U.S. Military: Are all jobs equally important?

In the Army you can sign up for a specific MOS. IIRC the Air Force lets you select like 5 jobs that you would like and then sign up and they'll give you one of those 5 that you picked which may or may not be the one you actually wanted. I think the Marines do that too. Not sure how the Navy does it.

My buddy joined the Air Force wanting to work in the intelligence field and ended up working the front desk at a medical clinic. Another buddy of mine is a former Marine who wanted to work in combat but ended up working some admin job or something.

The Officer schools in the military tend to have you sign up for OCS and THEN tell you what job you are slotted for. I know plenty of people who wanted to be jet pilots in the Air Force and ended up getting Space and Missiles. I know plenty of Officers in the Army who wanted to be pilots and ended up being Armor Commanders or something. I'm doing this from memory but I think in the military if you attend one of the Academies or an ROTC program then you are already committed before you find out if you can get slotted for the job you want. The whole "service first" thing. Now if you are already enlisted and then you attend OCS in the Air Force then you get to pick BEFORE you go to OCS. I think that's how it is or used to be.

Warrant Officers in the Army are one of few Officer careers that you pick exactly what you want to do before you ever attend WOCS. Thats because Warrant Officers are specific subject experts in a particular field and are not really "leaders" in the traditional sense. You won't see Signal Warrant Officers working with Patriot Missiles or anything like that whereas it's not uncommon to have an Artillery Captain leading an Armor Company or something.

But yeah rarely does a MOS actually live up to its hype. Many people have a misconception of the military due to the amount of video games and "cool" stories shown on TV and whatnot in today's media. Media and recruitment never show the boring stuff which comprises the majority of the time in the military they only show the "cool" stuff. Even the "coolest" jobs in the military get tedious and boring after awhile. My buddy is an F-16 pilot which to the outside world is probably the coolest thing on planet Earth. He routinely texts me saying how annoyed he is that he has to go fly again and wishes he could stay home and play online video games with me instead lol. That seems unheard of to somebody looking from the outside in. I laugh because I know exactly how he feels. It's just funny to hear somebody actually say "damnit...I HAVE to go fly this $20 million fighter jet today I'd rather play Halo on my Xbox" lol.

 

That is true. If you are solely looking for a paycheck or scholarship money then you would probably sign up for the job with the least amount of stress and or danger or physical abuse. I don't think too many people join the Infantry JUST to get a paycheck when they can work admin at a desk in an air conditioned building for the same pay.

The military attracts many people due to its relative stability. It used to be that if you wanted to make the military a career and retire at 20 then you pretty much could barring any big law violations or something that would kick you discharged. Nowadays it's not like that so much and people are getting discharged due to overstaffing and the downsizing thing.

Most of the people who do the more "elite" or "tough" jobs due it for love of country. You don't get paid any more as an E-4 Navy SEAL than you do as an E-4 Sailor who sits at a desk in a medical clinic. You don't become SEAL, Ranger, Special Forces, Recon, etc for the paycheck. Almost all civilian equivalent jobs to their military counterparts get paid WAY more money. Thats why so many people got out of the service and went into civilian contracting doing the same thing and making double or even triple the money that Uncle Sam paid them.

An aircraft engineer or mechanic at Boeing or General Dynamics makes WAY more money than an E-5 crew chief. High level airline pilots make way more money than military pilots. Civilian rotary wing pilots make a lot more money than military rotary wing pilots all without the threat of bullets and missiles flying by them at work and half of the stress of being in the actual military. You can make 6 figures easily by simply flying workers out to oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. A civilian doctor usually makes way more money than even an O-6 Colonel who is a doctor in the military. Thats why the military tries to hand out huge bonus checks and other perks to it's doctors to keep them from jumping ship. The military pays you based on your rank regardless of what job you do. Some jobs get bonuses like aviators get flight pay and whatnot but for the most part everybody of the same rank makes roughly the same money whether you are a Navy SEAL or a cook.

While some people do simply sign up for the paycheck and medical benefits that's usually what draws them in the door but after a few years something else tends to make them stay. And that something usually isn't the paycheck. The military pension is a nice incentive but even so if you did some of these "technical" jobs in the civilian world you'd make enough money to save up and retire on your own without the stress of 20 years of military life.

I for one could literally double my income right now if I quit and went to work a civilian equivalent job. But its not about the money, the money is decent enough. And Im not alone in that thinking which is why we actually have people in these "elite" military jobs. The military knows that it can't keep up paycheck wise with the civilian world they simply cannot afford it. That's where the pride and love of country takes over. The military pays enough to keep people comfortable and hopes that pride and patriotism will fill in the monetary gaps between them and the civilian world. It works pretty often.

 

Yeah that's pretty accurate. Enlistment bonuses were huge during the troop surge back in 2008. Or 2009? Whenever.

They needed bodies and they needed a way to attract people. MOS's like EOD were literally handing out $80,000+ sign on bonuses because they were in such high demand due to the rise of IED's. Linguists were big too. So was intel.

I really don't even know how the whole sign on bonus thing even works. I've known 2 guys who signed up for the exact same job at the same time in different states and one of them got a $5,000 sign on bonus and the other one got nothing. So I don't really know how they come up with who gets what.