They need to get int positions of leadership first. In a typical corpo office, those people are not rewarded, they are pushed out.
That set the tone for the rest of the war. Bad leaders were routinely demoted or retired by a formal process for identifying losers. Not for policy reasons. For not being good at combat leadership. For most of the 1950s, at least, the US military continued that tradition. Much of the staff of Apollo came from that environment.
[1] https://www.defensemedianetwork.com/stories/gen-george-c-mar...