Pros
- Free uniform. - Training at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst is great for your CV. - Opportunities for Adventurous Training travel around the world (although these seem to be disappearing, as money runs out). - Perhaps (depending how bankrupt the organisation is) still worth doing for a three-year Short Service Commission - but it's exceptionally difficult not to become stuck in the Army through a poisonous combination of inertia and cowardice (i.e. the default position is that you stay in, and the longer you remain, the harder it gets to leave, the more you have to lose, and the less employable you are outside. Former officers struggling to adapt to the real world can be quite pitiable). - If you join for three years, get as many travel, Adventurous Training, and other CV-building opportunities as possible, then have the self-awareness and self-discipline to get out in your mid-twenties before your employability falls off a cliff, you can use the Army as a superb springboard - hence the 4* 'career opportunities' rating below. Beware, though! Too many friends found their arms in the mangle, due to a superficially compelling procession of 'beige list, ICSC(L), sub-unit command, pink list, unit command', etc. and then struggled to find proper jobs, having dropped precipitously behind all their civilian peers of similar ages.
Cons
- Desperately, pitifully short of money - the lack of which infects everything from training, accommodation, morale and welfare. The Army lost in both Iraq and Afghanistan and politicians are unlikely to trust it again for decades - if ever. Accordingly, they are starving it of funds, and this is killing it slowly, from the inside out. - A callous and often brutal culture, in which rank is the only arbiter of how people are treated. - A rank-obsessed organisation, in which power matter more than right or wrong. - Persistent, and long-standing (25 years+) culture of bullying, and failure to properly handle grievances/complaints. Search for "Army Deepcut" or "British Army Bullying" for stories like this: "A second inquest into the death of Cpl Anne-Marie Ellement, who was found hanged, has found the effect of an alleged rape by two serviceman and bullying by colleagues were factors in her taking her own life." - BBC News, 3 March 2014. What you read in the news is just from those whose stories are covered. The Army blocks access to Employment Tribunals, and 'marks its own homework', so most people who encounter problems don't manage to get any coverage, they just have their dreams crushed, and their careers destroyed.