Stories about re-enlistment/retention usually assume that anyone in the military intends or is open to a career in the military and that current policies or conditions drive people out of the services. But the reality is that most people who serve never intend to make the military a career. This is true not only in our time when facing perhaps multiple 15 month tours in combat, but also in peacetime. In peacetime your job is a lot of garrison bull#### and training for combat that you'll never see. After a while its just boring and once you have accomplished your individual goals it's time to move on. Whether people stay in or get out has become a political issue, but what is ignored are the variety of individual motivations. If someone joined the military for a defined period of time and then intended to get out then it doesn't make sense to portray them as a potential career officer or NCO who was lost due to current curcumstances. There is a kind of Catch-22 in all of this: in wartime people don't want to stay in because there are too many deployments, but in peacetime people don't want to stay in because there are no real world deployments and it's just a lot of bs.