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tankadillo posted:I've been talking to an Army recruiter about getting into OCS. When I asked about how I pick my career path as an officer, he brushed off the question and said that all that stuff gets decided during OCS. Is that accurate? It feels weird that I wouldn't get any say in my career until I'm already that deep in the system, but I'm coming to find that a lot of stuff in the military doesn't work the way I would expect. It's based on what branch slots your OCS class is allocated and where you stand on the order of merit list, ie the guy on top gets first pick with whats available. There's practically always a good amount of infantry, armor, and artillery slots. Everything else can be pretty random. My class had 1 MI slot whereas the class ahead of mine had 12.
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Jan 28, 2016 20:46
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Pon de Bundy posted:i could always try for army/marine officer..is that worth it? its a much longer commitment tho Active duty Army OCS is a 3.5 year active duty commitment. Neither Basic nor OCS are hard and you can expect to spend your first 6 months in the Army in an "immersive military environment." OCS lightens up towards the end with weekend passes and such but it's still OCS and you will want out of OCS ASAP. OCS is like one giant gently caress gently caress game for 3 months. Where people have trouble is if they can't land nav, struggle when put in leadership positions, or if they suck at history. Life as a LT is pretty chill but it is the Army so expect poo poo to suck from time to time. It's 130 AM on Monday and I'm getting ready to go work a 48 hour shift at 230 with 3 other LT's so that I can listen to people on a radio while they execute a mission then listen to them do who knows what all day Tuesday while they plan their next mission before getting replaced at 230 on Wednesday by 4 other LTs. I've been through the armor officer pipeline and have a pretty good idea of what it's like for the infantry LT's since it's also here at Benning. No idea what it's like for the support branch guys but it's probably considerably less gay since all my support branch OCS classmates facebook feeds are full of pictures of them in uniform in air conditioned buildings. Also can't tell you what being a PL is like yet since I still have 2 months before I leave Benning for my unit. tldr: it's still the army but there are worse decisions when joining the military than becoming an officer
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Feb 22, 2016 07:36
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Vahakyla posted:Alright, tell me how screwed I am. Why are you so set on doing the Airborne thing? Odds are you'll end up in the 82nd which I have never heard anything good about other than from motards. On second thought, maybe you'll fit right in. Regardless, if you want to commission just get your citizenship then put in an OCS packet when you can. From what I've heard they never get as many in service OCS applicants as they have slots for so you should be able to get an OCS slot. However you should be aware that as an officer you don't just pick a branch, well not exactly anyway. Each OCS class is allocated a certain number of slots for each branch which can vary greatly between classes, just depends on what the Army needs at the time. Hell, if you're still super motivated years down the road you can always drop a packet for SFAS and become this generations Larry Thorne. Just wikipedia'd him again, apparently he got his commission in the Signal Corps before going to SF.
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Mar 26, 2016 18:44
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At OCS there is almost assuredly going to be a good number of slots for either Infantry, Armor or Field Artillery, it's just the numbers of each fluctuate. Aviation is possible from OCS but very unlikely, it's not one of the branches that OCS gets slots for. There's a good amount of paperwork you have to put together and then put in a DA 4187 while at OCS for Aviation. If you want a combat arms branch as an officer from OCS you'll be fine, you just won't have too much of a say on which of the 3 you'll get. Infantry and Armor are both at Benning so they have the most follow on schools available to them since the post is full of various courses. As an Armor officer you are unlikely to actually go to a unit with tanks, less than a quarter of ABOLC LTs go on to become tankers as PLs, the majority go to either Infantry or Stryker BCTs to become scout PLs. FA sounds horrible from friends that went through FA BOLC, lots of math.
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Mar 26, 2016 19:38
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If you had gotten in before they noticed that you would be doing bitch work for however long it takes for them to sort it out before you would continue training. Happened to a few guys I went to BCT with. One of them was still doing bitch work at HHC waiting for his security situation to get worked out after I had commissioned from OCS.
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Apr 4, 2016 21:54
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BCT still gets plenty of 5.56 blanks, arty sims, smoke and whatever for their FTX. Only time I've ever had to yell "bang bang bang!" is if we were doing some kind of tactics training and we weren't at a range/training area.
