What you said reminds me of a passage in Ender's Shadow where Graff and Anderson were reading one of Bean's essays and how the Battle School promotes good-looking mediocrities.
As our Best Stalin had pointed out, what good are those decorations if you can't tell who's competent and who's deadwood? Especially when the wars that have been fought for the past twenty years willfully and constantly ignore Sun Tzu's basic precepts. Even without woke stupidity, the officers that made it up the chain were people that looked good in uniform, but never actually had to produce results. Take that infamous jumping jacks video. Everyone laughs at how they can't do them, but listen to the trainers speaking in English. How many US training officers know basic Pashto, Dari, or Farsi? That's partially a teaching failure too. But it doesn't matter for the careerist, it looks good on a resume.
It's not even an officer problem either, but a problem that infects the Center Left as a whole. They want Obama as a leader, even though the results he actually produced were garbage. Their problem now is they've chased out anyone who could have been competent like Surf Mommy* or Bloomberg.
*Actually, I think Tulsi is the kind of mediocrity I'm criticizing. It's just that the wokeness of her party made it so she couldn't say and think the right things.