Well actually it is intended to be useful advice. Don't get all defensive just because it's not what you want to hear.
To make it as an officer in the British Armed Forces is very challenging indeed (particularly if you want to become aircrew). Recruitment is hugely oversubscribed by very motivated, high calibre candidates who are intensely focussed on their intended career. To get through the application stage is very tough. For those that make it through selection, the training is then very, very tough (on a scale that I suspect you do not yet comprehend).
The chances are that if your heart and aspirations actually lie in a different career, you will be found out at interview and not make it past stage 1. If somehow you do make to training, and your heart is not in it, you are very unlikely to succeed. Even some of the most motivated candidates don't make it through training. If you're sitting on a moorside at 4am in a gale, freezing cold, hungry, fatigued, with 20 odd kg of kit and another 15 miles to go, and you're thinking 'only another 16 years of this before I can poke off to the airlines' then... well, you see my point. The forces don't need people who see them as a last resort.
If on the other hand you're thinking of joining in the ranks, then you may well get in. However, although first class life experience, it may not be the sort of experience that particularly advances your career towards the airlines and on a private soldier or NCO's wage, you'll probably be too poor to pay for fATPL training until you're too old to stand a good chance of getting a job.
The exasperated replies you have received are a result of us so often hearing people suggest that the forces (RAF in particular) are a cheap shortcut to becoming an airline pilot. Those people are in for a shock. If you want to become an airline pilot I would suggest a more direct approach.
Last edited by Torque Tonight; 17th January 2011 at 15:53.