I've heard many times from many places "the military produces so many extraordinary leaders, I wonder how they do it". I don't know what your experience has been, but my experience in the Navy was that they "create" leaders the same way a blast furnace "creates" purified iron; by taking in vast quantities of low-quality ore and burning and discarding 95% of it. All of the programs I completed had attrition rates of 70-90%. I always got the impression military training programs knew how to select people who already had the skills required, and typically had no idea how to teach someone who didn't already know everything. But that's just my experience from the programs I completed. I certainly hope other people had different experiences.
You're not wrong. On the officer side, service academy seats and ROTC scholarships are competitive to get (like getting into any top-tier college), and then there's a decent amount of attrition along the path to commissioning, followed by more rounds of competitive selection and attrition for certain military communities (aviation, special operations, etc.), followed by the brutal up-or-out promotion and assignment system. So the people who are left standing after a while are usually fairly impressive.
