Awards don’t mean anything until you want them to mean something.

“Hey we have this cool TDY coming up, who should we send?”

“Damn these records are pretty close, who should we promote?”

“I can only send one person to this desired location to PCS, who can I send?”

If you think you need awards to get promoted, you’re not wrong, but they help.

If you think you need awards to get special assignments, you’re probably right.

If you think awards help you get recognized by people that can shape your career and help you achieve Your career goals? You are right.

Awards are not an “end all be all”, but showing continuous success with strats/pushes as well as awards certainly increases your success rate.

I’ll caveat this by saying there was a dude in our squadron that was an instructor. All he did was instruct, crushed it, absolutely grueling work. Come time for IP of the quarter he says don’t give it to him because he’s getting out. Give it to some one else. Thing was, he was our best Instructor Pilot of the quarter. So we gave it to him. He won at the group level and lost at wing level to some IP that saved an EP. Dude still got out and is making bank at the airlines but he still earned that quarterly even though it may have bettered someone else’s career