this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2024
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A Boring Dystopia
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It was required in my school to take the ASVAB. If we missed we'd face repercussions. I purposely answered questions wrong-- not all of them because it would look too obvious, but I apparently still scored high enough that they still considered me. I got my results in class, we had someone from the military come speak with us and try to get us to sign up, and even text messages.
Shit was so fucking annoying.
I asked a friend of mine from where I used to live if she had to take it and she asked me what the fuck I was talking about.
I mean, shit, I guess when you live in a state that is known for having awful levels of education they figure they can shove you in the military instead.
...Or football.
What score do you think is the cutoff to not be called?
My guess is they call you regardless of score and use the score to decide how to make the sell. They need all levels of people to stand in front of bullets and maintain a base/outpost.
My highschool had the same thing, they made it sound mandatory but a handful of us found out they couldn't force you to take it. So yea while 99% of my classmates took it the 5 of us got to sit in a empty classroom and wait it out
This sounds worse than sitting through a time share presentation.
But better than a friend trying to get me to join their downline.
Joke is on you; they left all the kids that made perfect scores alone. They knew they couldn't convince them to join.
When I was in school we had to take it but the recruiters also passed back the results. So even if you didn't want to join it was supposed to be useful information about what you're good at doing.
Ironically they may have tried harder because you scored low. The phrase "Asvab Waiver" exists for a reason. And there's very few people who couldn't drive a truck or something useful.
How else are they going to help you leave the state? Teaching you math?
Yeah, we had to take it in school as well. Since I had no interest in dying in Iraq, I just filled in bubbles at random. Still got phone calls and mailings aplenty begging me to join the military. They even mailed me a video game that the Army made, though I never played it so I don't know how bad it was.
Was it Americas Army? I played that when it released. Not bad. I’m not a fan of shooters, but it was at least interesting to see a game that had an honest attempt at making it as “real” as possible.
The sniper mission was the only thing I didn’t complete. It had one mission where you had to sit and wait for up to 48 hours real time before you could take a shot at your target. Neat concept, but totally impractical for a game.
Americas Army stunk bad on release, but was pretty solid by the time that it got to 3.0.
Recruits are trained on the engine used in ARMA by Bohemia Interactive. I played some of the scenarios on Operation: Flashpoint (which featured cold-war operations in the late 1980s).
Eventually, when I got hit, I assumed I was dead, and occasionally be surprised that I'm not, in fact, falling over, and am still alive and still have functional parts.
But yes, the most effective way to play seemed to be to hide in a bush and wait for minutes (hours if necessary) for the enemy to cross your firing line.
I guarantee you recruits are trained in the nearest forest. There's edge cases where using a video game can be useful for testing new tactics with veterans. But recruits are looking for the basics. Like what does a platoon wedge look like in a forest versus the grass.
War games are really useful for officers trying to plan things. That way they don't need to pay for thousands of people to deploy to special training areas to figure stuff out. But even then it's open to misuse, like when Rumsfield decided light infantry was a dead concept.
That tracks. I knew the Arma engine was used for training in the US Army and USMC but I didn't know where it fit in.
So you just made something up?
An equivocative question. Are you law enforcement?
No?
America's Army was actually really good because of how realistic it was with respect to tactics
if you still have that game it might be a good fit for the internet archive
If it was an fps it was probably decent, they have access to the top Secret specs of war machines.
Which then was leaked on the War Thunder forums.
Texas?
Close. Alabama
I'm from Kentucky and never had that, so idk.
Whats ASVAB
I don't know what it stands for, but it's basically a test for recruits to ensure they meet the basic levels of intelligence required to serve. ASVAB
Thank you!
My dad had to sign up for service in the military in Britain in the late 1940s when he turned 18. He never told me exactly how he got out of it (I suspect he pretended to be gay), but he did tell me about the "intelligence test" he had to take which sounded very similar to the cognitive diagnostic test Trump brags about. He said it was stuff like-
Which of these doesn't belong: Square, circle, triangle, elephant.
He finished it in about five minutes, asked if he could leave, and was told he had to wait until everyone finished or an hour had gone by. Apparently, by the end of the hour, there were people around him really struggling to finish.