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Apr 5, 2016 12:51
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I wonder if the other basic training reception BNs are as lovely as 30th AG at Benning. Definitely one of the worst weeks of my life
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Sep 7, 2016 02:21
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Benning still has you sleeping in foxholes for the FTX, but it was still dumb and easy. Or at least it did 2 years ago.
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Nov 3, 2016 20:20
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Basic was the longest 10 weeks of my life. All Army poo poo all day for 10 weeks and tons of standing around, especially during the marksmanship weeks. So loving boring. I did it in winter and privates would smoke themselves just to stay warm.
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Nov 3, 2016 21:24
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So is Washington like the GIP Mecca or something? Seems like there's a ton of us out here.
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Nov 14, 2016 07:50
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Since you have a BA already not sure if the course credits offered for CLEPs and DANTES exams will help you but they're pretty easy to study for. I suck at math and got 6 math credits after studying for only 2 weeks. Lots of good free study guides online, I used http://www.free-clep-prep.com/
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Dec 18, 2016 20:45
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A guy in my platoon came down on orders and he only has like 17 months left. The Army is only going to get a year out of him at his new duty station before he comes back up here where he owns a house.
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Feb 25, 2017 17:55
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At your age unless you can get an OCS contract I wouldn't even bother. Even with an OCS contract 75% of your peers will be 10 years younger than you. It's bad enough for me and I'm only 4-5 years older than my peers and the same age as my commander. The Army is expanding but seriously being a private/specialist at your age will be living hell. Your team leaders will be in their early to mid 20's and your squad leaders in their mid to late 20's. Unless you somehow have literally no future besides enlisting in the military than go find something else to do for a living.
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Apr 4, 2017 05:24
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That is horrible advice. Why would anyone want to be an old fart combat arms private
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Apr 4, 2017 22:57
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Well you're definitely not going to get an OCS contract in the Army, for 2 reasons: Your legal history and then the fact that you're over 30.
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Apr 8, 2017 00:33
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Chemical officers seem to be the bitch boy that gets all the lovely officer tasks if a unit happens to have a chemical officer. Like being the slide clicker for every power point presentation or being one of the guys that's always sent out the field days in advance of the main body and then stays after everyone else leaves. I would say don't do any combat MOS unless you plan on making it a career. Junior enlisted 11B/C's and 19D's spend most of their time doing something other than what they're trained to do. There's a reason they joke that 19D stands for "19 Detail". Don't enlist in the Army. Or the Marines.
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Apr 8, 2017 02:46
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32 is too old for OCS anyway, 30 is the cut off Unless your prior service anyway, 30 for college option OCS
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Oct 6, 2017 01:34
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I'm an OCS officer and I can give you a run down of how it works whenever I get home You can look through my post history is this thread too, I think it's the same one I posted in. Edit: never mind, doesn't look like it
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Oct 14, 2017 01:11
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I used to smoke weed, admitted it and it's in my record. Was asked about it during my OCS board and here I am. Don't lie about it and give good answers. For the OCS contract: do good on your PT test, as close to 300 as you can get. You're competing with other people for your contract and being fit is important, especially if you become a combat arms officer. You're going to go before a board of your recruiting battalions most senior officers, so a lieutenant colonel or major and some captains. They're going to ask you a bunch of questions for 30 minutes to an hour to determine if they think you'd be a good officer. You pass your board, enlist and sign your OCS contract and then you get a ship date. You go to the same exact basic training that everyone else that enlists go to. Your drill sergeants will be able to identify you as an officer candidate based off your MOS, 09S. As long as you perform well they probably won't bother you at all, maybe put you in leadership positions like being platoon guide or something. If you're either weak or an idiot then they will make your life hell because there's way they ever want to work for an officer like that. Immediately after basic training you go to OCS. Depending on how many people show up, you may have to class up to start the next class. This basically means the people with the highest PT scores get in the class until there aren't any slots left. Theoretically you could be waiting a very long time before classing up but this is unlikely. These days there probably aren't many classes that get to maximum capacity. The main events that get people recycled or dropped from OCS are land nav, leadership positions, squad lanes, and the history test. Fail an event once and you retest, fail twice and you recycle to the next class. Fail a third time and you're dropped from OCS. Branching: OCS gets whatever slots are currently needed to be filled by the Army. They are different for every class. You pick your branch by order of merit, so being number one in your class means you get first pick. If you class up immediately upon getting to OCS you're looking at about 6 months straight of living and breathing nothing but the Army 