This is hugely significant. Senior NCOs and officers in high value career fields are often offered retention bonuses up to the five figure range. I'm thinking about the full bird colonel who has one of the senior positions at the US Space Command. She's a transgender woman who transitioned while in the Air Force, and she's already served for over 20 years. Over the course of those two decades, she has very likely been offered retention bonuses at least twice, probably more often than that.

So if she decides not to resign hoping that she can be assessed as one of those "machines" who gets to stay in, she could face crippling debt if she were discharged without resigning first.