Officers can have much more lucrative career paths post military than Enlisted - so far as I understand. If you go enlisted, you want to get something super specailized - like being a jet fighter technician. There was a story going around quietly in the Canadian Air Force (no one laugh, we have about 50 F18s that actually fly) that was interesting.
The RCAF was short of jet fighter technicians. They paid something like $25 million to send 150 guys down to get trained in some big air force base in Texas. But, the bureacrats didn't think it through and had no conditions of the training, and they got a specailist designation that gives maybe another 5k-10k/year. Corporals and Master corporals at the time made about 35-45k.
Within 2 years, something like THREE guys were left. They all got scooped up by defense contractors in the US making $150k/year.
If you learn to fix/build these billion dollar machines you can get paid mad $$ in the defense industry after your military career is over to help SELL things to the military. Not sure how that's gonna work if they close a bunch of bases down - but still. Pick your specailty wisely as an enlisted or become an officer- the pay and treatment is a lot better.
The RCAF was short of jet fighter technicians. They paid something like $25 million to send 150 guys down to get trained in some big air force base in Texas. But, the bureacrats didn't think it through and had no conditions of the training, and they got a specailist designation that gives maybe another 5k-10k/year. Corporals and Master corporals at the time made about 35-45k.
Within 2 years, something like THREE guys were left. They all got scooped up by defense contractors in the US making $150k/year.
If you learn to fix/build these billion dollar machines you can get paid mad $$ in the defense industry after your military career is over to help SELL things to the military. Not sure how that's gonna work if they close a bunch of bases down - but still. Pick your specailty wisely as an enlisted or become an officer- the pay and treatment is a lot better.