It depends on when you joined. Sometime after 9/11 college benefits in particular were beefed up.

I forget the details, but my dad retired from the service after 20 years.

I think he gets ~50% of his basic pay. I want to say it's inflation adjusted as well.

Their salaries are low, so it's not exactly an amazing retirement. In a low COL state with Social Security it could be helpful assuming you've got everything paid off already.

TriCare is a medical insurance component, but I don't know the details of how good it is. I think for us it was useful as it could sometimes be used as coinsurance, picking up what our other insurance did not. But I also vaguely recall having issues with it being accepted, though I was a kid and didn't pay much attention.

All in all, you're definitely not joining the military to get rich, especially as an enlisted man.

It's very, very hard to do 20 years of service. Individuals typically have very little choice in staying. They must be promoted in a timely fashion or be booted. The problem, at least with the Navy, is that the higher enlisted ranks have fewer openings, meaning more competition, and seniority becomes a factor in promotion. So you may be a great soldier, get good marks from command, and score well on the exams, but still get passed over because people four or five years ahead of you get the job instead.

Each year that you miss a promotion compounds. You can only miss so many promotions before it becomes impossible to hit the rank where you may retire.

IIUC it's the same as anyone else being in the military for 20 years. That's not really enough IMHO for the level of training they have.

Part of the allure of the job is that it's supposed to be about abstract values like honor, duty, loyalty, patriotism etc. and not about compensation. It can't be otherwise, because then you have to accept that the job is basically just about killing people in exchange for money.

It can be about all that stuff and you can pay people well. Nothing about the latter implies you have to suddenly change your values.

And yet I'm sure there are plenty of reasons these roles can make you quite cynical about those values (specifically, if leadership has those values) and decide it's no difference. Might as well make more in private industry without needing retraining.

An E8 who retires at 23 years gets about 2400 bucks a month, reduced cost socialized medical until they hit 65, and that's about it.