What are the best tools to help manage your military assignments and career?

Now, add in the hundreds of phone calls and emails each manager gets every day you begin to see the picture.  You also need to take into account they are also Soldiers that have training and other distractions from their day-to-day duties.  Not trying to make excuses, just try and be aware of the challenges they face.  So.....I highly recommend you outline your goals in an email to your assignment manager and give them a selection of places you would like to be assigned.  You must be realistic though in those locations.     

Personally, I ran into a similar issue with my last PCS. I had reenlisted for a SOF bonus that required me to remain in my SOF assignment for two more years. My branch manager cut orders for my replacement after my reenlistment date and cut my reassignment orders out of SOF the following month. When I attempted to rectify the situation on my own, my branch manager basically told me "tough, there's nothing that can be done now." Despite the fact that both my replacement's and my transition dates were still months out. Both my unit CSM and my shop COL attempted to reach out to branch and other contacts they had to prevent losing me and having to train a brand new guy with less qualifications than I had, but to no avail. Even though it does me no good now, my CSM was able to bring up my situation with the SOCOM Senior Enlisted Leader and they are working out a plan with HRC where they will be able to provide an OML of personnel to rank personnel according to who is most to least essential. They're hoping to basically be able to let HRC know who they can reassign and who they can't touch in order to keep quality people, while still allowing HRC to fulfill their mission of rotating personnel in and out. This used to be accomplished with personnel receiving an "S" identifier to let HRC know who was valuable to the SOF community to facilitate future assignments within SOF, but in recent years it hasn't seemed to be as much of a factor when HRC considers personnel for assignments and there's even talk of the "S" identifier being done away with completely.

I would say that the general consensus within the conventional Army has always seemed to be that anyone is replaceable and the unit will continue to execute whether you're here or not. I'm not sure if this will ever change within the larger force, but I definitely see the validity of operating in this manner when it comes to SOF and their specific missions.