I was in the military when this happened. Around 2014-2015 or so. We liked to refer to it as 'the great purge' of enlisted folk. Essentially in the military you've to make rank by certain years otherwise you are discharged. Honorably of course. I was in the Air Force when this happened so can't speak to the other branches but essentially what they did was greatly reduced the amount of opening positions in the E5-E9 ranks, making it it much harder to test up for promotion. The military has always been up or out but the pension shuffling caused this to be tougher. When I first joined the military, you could hit the 20 year mark as an E-5 (though you were kind of laughed at or something). By the time I left, you had to have been at least E-7.
These rank rules are always subject to change based on manpower requirements.
Many folks who had between 12-19 years suddenly found themselves in stiff competition and many had to leave before hitting the 20 year mark. Your options were take a early-separation package with cash OR stay and do your best to test up...but if you failed to make rank you were just booted out. Without the money of course.
My wife's got a cousin, Coast Guard, whose career started with the Academy, and she's about to "retire" with 25 years in, in her early 40s. Not a bad deal, but she almost took the cash-out deal back in 2015 or whenever; it was very enticing, as I recall. But as an Academy grad and a lawyer she knew she'd have no problem problem working her way up through the ranks.
Right, because using our brains to survive and thrive has worked well so far and is why we’re in the Anthropocene not the Cheetahcene.
It took me a sec to grok what your point was, but I think it's this: A more evolutionarily or anthroplogically-accurate quote would be something like this:
"At least once every human should have to successfully hunt large dangerous herd creatures with 5-40 fellow humans (either via persistence running down of an individual or a surround technique), successfully protect the community food stash from predator megafauna, and/or make it through a winter surviving only on the stash of roots and nuts that would have been impossible for just a single individual to gather but rather demanded the cooperation and cleverness of a group band of humans who figured out how to get along together, to learn that security does not come merely from self-reliance or personal strength, etc."
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Regarding ER: CHS's book "Money and Work Unchained" is another (far, *far*) less literate I'm sure source of the perspective that humans want to work/be productive, disguised as an anti-UBI rant.
I was aiming at something like anthropological accuracy, but I was also grumbling from a feminist or post-feminist perspective. Except for the fact that my mother suffered from bi-polar disease, I was the epitome of sheltered white suburban girl nerd. However, perhaps due in part to the fact that my usually Blue/Orange mother was perfectly capable of reversion to "law of the jungle" under the influence of her disease, I have a tendency to form relationships with overtly Dominant men. So, for instance, in post-9/11 America I was in Islamic marriage contract with a man who did have to flee his own country due to war at age 16, and whose daughters were attacked in a public park along with a less Westernized friend who wore hijab. He taught me how to shoot a gun and drilled me for the procedure we would enact if we were attacked in public while out together (which he believed to be more likely because I was white and he was green/olive.) I have also been in extended relationships with African-American men who grew up in very rough neighborhoods and climbed their way up to Orange or Orange/Green, and a Greek man whose mother survived WW2 by hiding in a cave and eating dandelions, and poor white guys who worked their way up from dirty factory or rough farm to yachts or Wall Street.
It has also been my experience that most men carry extremely strong blinders to the functioning of other men. Dominance itself is perhaps a form of blindness. I am having difficulty explaining my perspective or how I believe my "map of the territory" varies from what I read into the Heinlein quote (I think I read Heinlein 40 years ago!), but it comes from a place a level beyond the truth inherent in the expression "A good Dom is hard to find." Likely because this expression speaks to identity rather than natural social energy flows/dynamics. In overly simplistic terms, it has been my experience that most men view other men as either betas or assholes (bad Doms), but this is not the perspective of an old thoughtful female who has been around the block a time or three. IMO, the Heinlein quote, beyond ignoring the likely to be carrying an infant on wide-hip members of human clan in his quote, was also IMO erring on the side of assuming most other men beta or "soft" in functioning. The tendency to believe this of other men also has the psychological effect of putting yourself in the COTUC (center of the universe chair) where all problems become your problems.
Your options were take a early-separation package with cash OR stay and do your best to test up...but if you failed to make rank you were just booted out. Without the money of course.