That's what we called officers who went to the service academy. They often wear a academy ring, like lots of people buy high school rings. They figuratively, and sometimes literally, knock their rings together shaking each other's hands and showing it off.

Imagine if all along your career, there was a network of people that you know very well that you spent four years in an environment designed to build camaraderie. They look out for each other and hook each other up.

What's worse, is that academy officers, who almost exclusively went to the academy directly after high school, have virtually zero real world experience. They come out, newly commissioned junior officers, and their summer "internships" out of the field are not enough. They tend to have big egos (a product of the service academy's indoctrination) combined with a level of ignorance that makes them the worse kind of officers, at least at the lower ranks.

This is not to sat all academy officers are bad, but given the choice, you want someone who was enlisted first, or at a minimum, worked in the real world, went to a normal college, and the went to officer candidate school.