this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2024
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A Boring Dystopia
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Not everyone can be an officer. They're basically upper management in the military; there's way more enlisted than officers, and the officers are held to such high standards, it's hard to qualify to become one.
Source: I spent 20 years as an enlisted guy in the US Air Force. Considered going officer, but there was way too much politics and regulation involved. Screw that. Just let me do my job and go home at the end of the day.
I worked as an IT guy in the Air Force. I was always far removed from battles, and I joined right before the 2003 Iraq War kicked off. Serving in the military isn't bad, as long as you pick the right career field. Army and Marines abuse the hell out of their people. They treat them like govt property and they always get the worst of everything. The Navy and Air Force actually take care of their guys, though.
As an ex-USN carrier type, there’s a common phrase used in the fleet: choose your rate (MOS), choose your fate.
My carrier, the Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72), was (and probably still is) among the shittiest commands a sailor could be assigned to, and during the five years I spent aboard it as an E-5, I saw just about the very worst it had to offer. Deck Department got brutalized, and so did the nukes in the Reactor Department and the snipes in Engineering. The AZ’s (Aviation Administration) had it fairly good, all things considered.
The ship was bad enough that I EAOS’d from the fleet off of it, and never looked back.
The fleet can very easily be just as horrifying as the Army and the USMC, just in different ways. Luck is not always the lady.
Time's are tough all over, I joined the Air Force and one time the made me stay in a 2 star hotel, and when I deployed there was only one ice cream shop.
😂
Jesus fuck man, a 2-star?! Even we got better digs than that! Which CMSgt did you piss off, your CCM? Yeah, that’d do it, lol Oddly, your dining facilities on Keesler had better chow than Andrews! Good ole AF! Real bummer about the ice cream shop, though. Our carrier had an actual Starbucks on board.
In the UK, the colloquially named Chair Force had some NCO's go through who stuck out their term in a field that had lots of factors that transferred across to civilian employment. Top of the tree was air traffic controllers - certain branches of the RAF's ATC capability was based at Swanwick anyway so if they ever went to the National Air Traffic Service, a lot of the time they could pick up their stuff from their desk on their last Friday, and move it across the room to another desk for when they came back in new clothes on Monday morning.
Vets are another field that is great to get into if you want your fees paid for, but most of those are officer grades, same deal as pilots. The clerks are generally well trained too - those who used to "fly a desk" as they put it, went on to be good accountants and heath and safety ninjas.
Certainly for the UK, the military gave the option to poorer backgrounds to get expensive qualifications while not generally going near theatres or on deployments.
Spent 14 years in the Navy, and they don’t care much for their people either, just in a different way from the Army and the Marines. Imagine the Air Force but like 1/3rd as much money to spend on its people because they spent the rest on ships.
I once saw a junior officer get chewed out by a superior for using the word "ain't". I knew then that I could never measure up to those kinds of standards, and would go crazy if I tried.
You can't go to officer schools out of high school if you have good grades/pass an entrance exam? Mad.
You typically need a bachelor's degree to go to officer school.
That's what ROTC pretty much does. You need to have relevant education in something the military wants, then they pay for your education, and do some prep work for you to do well in officer candidate school.
That’s what my brother did. He done ROTC and then joined the marines. He spent a decade as an aviation technician and never left the states. This was at the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He was buff as hell when he left the military. He moved back in with my dad and step mom when he left and sat on the money he had piled up in the bank for years playing World of Warcraft and getting fat.
I envied him so much during that time (the part where he played WoW and got fat for years), but I wouldn’t have joined the military for any reason. That kind of thing just isn’t for me. I absolutely love reading about Napoleon and his soldiers trekking around Europe and fighting. I love reading about WWII and all of the combat stories I can gobble up, but there’s no way in hell I’d give any of my body for the ambitions of men who view their fellow man as figures on a board game.
Like, hoorah to the people who don’t mind. I just want to live in a world where we don’t need shit like that anymore.