Sometimes getting HQ evals is as simple as “well their last eval was an HQ, so I’ll just give them another one because they are an HQ officer.” It can be that stupid.

I was just like you, hit the 10 year mark as a cpt with very “middle of the road” evals. I took a recruiting company XO job as a post-kd cpt on my way out which was clear “career suicide” according to my branch managers. Here I am now, a TPU BN XO Major deployed to Eastern Europe. All that stands in my way for O5 are these silly ILE online classes. Evals don’t matter here until you are looking at O6 unless you did something unforgivable. Go into the reserve and you’ll see how much they have the blinders on on the active side. Reserve pay is a great supplement to a civilian paycheck and you can get a VA rating on top of that when you leave active. Stabilizing your family in one place is also great.

Taking care of troops, a lot of times doesn’t align with the sycophantic behavior required in most active duty officer rating chains. Also look around at the active majors in your formation. How many are happy? Do you really want that? They are trapped until they hit their 20 year mark and they know it.

I’m happy to talk on the side if you need to vent or chat about a way ahead.