Comment by rdl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rdl | Hacker News Reader

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I agree with some of your sentiment, but I think you don't have accurate information on all of the military. The big deal with the reserves/NG (in the Army, at least) is that there is a huge difference among units; the majority of army PSYOPs capability is actually in the reserve component, and is as good as anything in active duty; there are both active duty and reserve units in other specialties which are pretty widely regarded as incapable/ineffective. It kind of becomes an evaporative cooling thing -- good people who end up in bad units find ways to leave, and are attracted to great units. Basically the same as companies in the civilian world.

In some cases, the services (and government as a whole, and big companies) don't take advantage of pre-existing skills or aptitudes. In other cases, they do -- there are incentive/recruiting/fast-track systems for certain types of professionals. They've gotten better about this since becoming an all-volunteer force vs. draft. The big problem is that there is a "military way" to do a lot of things, largely focused on big-vendor enterprise in the IT space, and you have to work within that. Getting affiliated with a lab, DARPA, etc. is probably the way to use more interesting tech.

One problem I have personally is that they're very credential-focused; as a high school and college dropout, I'd be kind of screwed. Otherwise I'd be really interested in reserve/NG in certain specialties (psyops, civil affairs, infrastructure parts of embedded advisor teams, rotary/uav aviation, sigint, SAR, medical, diving). It would also be really difficult for a startup founder vs. an employee at a larger tech company.

For the donation/volunteer argument, rather than just donating money, my plan is to do NGO work on the side, and hopefully eventually be able to set up a specialty communications-in-conflict/disaster zones infrastructure NGO. A lot of charities ARE saddled by large numbers of unskilled volunteers (or at least without specific relevant skills), and structure their operations to be labor vs. skill intensive.

>One problem I have personally is that they're very credential-focused; as a high school and college dropout, I'd be kind of screwed.

The military isn't really picky about where your bachelor's degree comes from (as long as it's credentialed), or what it's in (there are some career fields where they require specific majors, but even some of the more technically-oriented jobs don't have any such requirement). It's really just a check in the block. If you have nothing else on your resume, then you probably need something better than a BA in underwater basket weaving from the University of Pheonix, but in your case you could get exactly that degree and then go to an officer recruiter and leverage the rest of your resume to find an appropriate career field.

If you had a high school diploma, you'd still have lots of good opportunities. Most of the truly technical jobs in the military are performed by enlisted personnel. Some officer jobs are relatively technical (engineers and other acquisition-related career fields, aviators, nuclear power officers, etc.), but all officers are expected to be leaders first and foremost. Even officers in technical-sounding career fields (e.g. cryptology) serve primarily in a leadership/managerial/administrative role, with the enlisted personnel under them performing the hands-on work. In the early days of computers, all of the computer programmers in the Navy were enlisted, because their job title included the phrase "technician," and officers don't serve as technicians, enlisted men do. Lately there has been a realization that some technical jobs require a level of knowledge that most high school graduates simply don't possess, and so the Navy recently established a new officer designator for hackers: http://www.informationwarriors.net/showthread.php?t=623

An interesting thing about this designator is that it still preserves the idea that officers are supposed to be leaders, via a very unique and unusual mechanism: any officer with this designator must, after five years, either change designators or leave the Navy. I'm willing to bet that this requirement is based on the idea that this isn't really a leadership job, and that they're willing to have very junior officers in non-leadership positions, but that after a certain point they want them to shift their focus to leadership like all other officers.

>The military isn't really picky about where your bachelor's degree comes from (as long as it's credentialed)

"as long as it is from an accredited school," you mean.

Yes, that's what I meant. Thank you.

Your argument, if I read it right, is basically that I'm wrong and that the military is good at capitalizing on people's skills - and you give psyops as one example and also talk about people's credentials.

Sure, I don't disagree with you that in general, you can specialize in the reservists.

The point I'm making is that specifically for tech/software engineers/startup folks -- which was the genesis for the OP comment -- there isn't a great deal of skill overlap and capitalization. I'm not sure anything you've said disagrees with that.

FWIW, I'm retired from the USAF. I also hold an ECE degree. In the military I did nothing that required my degree (though I got to fly fighters for a career, so it was awesome anyway). The military has a different mission than the "real world", and using your background and expertise and self-discipline and stamina and perspectives and judgement and ethical view are called upon at any given time, and occasionally, all at once - and sometimes there is failure - and you continue. The great value of such service is in learning to do the mission, to live with the frustrations of political vacillation that can decide what was worth great risk one day now might cost votes, to work with others that humble you with their own talent once you mature enough to recognize it, to absolutely be there when someone depends on it, and to develop and develop with those around you such that you know they will also be there when you need it. I did get to do a multi-year job once that drew heavily on my engineering education, and it was great too - but following Heinlein's thoughts on over-specialization, sometimes breadth is worth more than depth - sometimes much more. Vince malum.

The military has been making a huge push in recent years to grow capabilities for "cyber warfare." The Air Force has pushed especially hard to establish themselves in this area, because they see some of their existing core capabilities being marginalized, and they need to keep finding ways to keep themselves relevant. Although the Air Force is pushing hardest in this direction, the other services are also trying to expand their cyber capabilities, and the Navy even recently established a designator for officers to basically be hackers: http://www.informationwarriors.net/showthread.php?t=623

I was active duty PSYOP (we don't call it PSYOPs), and I worked with reserve PSYOP units - the differences between the two units are vast.

AD PSYOP units have a major advantage in quality of training, and mission selection. This isn't to downplay the role of reserve PSYOP units, but the roles are dramatically different.

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