Well the personnel problems with the military go far beyond the timing of benefits alone, unfortunately.
As it stands the military actually has great difficulty retaining people past 10 years. Many military communities are chronically undermanned at the senior enlisted and officer leadership levels.
So while it's fair to say that the military has held onto lower-skilled workers, it's not exactly the case that it's leading to a glut of excess deadweight just hanging on. Rather, we use the "idiots" to fill the desks that would simply be left empty were it not for these guys biding their time to 20 years.
Whether that's a net positive or not depends on the given billet being filled, but we'd have to do away with billet-based manpower and fine-tuned "year group" tracking entirely in order to truly see benefit from dropping deadweight in the 10-18 YOS ranks. But the way it stands now, many billets require a certain rank or grade to fill them, no matter what the skill level might be of excess junior (or senior) personnel.
I know several people who left the U.S. Navy after 6-8 years rather than taking unpalatable billets (one was a master-at-arms (IIRC), serving on several of the hospital ships who was given the choice of leaving or moving to Diego Garcia; several others were Sea-Bees) or who took the latter of the up-or-out option after being unable to advance under new requirements.
It always seemed like the Navy was doing its best to get rid of skilled workers.
As it stands the military actually has great difficulty retaining people past 10 years. Many military communities are chronically undermanned at the senior enlisted and officer leadership levels.
So while it's fair to say that the military has held onto lower-skilled workers, it's not exactly the case that it's leading to a glut of excess deadweight just hanging on. Rather, we use the "idiots" to fill the desks that would simply be left empty were it not for these guys biding their time to 20 years.
Whether that's a net positive or not depends on the given billet being filled, but we'd have to do away with billet-based manpower and fine-tuned "year group" tracking entirely in order to truly see benefit from dropping deadweight in the 10-18 YOS ranks. But the way it stands now, many billets require a certain rank or grade to fill them, no matter what the skill level might be of excess junior (or senior) personnel.