air force cryptologic linguist lifestyle

People told me not so sign a contract I don’t want, and my recruiter/bots from It was described that I will be at a severe disadvantage if I do that, and tack on more years to my stay in the military. There are a few other opportunities later on.Īt the moment 5 or 6 people told me that the ranking system I described for why someone took the spot I was in is most likely BS (someone thought I was straight up lying and told me to go to another forum), that if I want to retrain for an air position, I have to try my luck in talking to my supervisor in tech school and hope that they are willing to switch me, or re-enlist, which is more difficult then already going in as airborne. Most if not all 1A8s start at Offut AFB in Nebraska. They are all desk jobs and some ops centers if you're working live missions require you to be listening ALL shift unless someone replaces you.

Ground linguist is not physically engaging at all so if that is one of your requirements, you should not pick it. Ground is going to get you more into stuff that may actually affect foreign policy. I don't know many airborne linguists, but I'm fairly certain a lot of their missions are threat warning based. Unless something has changed, Navy doesn't go to further tech training after DLI at Goodfellow, so you'd get operational quicker likely with the Navy. In class at DLI is mostly the same, except AF/Navy are going to have different service side requirements. The training is a bit different from Navy/AF. I have no idea what main languages the Navy is pushing right now, but all of the AF languages translate well to civilian jobs if that is what you're interested in. The Navy isn't terrible but the AF is still the place to be for quality of life. The answers are there, but whatever assumptions/research you've done is fairly correct. I'd do a search, this question gets asked at least every 2-3 months. I really would like to take on work that is both mentally and physically engaging. There are no guarantees in the navy though, and if I can guarantee a more 'active' lifestyle as an airborne linguist without sacrificing the intellectual aspects of the job, then that seems very attractive. On the navy side, there's just one rating, and CTI duty seems to be be primarily CONUS cyber-heavy (like 1N3) with some limited opportunities for deployment-heavy duty (like 1A8). I'm just trying to consider all useful avenues. I'm coming to this as somebody who is also looking at joining the navy as their equivalent (CTI), and I've already familiarized myself as much as possible with the enlisted linguist role - which should see similar training regardless of military branch. I know 'it depends' is the safe answer to some of this, but I'm not familiar enough with pulling USAF documents to see if I've missed some less obvious difference between the two. Ground should have a more stable office lifestyle, while airborne schedules can be unpredictable.īut other than 1A8 needing to know plane systems and related emergency/survival skills, they're basically the same job, right? The airborne variety isn't a dumbed down version of the ground variety? Career and advancement prospects are similar for both? The culture sounds somewhat informal at both, though ground seems more traditional corporate/government while airborne seems closer to an 'air force' or 'military' experience. 1N3 seems primarily based out of various cyber commands (GA, MD, HI), and 1A8 seems to locate closer to bases where flights originate? I'm not familiar enough with the related air bases to guess what it is they have in common.

My impression is that both are analyst jobs in an intel environment, where the airman will work as a translator and subject matter expert in the culture/language learned at DLI. Are all of the differences stemming from that, or do the jobs significantly differ in other ways? The obvious difference is that one works on the ground, and one deploys on planes. (Disclaimer: not asking for details of what's done on the job, as I know much of it will be classified.)

I'll put some background info at the bottom in case it matters, but my primary reason for this thread is I'm looking for some nuance between these two fields, such that it may exist.

Air force cryptologic linguist lifestyle