Comment by mrguyorama
12 hours ago
>If you tell them that you want to enlist but will only do so if they guarantee a truck driver MOS on your contact then they'll absolutely take you unless they've already hit their limit for that fiscal year.
(I think this is right, I've heard conflicting info about what recruiters can promise you)
If they are official military, then the truck driver HAS been through Basic and knows the absolute minimum of combat.
You don't have to trust me, this is literally what tons of women did during WW2 in most countries (except germany, who used slavery). Betty White and Bea Arthur both signed up for service as literal truck drivers. In fact, they both worked as truck drivers in different services set up to recruit women to replace men in non-combat roles to free them up for other service. Bea Arthur even went through some form of "Boot camp".
The UK used women heavily, especially in things like running the logistics of the air war. WRNS even did activities like fly transport planes and shuttle fighter aircraft around.
>In December 1941, Parliament passed the National Service Act, which called up unmarried women between 20 and 30 years old to join one of the auxiliary services.... by 1943 about nine out of ten women were taking an active part in the war effort.
The US uses a lot of civilian contractors for logistics, and that is the same idea. However, if the US ever deals with real, serious industrialized warfare again, I would bet on those civilian contractors being consumed by the military.
The US Women's Army Corps alone had 80k women serving, so not exactly millions, but it was a significant effort.
So not only is it the norm for a serious war to often push leadership to free up people doing non-combat duties by replacing them with people "not fit" for combat, it literally went to the extent that in WW2 we pretended to ignore sexism to make it happen and literal women were put in harms way and other "not technically front line combat but in danger of taking fire" roles.
> Like half the users seem to be aggressively ignorant of stuff that's common knowledge in the real world outside the tech industry.
Seriously agree though. That's not a slight, or a "take that", it's a real problem for HN. Tons of people here think they are smarter than average for choosing to browse orange reddit.
Get it in writing and check the fine print. A recruiter might lie but an enlistment contract is exactly that: a legally enforceable agreement. If the contract guarantees a particular MOS and the recruit doesn't get it for whatever reason then they have the option to take a discharge instead of being reclassed.
Even without a written guarantee, in volunteer forces the senior officers will generally get rid of new recruits who decide they don't want to be there instead of forcing them into a different job. Especially for the combat jobs where even training can be deadly. Better to give them discharge papers and GTFO rather than wasting money training someone who's going to be a poor performer with constant morale and discipline problems.
(Of course if there's ever another world war and conscription is reinstated then the rules will go out the window. But that's not what we're discussing here.)