its highest permanent active-duty grade of medical director, a practice sometimes derided as creating "instant admirals".

Delayed nominations Delays in submitting a nomination could leave a four-star position vacant for months.

After the commanding general of Army Futures Command (AFC) retired in December 2021, the position was left vacant for almost a year because the president did not nominate a successor until September 2022. The secretary of defense, Army secretary, and Army chief of staff all recommended that the president nominate Lieutenant General Walter E. Piatt, but members of Congress blamed Piatt for delaying the military response to the attack on the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, so the White House blocked his nomination until the Pentagon gave up and picked a different AFC commander. Lieutenant General Charles A. Flynn also attracted blame for the slow response, but was allowed to assume his four-star command of U.S. Army Pacific (USARPAC) in June 2021 because he had already been confirmed for that position in December 2020.

The top two positions in the National Guard fell vacant simultaneously in 2024, when the White House did not submit nominations for the new chief of the National Guard Bureau (CNGB) and vice chief of the National Guard Bureau (VCNGB) in time for the Senate to confirm them before their predecessors retired. All four leaders of the National Guard had long been scheduled to retire that summer, including the four-star CNGB, the three-star directors of the Army and Air National Guards, and the three-star VCNGB, whose successor was slated to be the first four-star VCNGB. Air National Guard lieutenant general Steven S. Nordhaus was finally nominated to be CNGB in August, shortly before the Senate left on a six-week recess, and the newly appointed Army National Guard director had to act as CNGB until Nordhaus could be confirmed in September. The VCNGB nominee, reported to be Army National Guard major general Joseph F. Jarrard, remained stalled in the White House even though the position had been vacant since May.

Grade caps The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010 (2010 NDAA) set numerical caps on the number of four-star officers, with dedicated allocations for each service—7 Army generals, 6 Navy admirals, 9 Air Force generals, 2 Marine Corps generals—and a separate pool of 20 joint-duty four-star officers.Act of October 28, 2009 [National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010] ().Harrington et al. (2018), pp. 13–17. When the Army asked to restore a fourth star to its component commander in Europe and Africa in 2020, Congress raised the Army allocation to 8 but lowered the joint-duty allocation to 19, keeping the total number of four-star authorizations constant.Act of January 1, 2021 [William M. (Mac) Thornberry National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021] (). The 2023 NDAA allocated 2 generals to the Space Force, corresponding to the chief and vice chief of space operations.Act of December 23, 2022 [James M. Inhofe National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023] ().

Effective December 31, 2022, the 2017 NDAA cut the total number of general and flag officers in joint-duty positions that were exempted from grade caps by 25 percent, but deleted the grade distribution restrictions for those positions, which previously had been limited to 19 joint-duty four-star officers.Act of December 23, 2016 [National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017] (). Harrington et al. (2018), pp. 17–20. The 2025 NDAA authorized the secretary of defense to exempt an additional pool of up to 35 general or flag officer positions designated as the Secretary of Defense Adaptive Force Account.Act of December 23, 2024 [Servicemember Quality of Life Improvement and National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023] ().

Senate holds A Senate hold on a nomination was a communication by a senator of an objection to approving the nomination by unanimous consent. Of the thousands of nominations submitted to the Senate each year, the majority were military promotions and appointments that were typically approved in large groups by unanimous consent, since considering them separately would take too much time. Although the full Senate could always override any individual hold by majority vote, the majority leader typically would try to resolve the senator's concerns before invoking the lengthy cloture process.

Sometimes a senator placed a hold on a nomination to escalate a dispute with the executive branch that had little to do with the specific nominee. In 1994, Senator David Durenberger placed a hold on the nomination of vice chief of naval operations Stanley R. Arthur to be commander in chief of U.S. Pacific Command, to pressure the Navy about a constituent's claim of being dropped from naval flight training after reporting sexual harassment by her instructor, and was surprised when the Navy withdrew Arthur's nomination rather than risk another controversial confirmation battle in the wake of the 1991 Tailhook sexual assault scandal. In 1997, three senators from Utah and Oklahoma placed holds on the nomination of Lieutenant General George T. Babbitt Jr. to be four-star commander of Air Force Materiel Command, in order to protest administration plans to privatize maintenance jobs instead of transferring them to Air Force logistics centers in their states.

In May 2020, Senator Dan Sullivan placed a hold for three weeks on the nomination of General Charles Q. Brown Jr. to be chief of staff of the Air Force, to pressure the Air Force to base the KC-46 tanker in his state. Two months later, Senator Tammy Duckworth blocked 1,123 Army promotions for two weeks, including the four-star chief of the National Guard Bureau, until she received written confirmation that the Department of Defense had not blocked the promotion of Army lieutenant colonel Alexander Vindman after he testified against the president during an impeachment inquiry.

In November 2024, Senator Markwayne Mullin placed a hold on the nomination of Lieutenant General Christopher T. Donahue to be four-star commanding general of Army forces in Europe and Africa. As a two-star general, Donahue had led the final evacuation of U.S. forces from Afghanistan in 2021, an operation whose messy outcome had been a campaign issue in the 2024 presidential election. Donahue was confirmed in early December, after Mullin dropped his hold.

Tuberville holds

In February 2023, Senator Tommy Tuberville placed a blanket hold on all civilian and military nominations in the Defense Department to pressure the secretary of defense to retract a December 2022 policy allowing servicemembers to travel to get legal abortions after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022.

For most four-star officers, the delay in confirming their successors merely extended their tenure in office, but members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had statutory four-year terms that could not be extended, so when their terms expired the service vice chiefs held double duty as acting chiefs. The four-year term of the Marine Corps commandant expired on July 11, the Army chief of staff on August 3, and the chief of naval operations on August 11, and the term of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was scheduled to expire on October 1. On September 20, the Senate held individual votes to confirm the Air Force chief of staff as the next chairman, the Army vice chief of staff as chief of staff, and Marine Corps assistant commandant Eric M. Smith as commandant—leaving their former jobs vacant, since their successors had not been confirmed. Smith suffered a heart attack on October 29, and on November 2, the Senate confirmed a new assistant commandant to serve as acting commandant while Smith was hospitalized, as well as the nominees for Air Force chief of staff, and chief of naval operations.

On December 5, 2023, Tuberville finally released his hold on all but the remaining four-star nominees, 11 of whom were confirmed separately by the Senate on December 19. The 11 four-star nominees confirmed on December 19, 2023, were: Lieutenant General James J. Mingus to be Army vice chief of staff; Lieutenant Generals James C. Slife, Gregory M. Guillot, Timothy D. Haugh, Kevin B. Schneider, and Kenneth S. Wilsbach to be Air Force vice chief of staff and command U.S. Northern Command, U.S. Cyber Command, Pacific Air Forces, and Air Combat Command;