Traveller RPG Character Creation help
Were these characters all done up using the RPOL die roller? Given the random nature of chargen you can have characters all over the place and that means you can't really be sure if they're 'legit' unless you can audit the rolls.
Now, my first thought is that if they're all ex-General and ex-Admiral, it sounds as though you have the perfect setup for a themed game, one that probably trends more toward celebrity tour/on a lark for these newly-retired senior figures, or at the very least 'strategists on call' for governments having a crisis, rather than the typical tramp freighter gig, so I might just be inclined to run with it myself...
My guess is that you're dealing with the Mongoose version?
Anagathics generally present the problem of being illegal (in most places) and extremely expensive. That's usually enough of a limit in its own right, especially since those factors tend to create serious complications during actual play. (Those aging ex-military types might well be off on that farewell tour because they know that age really is about to catch up with the lot of them, putting a bit of an urgent shadow over everything that they do...)
I wouldn't force chargen to end with a survival failure. A character already loses a lot when it happens, and that idea could easily result in characters who are first-term washouts, who will end up being nigh useless.
Term limits are a common gimmick, although they have a few problems: you can't really do an older, more experienced character (they all end up youngish), someone with bad survival results (or bad events) might want to go extra terms to try to compensate for it (the randomness problem re skill sets), and it can happen that someone's supposedly final term gives them the 'you must continue for another term' event (I've actually had this happen on what I expected would be a final term!), or they end up in the prisoner career (which you can't leave until you're done), which short-circuits the limit for those characters.
You could avoid that last problem by declaring that no one goes more than one term over the limit, or just doesn't go over the limit at all (the advancement special doesn't trigger and/or your prison time is simply done), but it doesn't really solve the first two issues.
On the other hand, if your main concern is the 'too many skills' angle then a simpler option might be to cap the total number of skill ranks (and stat ups) that someone can get at character generation, at least prior to Connections and Package. 20 would be hit by term 4 at the earliest and is more likely around term 6-7, although unlucky types might take a lot longer; it gives a reasonable amount of room to develop. This doesn't affect the potential issue of high rolls vs low rolls for initial stats, of course, so you might want to accompany this by setting the initial stats at a specific total (48 gives some flexibility) pre-race modifiers.
I believe that there is also an unofficial point-buy method floating around on the Mongoose forums but I don't have any experience with it so I can't attest to how well or badly it works (or whether it has issues with corner cases). Unfortunately, the official one won't show up until next year at the earliest since that book has been getting pushed back repeatedly.