I guess I may as well add generals don't get there by being hired anyway. They're promoted from within. To get into the military officer corps in the first plac

I guess I may as well add generals don't get there by being hired anyway. They're promoted from within. To get into the military officer corps in the first place, they absolutely do have to apply, many times, first to the academy, ROTC, or OTC, where they spend years being rigorously trained, tested, and evaluated before ranking the career field they want to be in, which they will only get based on where they rank compared to all other cadets in the same cohort year. An equivalent private sector practice would be not hiring leaders at all and only appointing them via internal promotion, but to get into the organization at all, you need to apply to a training academy first, then spend several years in that academy learning the organizational doctrine and culture and being evaluated and stack ranked before you're ever given a real job. Typically, the bottom 40% of so of cadets don't even get in at all and have to become reservists.