12Y vs 12B

You will make maps that will be wrong by the time they're printed, distributed, and used by someone who is holding them sideways. Your GIS software will be ESRI products running on government computers that were fast in 2016, and you will learn to love the spinning cursor as a meditation practice. The actual geospatial work is technically interesting — terrain analysis, route planning, data layer integration, coordinate system management — and the people who find it interesting are generally very good at it. The problem is that 'geospatial engineer' sounds more like a civilian job title than a military one, which means officers will use you for things that have nothing to do with geospatial engineering. Your clearance plus your GIS skills plus a GIS certificate from a community college puts you in line for federal contractor roles, USGS, mapping companies, and tech firms doing location intelligence. The civilian demand is legitimate. The military utilization of your actual skills is, characteristically, aspirational.

The CSO is the officer who is not flying the airplane but is responsible for what the airplane does — weapons employment, navigation, electronic warfare, sensor management. On the B-52, this means managing a crew position with direct control over weapons systems that have not fundamentally changed since the Cold War and also avionics that have been updated six times with questionable integration. On the B-1, the CSO manages the most capable conventional strike platform in the inventory with a targeting precision that was inconceivable when the aircraft was designed. The pilot gets to land the plane and the CSO gets to break things — the culture has made peace with this. The career path for CSOs is narrower than for pilots, which affects promotion rates and assignment variety. The technical expertise in weapons systems and electronic warfare translates to defense industry positions that pay considerably more than Air Force O-pay. Raytheon, Boeing, and every major defense platform contractor needs people who have operated their systems at operational proficiency. That is you.