Pros
- It's a decent place to start a career if you don't have a college education. Just make sure that the training standards for the job you choose are equivalent to the civilian standards of the same job, or the training will be worthless outside the military (vehicle mechanics - take note). - It's mostly a meritocracy. My experience was that schmoozers and salesman type personalities get run into the ground in the enlisted ranks. - There's a lot of individual tasks that are fun to do in a training environment (jumping, rappelling, shooting, blowing stuff up).
Cons
- Once you become a servicemember, you no longer live under a democracy, you live under totalitarianism. "Defending democracy" becomes a hypocritical concept in this environment. - Very dishonest and arrogant culture - things that would land you in the middle of a lawsuit in the civilian world are protected from legal consequences in the military. There are too many individuals who take advantage of that protection. - "Lying recruiters" is not a myth... and you can't do anything about it either (refer back to note on "arrogant culture"). - They don't screen the riff-raff out of the recruitment process. Virtually every disqualifier to enlistment is waivable. - Single soldiers have no choice in who they live with, meaning if you are told to room with someone who has criminal tendencies, then tough. - The establishment tries every underhanded marketing trick in the book to corner soldiers into reenlisting (eg. intentionally making barracks life so miserable that soldiers marry just to get away from it... with marriage comes an increased liklihood of children... with children comes an increased liklihood of re-enlisting just to make ends meet.) - Single enlisted soldiers typically don't get BAS without special approval. This means that if you are single and you don't want to eat Army food for every meal, you have to pay for your food out of your base pay. This effectively means that the Army penalizes you for eating what you want to eat. - As much as the civilian world claims to value employees with military experience, my experience so far has been that having a military background is a negative.