In the military, if you don’t make promotion lists at certain junctures in your career, you’re done. Whether or not you make said list depends on your boss’s completely subjective assessment of your performance. My boss was a toxic diversity hire and I knew from the day he took command that it was going to be a rough time for the unit so getting a pair of negative evals from him was kind of like having Paul Ryan tell you that you’re a failure.
I thought I’d be more angry or sad or something but truth be told I’m mostly just relieved. I didn’t want to fight for this new president or this congress and I don’t want to watch the organization I’ve devoted tens of thousands of hours of my life to slowly fall apart over the next decade and now I won’t have to.
So I guess I’ll just take my four deployments worth of combat experience, go back home, play with my kids and wait... for something.
I heard an explanation for this.
At each juncture when you're up for promotion in the military, you're competing with 100 people, all of whom have a perfect service record with the highest performance grades.
If you have a single boss who doesn't like you, tough luck, your military career is over.
Thus, the only people who make it to senior leadership are people who managed to win a 20 year single-elimination ass-kissing contest. They managed to make it 20 years, without ever pissing off a boss for any reason. You can see that type of person might not exactly be the best leader, but that's what the system produces.
That’s accurate and succinctly put. My CO and 1SG were both relieved when I was a PL over total bullshit. They were both real warriors but no one that mattered had their back. After that, I knew it was largely out of my hands.