The Navy and Air Force actually take care of their guys

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.

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.

True. The taxes you pay do that already though, might as well get a degree and leave as soon as you can if it is a good option.

Well in my head it isn't crazy, you can join the royal military school of Belgium with a high school diploma and get a degree while being paid, fed and hosted. It isn't great fun and they're pretty strict, and you have to serve them for five years (or sometimes more) afterwards, but it's a pretty good deal if you don't want to spend a lot of money on prolonged studies like becoming a surgeon.