Even as a kid, you want to inspire me to join the military, show me the capabilities of the C130, or other airplanes I might actually get to fly.
In typing that, I'm realizing how literally true it was in my life. I considered the military, but as a kid I really only knew about the fighters and once I learned how unlikely it was I would be flying one I gave up and stayed civilian. I didn't have any idea about the many, many other flying jobs in the military until much later in life.
The aviation services have done a relatively visible job of relegating frontline fighters (legitimate extreme population outliers within the DoD specialty code universe) to the background over support/non-flying jobs, in their more recent (last 10 years) history of TV and now social media advertising. At least that's been my experience over 18 years. They've made significant inroads to showcase the air force as an all-inclusive pedestrian jobs program, which in fairness, the in-garrison DoD writ large is.
To your personal anecdote, mine ended up being the opposite. If my only exposure as a kid had been strat airlift,
I would have stayed civilian.
I still contend the usaf does/did it correctly by showcasing the fighters. See, even though I ended up not getting what drew me into military service in the first place, the service still got their pound of flesh out of me. Which is the point of advertising. I don't know how old you are (this board skews boomer old), but in my experience the post-911 modern collective is not ignorant of the existence and availability of non-fighter aircraft in the military. Airshow statics are riddled with them, all the time. I'd know, I've been part of those statics. We even have heavy aircraft demo teams.
Lastly, at least on the usaf side, good bad or indifferent we have decades of market research that says bait and switching 3/4ths of the applicants with dreams of fighters they mathematically can't all attain, is a higher percentage play to fill graduating classes, than casting nets based on mobility aircraft advertisment as the primary.
At the end of the day, we don't have a shortage of people wanting to become pilots. That niche is covered. It's the 95% of other jobs not directly represented by an F-22 doing thrust vectored cobras at the end of the runway, what the usaf ultimately has problems dealing with. As such, the media campaign needs to appeal to those jobs, and I think they're doing that.
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