How old is too old for military service

Admissions liaison officers act as a mentor, sounding board and guiding light rolled into one, and every service academy The U. The demonstration, which took place in A former US Marine, Trevor Reed, has gone on hunger strike in hunger to protest against his prison sentence Poland's Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki met with soldiers guarding the border with Belarus on Tuesday, as authorities braced for Join the Military.

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Those who are eager to get into uniform as early as possible should know that not having a high school diploma could delay their entry into military service.

For almost all male U. Each branch of the military has an enlistment option that allows people who separated from military active duty, the Guard or Reserve, to enter full-time back into service. For example, if an individual has five years of credible military service in the Army and wants to join the Navy. The Navy could waive the maximum enlistment age to The maximum age of 34 for the Navy, plus five years credible service in the Army.

The Marine Corps and the Marine Corps Reserve maximum age of enlistment for prior service is 32, after computing the prior-service age adjustment. Any recruiter will urge a potential new recruit to complete high school first before trying to enter the military. That said, military recruiting involves something known as the Delayed Enlistment program where those who are not technically eligible to serve yet due to age or school status may enter into a provisional agreement with the service they wish to join.

Delayed Enlistment may put the enlistee into a program to familiarize them with military life, procedures, what to expect in basic training, etc. Army Special Forces are called Green Berets for their headgear. The Army's members are its soldiers.

It provides national security and search and rescue for America's waterways, seas, and coast. It's responsible for stopping drug smugglers and others breaking maritime law. It enforces marine environmental protection laws. Service members are Coast Guardsmen and nicknamed Coasties. The reserve component is the Coast Guard Reserve. It provides land combat, sea-based, and air-ground operations support for the other branches during a mission.

This branch also guards U. All service members are called Marines. The reserve component is the Marine Corps Reserve. The Navy is part of the DOD. Navy warships provide the runways for aircraft to land and take off when at sea. Navy SEALs sea, air, and land are the special operations force for this branch. All service members are known as sailors.

The reserve component is Navy Reserve. The United States will allow enlistment of a seventeen year old teenager into their military with parental consent and eighteen year old without that consent. There are many aspects of law where certain individuals such as underage girls and more recently, boys, are incapable of consent.

Surely this should apply to an equally dangerous scenario with even greater potential harm to the underage person. There is a greater debate in Britain than in America over the minimum enlistment age of boys into the military perhaps because the age is so low in the United Kingdom. A boy can apply for military enlistment in England at the age of fifteen years and seven months with parental consent to join at sixteen years old.

Lack of employment opportunity, drug use or gang activity cannot be a stanchion in the age enlistment debate. There can be no reasonable objection for a widening of the Peace Corps or AmeriCorps to an extended and expanded non-combat military cadet corps that would provide a ready pool of informed volunteers in that event and at a proper age. The surprise may be a possible massive recruitment from such a new paradigm of millennials or boys from the U.

One realistic point of view is that a large majority of potential underage recruits fail early for health, academic or criminal history reasons. A senior military officer put the actual recruitment pool at less than five percent of the available under twenty-five year olds and even down from that for deduction of failures in the Armed Forces Qualification Test. The most glaring contradiction comes from comparison with the enlistment age for the equally dangerous and demanding job of police officer.

While some rules vary, the general minimum requirement is twenty-one years of age with many forces having extended maximum age limits. In this the police services have shown a greater understanding of youth and the necessity of a mature mind for a difficult job. What is called for is an open discourse and transparency for recruits in a meaningful way that the following may befall them: training injury or death, battlefield injury or death, capture and imprisonment, abuse or death in captivity, dismemberment and disability, lifetime confinement to a wheelchair, personal upheaval, PTSD, suicide, chemical or biological injury and lately, confronting fellow citizens during protests, peaceful and violent which may be the greatest of conundrums.

The compelling necessity to raise the enlistment age takes on a new urgency in a world awash with demonstrations and protesters often facing the military. The only thing more dangerous than a young soldier in Afghanistan is a too young soldier in a city protest.

The general public should consider the likely age of the military confronting them on their next peaceful march and whether they would prefer confrontation with enlisted personnel of similar age rather than an armed teenager.