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I personally didn't think it was hard but you will have no freedom and you probably won't get much sleep. In OCS you're basically responsible for making sure all the legwork of your training happens. Candidates in leadership positions actually have quite a bit to do on top of what they're already doing for the course requirements. Once you graduate and commission you immediately leave to go to get your branch training. To branch aviation as an active duty candidate is possible but you won't have the time to put in the leg work to meet all the additional requirements for aviation. Particularly if you branch infantry or armor, you will find yourself in many physically and mentally unpleasant situations. Often both at the same time. It's not super hard but it definitely sucks nonetheless. If you're weak or can't run you will immediately be considered a poo poo bag and that's a hole that's difficult to dig yourself out of. I don't at all regret joining but I definitely don't want to do this for 20 years. You're going to be putting in a lot of hours and be given more work than you realistically have time to accomplish. Social events aren't going to be optional for you. Well, technically they are but it's not a good idea to miss too many. Good work is going to be rewarded with more work while your shitbag counterpart skates by doing jack poo poo because no one would even trust him with the simplest of tasks and he's stuck there until he does something bad enough to get him kicked out, which probably isn't going to happen.
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Oct 14, 2017 05:32
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You aren't going to get either of those jobs out of OCS. Aviation maybe if by some stroke of luck you're able to get an aviation physical and all the other paperwork required done while you're there but that is extremely unlikely. Armor, Infantry, Field Artillery, Engineer, Transportation, Quartermaster, Adjutant General, Air Defense Artillery, Military Police, Signal, Military intelligence are the branches you need to be looking at from OCS. You will have a combat arms branch in your top 3 regardless of whether you want to or not.
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Oct 15, 2017 19:59
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If you're looking for a career why are you looking at the reserves? Particularly for experience? I have a hard time seeing how being a reserve or guard officer translates into any kind of relevant job experience unless their unit deploys. And the one thing junior officers need the most is experience. I do more in a month or two than my reserve and guard OCS classmates have done in the past 3 years. And most of them work jobs that make less than they would have made as active duty officers.
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Oct 15, 2017 20:40
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If you are college educated there is entirely no loving reason to go in as junior enlisted. Sure, you have more control over what MOS you get but who loving cares? My housing allowance alone is more than those guys make in a month. No one treats me like poo poo or smokes my balls off if I gently caress something up. Do you seriously want to be a 30+ year old SPC? And you're basically a private because the other SPC's at least have a couple years in the Army.
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Oct 18, 2017 01:42
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Dick Burglar posted:Not really, that's why I was trying to justify OCS. I just don't know what officer jobs I'd actually want (that I could get into). Your choice is whatever slots your OCS class gets. It doesn't matter what you want, or what anyone else that wants to become an officer wants. Outside of dudes like JAGs, medical officers or other direct commission folks there isn't a single officer in the Army that had any guarantees on what branch they got. And don't even try arguing that being a combat medic or a firefighter in the military is at all better for any post military career than having experience as an officer. The difference in quality of life alone between being junior enlisted or an officer is so stark that it's breaking my god damned mind that someone is even entertaining the idea of enlisting over commissioning.
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Oct 18, 2017 03:13
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So you get a commission, go to BOLC or whatever your branches officer training is, get out at like 3 or 4 pm when you're not in the field. While in between follow on courses you'll show up for PT and 0930 formation and then have the rest of the day off to jerk off, go to the gym, see what there is to do in Columbus, GA (hint:nothing, burn this city to the ground), go to the gym, jerk off. You might accumulate 3 months of jerking off before you're done with your follow on schools and go to your first duty station. You'll get to your first duty station and mostly likely end up on staff working with a bunch of other LT's and some CPT's. Depending on where you're stationed you may or may not be surrounded by a bunch of socially awkward academy grads that make you cringe every time you see them interact with somebody that isn't an officer. If you're at Lewis, Carson, Germany or Italy you're probably swamped by West Pointers. Eventually you'll be sent down to a platoon to be a PL. This is the most fun part. If you're not a dickbag you'll enjoy working with your NCO's and PSG, and non shitbag soldiers. On the other hand, you'll constantly be tasked to do things that seem like a tremendous waste of time. You WILL waste a tremendous amount of time as a PL. Whether it's standing around twiddling your thumbs in the motor pool watching oil stains grow because your new BN leadership come from an ABCT or waiting for your soldiers to print out AT lvl 1 certs from a printer 2 miles from the computer they're using, you are going to waste a lot of time. And here's some free chicken as the Army likes to say: right click somebody's name on their AT lvl 1 cert, click edit text, and then have one your NCO's fill in everybody's name to print off. Congratulations, you and your platoon never have to do 90% of online training ever again. And then there's all the personal issues you have to deal with like divorces, DUI's, drug dealing, theft, whatever. If one of your soldiers farts you better have a counselling ready. So, what I'm trying to get at is this: gently caress the Army.
