Welcome to the board, Virginia!
We have several vets and a few retired military with several more at the ready spot, but so far only one other military ER. (Where the heck is GDER?)
First off, you're not crazy and you are smarter than your co-workers, but you're also in a very small minority. Ironically, although military retirement solves two of ER's biggest challenges, most military don't ER. Unpublished research claims that 75% of retired officers keep working. I don't know of any research on enlisted ERs but lower pensions would discourage ER.
Before you retire you have to get through (at least) the next 11 years and you might want to keep your options open at your next re-enlistment. Assignment officers will stomp all over that long-term obligation and in eight or nine years you may end up in some overseas garden spot getting (highly over-rated) combat pay. Whatever service you're in, get everything you can out of this enlistment but also learn everything you can about the Reserves. One of my biggest regrets today is that when I was at your point I was too ignorant to appreciate the advantages of a Reserve career. (Admittedly that's a small regret, but you can learn from my experiences without repeating them.)
If you make a career of it, take the high-three retirement decision (at 15 years) vice REDUX. The $30K REDUX "bonus" is a bad long-term deal but it's tempting to those who don't do financial math. If you don't know REDUX then join Military.com and start reading the
fine print.
For the next 11 years, if you're not already, you should be maxing out your TSP & Roth IRA contributions. Don't invest in anything else until you've put the most you can in these accounts. I'd recommend a high-stock allocation but you have to make your own sleep-at-night decisions. (You can always pile up bonds & cash in your taxable accounts, but again there are lots of correct answers to the asset-allocation question.)
The two biggest ER challenges are inflation & healthcare. High-three military pensions are indexed to the full COLA (admittedly a manipulated number but there's nothing better) while TRICARE will carry you to Medicare & beyond for only $230 per YEAR. I'm not aware of any other retirement system with these benefits, credibility, & sustainability-- as long as you don't get your assets shot off before you qualify.
I wouldn't recommend an annuity for a military retiree. You're already getting the world's best annuity from the federal govt-- pick your retired paycheck and see how much it'd cost to buy an INFLATION-ADJUSTED annuity from Vanguard or anyone else. Instead I'd keep socking it away in your TSP & IRA and learning to manage your own finances.
Thanks to this decade's sacrifices of thousands, veterans currently have a good reputation with Congress and once again we'll soon have a lot of veterans IN Congress. I don't see any erosion in TRICARE or military pensions for at least the next couple decades. Veteran's organizations have some of the country's highest voting rates and retiree/medical benefits have significantly improved over the last decade.
As for savings, everyone's picture is different and again there are lots of right answers. Track your expenses, throw in a little extra for remodeling & traveling, and run that annual withdrawal in FIRECALC. If you're near a 4% withdrawal rate at anything over an 80% success rate then you'll probably be OK without part-time work. However your real fun for the next 11 years will be tracking & refining those estimates. You can trust FIRECALC as one of the best free calculators on the web, or you can pay some bucks for an extremely detailed analysis at FinancialEngines.com.