I’m not sure where you’re getting that from. In general, USNA and NROTC exist to create URL officers. Why do they exist to create IRL officers? That I don’t know. It’s a subject of much discussion. Doesn’t mean they’re necessarily better at it (there are a lot of statistics out there about retention differences, but it’s questionable how useful retention is as a metric for performance given the extent to which populations may be self-selecting and there have been huge variations in how USNA/NROTC/OCS are structured to provide manpower across the decades—NROTC used to be much more focused on creating reserve officers, rather than regular Navy, for instance).
Anyway, part of my job at USNA involved *trying* to read the tea leaves if there were major performance differences between USNA/NROTC/OCS, but the only thing I can say definitively is if there are differences, they’re not huge, and to the extent data is necessary to really distinguish, it doesn’t really exist in quantity with sufficient fidelity to really tell.
All that to say, don’t mistake the reality that USNA and NROTC are designed to commission URL to max extent, and OCS is intended to plug gaps (among other things) for an indictment of OCS as a commissioning source. It’s just a reality that if the Navy pays for four years of college up front, you can expect it’s going to be very insistent that those people go where it wants them to go. For whatever reason, for USNA and NROTC, that’s URL. If, after USNA and NROTC have accounted for each graduate, there is still room left for OCS to get a few quotas too, great. If not… what do you expect to happen?
To be clear, I personally think the Navy *should* open up more RL slots to USNA and NROTC. I am *not* personally convinced there needs to be that URL-centric focus. In fact, as a former SWO myself, I think the SWO community in particular would benefit if fewer people were forced to be SWOs because they aren’t qualified to fly and/or don’t have the grades to do subs. The fewer people who end up in jobs they don’t want the better for all. To achieve that, I think it makes sense to let USNA and NROTC have RL quotas even for those PQ for URL. And then OCS can plug the gaps as needed with genuine volunteers. And that would hardly be unprecedented in the broader military. USMA and ROTC, for example, don’t just force everyone to go combat arms. Hell, even the USMC grads from USNA and NROTC have the chance to compete for things like intel and logistics related fields as part of the ordinary mix coming out of TBS. So I really don’t see why Navy grads coming out of USNA and NROTC must be pigeonholed to URL.
But that’s just my opinion.