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Dec 26, 2017 04:42
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Just look at the pay difference between a newly commissioned officer and a brand new recruit and you tell me which you should do. This shouldn't even be a question people ask.
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Jan 21, 2018 22:05
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The pay between each branch doesn't change. I enlisted with an Officer Candidate School contract so I spent 6 months with an enlisted pay grade. I made $750 every two weeks. As a brand new 2nd LT in GA I made about $1900 every 2 weeks. Now as a 1st LT in WA with a few years in I make $3000 every 2 weeks. I've always had a housing allowance as an officer because I never lived on post. Your housing allowance changes based on where you live. Enlisted pay raises aren't even remotely as drastic as the officer side. And that's not getting into how you're treated and your quality of life.
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Jan 21, 2018 22:16
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If you’re like me and an International Relations major, I took the FSOT, passed and never got called about an interview. From what I understand the State department isn’t in great shape after Trump took office.
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Jan 24, 2018 05:05
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The thing is that officer contracts are loving huge compared to standard enlistments. Whoever your recruiter is will be putting a ton of effort into getting it done. Officer recruits are uncommon enough that many recruiting offices may not have anyone with experience putting one together so that it turns into trial and error as they digitally submit documents and have them kicked back until they’re all accepted. So it shouldn’t be any mystery why a recruiter would prefer you go for a standard enlistment and let some other bastard deal with putting your packet together. To sign an OCS/OTS contract you will have to constantly be in contact with your recruiter to get things done.
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Jan 24, 2018 06:20
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Army has never had officer recruiters, same recruiters for everybody. Took me a year to finally sign my contract.
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Jan 24, 2018 07:12
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Enlisting in the Air Force over commissioning in the Army is dumb. Army doesn’t care what your major is. Have decent grades, be in shape and no legal issues and do well at the board and you will get an OCS contract. And not have to wait 2 years to ship out.
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Jan 28, 2018 17:49
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HELLBITCH posted:My dad has a CIB and will call me a pussy if I try to be an officer right off the bat If that’s true then your dad is a loving idiot
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Feb 22, 2018 16:49
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You obviously have a lot in common with your dad, enlist 11X for 6 years Over thanksgiving you can regale your family with stories of picking up pine cones or scouring the desert at NTC for wag bags full of MRE shits. Maybe if you’re lucky the guy that lived in your barracks room before you left you his dried up cum rags and a box of ramen.
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Feb 22, 2018 18:21
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What are you looking at gaining by enlisting? The respect of your friends and family is a loving awful reason. If you don't get a giant loving boner at the thought carrying a bunch of heavy poo poo for miles and assaulting an objective, carrying 100 lbs of poo poo up a mountain to set up an observation post and freeze your balls off while looking at stuff that may or may not be there, or spending day after day cramped inside a tank festering in BO and farts as a tank crewmen than you have no business enlisting combat arms. If you're lucky you'll spend 25% of your time actually doing your job. The other 75% will be whatever manual labor the Army forces you to do. I was 100% serious when I said you can expect to scour a desert collecting literal bags of human feces left behind by your fellow soldiers. You can reasonably expect to be treated like a child for the entirety of your first enlistment. If you make it to SGT by the end of it you might be moderately treated like an adult from time to time. The combat arms MOSes have the lowest entry requirements in the US military. You will be volunteering to live and work with people that are quite literally too stupid to do anything else. But hey, maybe your pops won't call you a pussy over Thanksgiving or your aunts will tag you in "support are troops!!!" pictures on Facebook
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Feb 23, 2018 05:39
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As an officer with less than a year left before I get out and working on getting into graduate school, from what I've read officers have up to a 50% higher acceptance rate into graduate programs than non-officers (enlisted and civilians). Also, it is objectively a stupid decision to enlist in the military when becoming an officer is an option available to you. A 2 year 1LT Makes over twice as much as an E5 SGT living in the barracks. The lowest ranking officer gets BAH without having to marry the first girl they meet to get it.
