You know, I nearly joined the army national guard in my junior year of HS. I took the ASVAB and did really well on it and did all of the interviews, even got a written promise that I’d get the MOS I asked for.
Then my recruiter called me for an interview where he just flat out dropped the act and told me about all the worst parts of being in the army. I wanted to do small arms repair so I could get a foot in the door to get into military R&D, he told me it’d take a career of 30+ years to get there, but that could in no way be promised, because small arms repairmen don’t get promotions easily. He told me that I’d have to live on base, and because my chosen MOS was one that was in constant need, I’d likely not get much time off. Meaning all of my free time would’ve been for the army to decide what I did with it. If I wanted to take a week to visit some friends, it likely wouldn’t’ve been easy to get the leave, for instance.
Recruiters are parasites, who’ll lie straight to your face to get you to sign on, and only a very small amount of them have the heart to tell hope-filled impressionable teenagers exactly what military life is like.
All those points are true. You’re lucky to have gotten a promised MOS, but that’s probably cause it was a low demand job (not a lot of people want to do that). If you really want to get into military R&D, you need to school, probably get an advanced degree, and work for a contractor like Lockheed and Martin, Raytheon, etc. They’re the ones who really do the R&D, and they don’t pay like shit like the military does.
I’d have to go to officer school after completing AIT, then hope that I get noticed by the right higher-ups to get upgraded to the Combat Capabilities Development Command. I also had job offers from LM and Colt, and an offer from the Joint Munitions Command (as a civilian), so it was totally possible to get the promotions. But waiting until I’m like 50 and all of my ideas are outdated to finally be able to present prototypes and work on the development of new munitions wasn’t an attractive offer at all.
damn, i’m impressed with the ability of us military to recruit people when the service is NOT MANDATORY, like how?
i know that their military recruitment partly depends on people who have no other way to pay for education, but isn’t that a relatively small portion of recruits?
military service here is mandatory and everyone fears it like fire, people go through long and complex processes to avoid it 😬
Greece?
I had this idea that service should be compulsory. But that you can choose to work in a charity, the police, clean the sewers, etc. It would force people to do something for society as a kind of education, but more importantly it would stop these offices becoming tight cliques of likeminded people with no new ideas coming in.
Later I heard that this is an old idea. What do you think anyway?
I had this idea that service should be compulsory. But that you can choose to work in […]
We had this in germany until 2010/2011. You could apply for “Zivildienst” instead of going to military service. It was essentially legal forced labor in the social field. Nearly everyone did this, so they made the military voluntary. (Actually, the compulsory service is just suspended :/) And now only stupid or really desperate people join.
it would stop these offices becoming tight cliques of likeminded people
The people that join voluntarily are basically the same people that stay after compulsory service.
did it really being any benefits to society?
when did they end it?
I guess, the jobs where mostly in fields that are severely underpaid anyways, so they could use a helping hand. Companies couldn’t really abuse this to replace a full position since it was short term. And it was limited to the social field, so you had to do something at least remotely useful to society.
Imo it’s way better than forcing people into the military, but not having forced labor is the better option. If you want to have more workers in the social field you can just incentivise that. Also it was super unfair since only men had to do this.
I was a conservative libertarian from about 2014 - 2016. I almost joined the military and I’m so damn glad I didn’t. Took a practice ASVAB at the recruiting office and scored pretty well. I texted my former Ranger friend that I was at the recruiting office and he freaked out lol. He was like, “DON’T SIGN ANYTHING!”.
