@Consolation Enlisting isn’t “throwing your life away”, but it is wasting your potential. Enlisting is good if you need to turn your life around real quick and options are limited. It’s also good if you have no money for college, and you completely blew off high school or community college and now have a terrible GPA. Once your service commitment is over, the benefits of being a veteran are pretty massive. The Post 9/11 GI Bill is a great benefit to have, and generally a person will come out more mature and level headed.
However, if you have the opportunity to do ROTC or some other commissioning source, it should always be taken. As silly as it sounds, once you’re enlisted, it’s harder to become an officer. I know this makes no sense, and you’d think the military would value officers with enlisted experience, but this isn’t the case. The military would prefer fresh officer recruits who can do 20 years as an officer because they have more of a career left in them.
A prior enlisted officer usually will make it to O-3/O-4 in their 20 years, and by then they’re ready to call it quits. 20 years is enough, and the retirement is good. A fresh officer whose career is on track will make it to O-5 by the time their 20 years is rolling around. If an officer makes O-5, it’s far more likely that they will start chasing O-6 and higher because O-6 is right around the corner for them, and making O-6 is a very tempting proposition. That’s the rank where an officer really starts to be a tier above everyone else, and a LOT of status, respect and authority come with it. The civilian equivalent is if you’ve been working as a middle manager your whole career, then suddenly you’re told that you’ve been promoted to upper management, and they want to get you trained up so you can sit on the Board of Directors some day.
The military can’t be nothing but officers, but at the same time there’s no shortage of people enlisting to fill in the enlisted ranks. Just remember that for every 4.0 GPA valedictorian all-star kid that you have, there are 10 more kids out there with a GPA below 2.0, a middle school reading level, a crayon up their nose and an ACT score of 10 that is willing to enlist because they think Call of Duty and Battlefield is the coolest thing ever. Not every enlisted person is like this, but those types of people are drawn to enlisting over the average person. States that produce a lot of enlisted recruits are states in the Deep South. And what do those states have in common? Low education levels. Unfortunately, dumb people like to walk into the recruiters office and sign up all the time, and recruiters are too concerned with their numbers to turn away people that belong in a daycare instead of the military.
There are not enough filters in the enlisted ranks to keep these people out. Officers require a degree, which is basically protection against Joe Dirt from commanding hundreds of people. By lacking this filter, being enlisted means that you are more likely to encounter some of the dumbest people you will ever meet in your life. People who won’t shower, won’t clean their room, can’t wake up on time, damage every single piece of property they’re entrusted, can’t tie their boots, screw up everything they lay their hands on, poop on the floor in the bathroom (which I’ve accidentally stepped in before) and feel the need to draw a penis on every single wall they come in contact with. If you have any level of intelligence and maturity, the level of stupidity of some of the E-1 to E-3s you encounter in the military will drive you insane. And if you think it’s bad when you’re one of them, just wait till you make E-5 and now you have to keep these 18/19 year old goons in check and stop them from drawing penises all over the walls.