My experience in the military was different. My squadron had a policy that only 5% of each job type could take leave at any given time. There were about 45 people who had the same job as me. Do the math: at most we could only use about 16 of the 30 days paid leave. If you include the four month deployments every two years when nobody could take leave, that drops to an average of just 14 days.

Those 14 days are not the same as the civilian world: if your leave went over the weekend then that counted towards your leave time. At the end of the year we were getting effectively the same 2 weeks of vacation I get now my civilian job. Only now I can take the days off I want rather than scheduling a year in advance.

Good for morale? Not in my unit.