It's interesting you mention the solider aspect because the US Marine Corps went through a similar evaluation. For a long time, being a drill instructor (the g

It's interesting you mention the solider aspect because the US Marine Corps went through a similar evaluation. For a long time, being a drill instructor (the guy yelling at you in boot camp) was considered a low status position and therefore a career dead end. This in turn led to the DI spots being filled primarily by people who were in trouble, didn't care or were "bad apples". At some point, the questions were raised: "Wait, why are we putting some of our worst Marines to train new Marines? Wouldn't it it make more sense to have our BEST Marines train the next generation?". The follow up was then: so how do we actually make that happen? The answer was to make being a DI one of the stepping stones to higher level ranks. This dramatically increased the quality of DIs and in turn, raised the quality of the training and finally the Marines. There is a similar story in some countries with socialized medicine. E.g. to get a license to practice medicine privately, you first have to spend N years working in a public hospital. This ensures that you can get top quality people working even in a public healthcare based system.