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Oct 3, 2018 06:23
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If you have 60 days of leave and want to take 60 days of ETS leave, can your BDE Commander deny it and force you to sell off your accrued leave? Rumor is the BDE Commander wants ETSing officers off the books as soon as possible and doesn't want anyone else to take 2 months of ETS leave. Haven't actually ran into anyone that had this happen to them yet though. Really I just know that the BDE Commander isn't too happy with so many ETSing officers.
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Nov 1, 2018 23:54
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I was in your shoes once. I joined the Army at 27 as an OCS candidate, currently a captain on the way out. I don't regret joining at all, my experience in the Army has by far been the most influential experienc of my life. My posts in the Army thread are also evidence that I also haven't enjoyed much of my time in the Army. If you are remotely competent you will be used and abused for years on end while your less capable peers are given drastically less responsibility. If there is any organization that rewards good work with more work it's the US military. Other than being a platoon leader I have spent the entirety of my time in the Army in captains positions. People that don't know you and seeing a bar on your chest instead of rail road tracks absolutely makes your job harder until you've worked with them long enough to prove yourself. I won't say don't join but you need to be aware that in the Army and in a brigade combat team you will have the ever living dog poo poo worked out of you until you leave for the captains career course and then again once make it back to a BCT. The Army officer life is a meat grinder. There's a reason why they're the "miserable majors".
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May 24, 2019 01:51
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I've done a decent amount of training with/through the Air Force and even their lovely bases have a pretty high standard of living compared to the Army. Like Mountain Home Air Force Base has great hours and even though they're in the middle of nowhere they're still only an hour tops from Boise. Something tells me that Air Force field problems aren't a month long like the Army's, unless they're TACP's anyway. The one thing I've noticed about the Air Force is that they smile a hell of a lot more often than the Army does. The Army is in a near constant state of anger and bitterness.
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May 24, 2019 06:37
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Junior officers are generally always over strength due to having to compensate for some of them getting out. May be different for smaller branches but this is definitely true for armor, infantry, FA and probably engineers as well. "Peeling potatoes" for an officer is more like being put in charge of stuff that your immediate superior doesn't want to deal with. You're never going to find yourself painting rocks or pulling weeds. There's no shortage of stuff for an officer to do on staff. If there's an officer that has been given very little responsibility then that's because he's been found to be too incompetent to be given anything remotely important. Recruiters are also not at all going to have any idea what officer manning is like. The only way you would be able to get that kind of information is from a units Officer Strength Manager/S1 or from a branches LT and CPT managers at HRC. I'm also not sure how reservist or National Guard positions get your foot in the door for anything. With their one weekend a month and 2 weeks a year none of the Guard/Reserve units I've trained with seem to have any idea on how to do Army stuff unless they've recently deployed.
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Aug 2, 2019 21:04
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Every newly commissioned officer in the US military is a butter bar regardless of commissioning source. (Except for direct commission) How not to be an rear end in a top hat? Don't be a dick to other people, it's really easy. If you have to pull rank on someone, you're probably an rear end in a top hat. Why do you want to be a Marine infantry officer?
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Sep 19, 2020 16:57
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 15:58 |
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If you're going to join the military join the Air Force. They actually smile sometimes and can reliably expect to always have edible food. I was an armor officer in a cavalry/reconnaissance squadron before spending my last year on the brigade staff. Life in a an Army brigade combat team (or its USMC equivalent) is a pressure cooker that squeezes every last drop out of you it can before you head somewhere else to repeat the process. I've never met anyone that isn't completely worn out after time in a BCT and that's including the careerist combat arms folks. Follow Army WTF Moments and 99% of that poo poo is from one of the Army's BCTs.
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Sep 21, 2020 05:38
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