Interwar Years
During the 1920s and 30s, the Regular Army was badly under-funded and ranked 16th in the world. Promotions within the Regular Army were also very slow and it was not uncommon for officers to spend ten to fifteen years in the junior grades and enlisted personnel to never rise above the rank of private. Dwight Eisenhower, for instance, spent sixteen years as a major before being promoted to lieutenant colonel in 1936.
Read more about this topic: Regular Army (United States)
Famous quotes containing the word years:
“Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)