Leaderboard

No, it really isn't. Resilience day should provide an opportunity to forget about your life/job/enslavement for awhile. Off-site, civilian clothes, families involved, fun, no "Briefings", no CBTs, corn-hole tourney, trust-falls, Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, and copious amounts of non-alcoholic beer. The human mind can only accept so much stress over set periods of time; why do we have to learn this through empirical evidence... you don't push people to the average limit, because everyone below the average can't take it. You only push people to the lowest common limit (young airmen that barely understand life, and we place the weight of the world on their shoulders), and only then will you see the reduction in suicides. Pushing folks is a fact of life in the military over short durations, but over 10 years it becomes dangerously ineffective. Solution: Reduce the necessary stress wherever/whenever possible: you could argue that maybe AADs/inspections/etc make sense during a peace-time force, but really have no business while actively engaged. Do we really need to deploy 5 FGOs to create power point slides for the Col? Get rid of any and all extraneous stress/duties/deployments and provide stress reliving opportunities whenever possible. Instead of TA for AAD, we need TA-like assistance to go on a cruise, vaca, or other recreational activities. I would rather see tax dollars spent on outdoor rec, than an O'club/Plasmas/BX, so any soldier can actually afford to enjoy more of what they offer. Every base should be required to have a pool, go-cart track (german-style), put-put course, obstacle course, etc., well before we spend a dime on a plasma TV, TIB. You reduce this stress, If you really want to stop suicides, by learning how to say NO to your superiors. NO, we can't launch a 10 turn 10 turn 10. NO, we can't prep for an inspection, fight 2 wars, deploy everywhere, and stay sane. Not only NO, but Hell NO I will not waive his post-deployment down time. You say it enough times and 1 of 2 things will happen: You will get fired and lose your job, or 2 your boss will stop asking. If you get fired, your replacement has a better chance of saying the same thing and might be listened to. I would rather be out of a job by politely dissenting than knowing I pushed the people under me so much that the enemy was no longer the threat, I was. I've come to realize a simple litmus test for a poor leader: He always says Yes to his boss and No to his subordinates, without any thought to the effects of such decisions. Great leaders realize what's important for their unit and when necessary disregard the chaff (AAD, PME, Ancilliary, AFA, CFC, PFT, inspections...) and reward them (not just "award" them) with the opportunity to live stress free and enjoy the benefits of the freedom they provide, if only for a short period of time. I think there are more leaders like this then we think, they just get overshadowed by the temporarily great achievements of other leaders who disregard this logic and by blind, shear luck make it through a 2 year stint without a fallout.

I think part of the problem (leadership fail, not suicide) is that we promote people who say/write things as opposed to doing things. So when suicides increase, they say "Be Resilient" and then appear to be literally mind-boggled when the problem continues. I don't know a single person who thinks these "resiliency days" are actually helping. Maybe, as no fly days, they're taking some of the pressure off of MX, which from what I've read is one of the leading groups for suicide. That's the only value I can see.

https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/2012/05/air-force-tacp-silver-star-afghanistan-battle-050512/ Fvcking amazing. Final score - 270 Taliban dead, 0 US/Coalition casualties. My favorite lines from the article... and It's easy to get cynical with the gayness that mother blue perpetuates everyday, but to think there are men like this on the ground who we have the privelage of supporting puts it in perspective. 'Merica.

video of Delaney controlling one of the strikes. Viper w/GBU-54. https://militarytimes.com/blogs/flightlines/2012/05/02/close-air-support-in-do-ab/ edit - maybe someone can embed the video - my feeble attempt failed

1) Being a drone pilot is more stressful than most people realize 2) Still not putting life at risk(not that pilots in current environment are beyond technical risks) aaaaand boom goes the dynamite. Who's got the next round? I'm wasted.

Fuck yeah. That guy should never buy a beer again for the rest of his life. Folks like this remind me why I put the uniform on in the first place. Well done. :beer:

Not only do they 'say' things and not 'do' things, they say things they know will help them get promoted. They ignore the real problems because it isn't what they want to hear. They really want it to be something they can fix with a few CBTs and a CC call. Air Force management doesn't address the source of any admin issue...they throw paperwork at it and hope it goes away. I'm not saying the pressure of the one mistake Air Force is going to drive people to suicide, but the fact that the Air Force is quick to start paperwork on weak performers without addressing the source is a failure in leadership IMO. It isn't noticed because we have managers bean counting and managing paperwork and no leaders leading people. While management likes to say they provide avenues to talk to about personal problems, often times those individuals are 'labeled.' In today's AF, they are looking to get rid of the 'problem' children, and I believe people with personal issues that affect their work are inadvertently weeded out once they are identified as opposed to having their issues addressed. It is part of the reason people don't speak up or want to give their name when they see problems (refence the article). Overworked, over stressed, instability, the on-again-off-again, cuts, no-cuts, ok more cuts strategy seems to be wearing on the force. What is the Air Force doing to address these things other than talking out of two sides of their mouths? Do you really think any O-5 or above is going to report that things are not ok with the morale of their people? That their people are over worked and stressed? That the cuts we are getting ready to take arent healthy for the force? No..it is Yes Sir, everything is great Sir! Certainly a General whose predecessor was fired for not playing the game isn't going to tell his bosses these cuts this early are a bad idea. Until the AF invests in its people and no-shit addresses and fixes the route causes of people's stresses, we'll continue to see a rise in suicides, domestic violence, ARIs, and other administrative issues. Just my opinion...and at my rank, it doesn't matter.

Or maybe for once and all the Air Force will pull their heads out of their asses and draw a line like the Navy does. Line vs Restricted line. Computer geeks need Masters Degrees, so do engineers, meterologists yup. Pilots/Operators etc do not. Quit comparing the folks that need degrees for mission success to those that don't. And if there is a pilot/operator out there that goes ahead and gets a meaningless masters we shank him/her.

Did you know that drones can be "flown" from anywhere and that you can put a small detachment of people in the shitty places where they take off and land and have the majority of people "fly" them from somewhere else that's not shitty? No? Neither does anyone else above the rank of O-5.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Chalk it up to me being a dumb Rescue guy, but less flowery speech, and more digestible phraseology might mean people would actually read your essay. You come off pompous.

I believe that "Sabatoge" remains the single greatest video ever made for MTV.

That's a big part of the problem: there aren't enough people to have this kind of manning. Even the measures that the AF has been trying for years -- TAMI21, extended/indefinite assignments, nonvols, re-tread Navs, Beta class, RPA-only AFSC and training pipeline -- still haven't been able to make it so that the AF can satisfy all the needs of the supported units in theater AND have enough qualified operators to make it a "normal flying job" in terms of hours and work week. Despite changes to the face of OEF and OIF, there is still an insatiable need for ISR. Without getting into specific numbers, the number of daily requests for ISR by supported units in theater outnumbers the total number of available ISR sorties (including all manned and unmanned ISR assets) over 6-to-1. It's an unbelievably big elephant to eat, even WITH the full-throttle press the AF has been involved in making RPA operators the last 5 or 6.9 years. Anyone who has worked with those supported units knows there are more than a fair share of those ISR 'requirements' that are ground commanders gaming the system or wanting ISR just as a security blanket rather than for a true operational need: IMHO there is a lot of fluff in those requests because supported unit commanders often don't know what goes into generating that sortie in terms of time and effort by the USAF (having spoken to a number of green-Army types, ISR is mostly PFM as far as they're concerned). The ISR cells do a decent job of filtering out some of this when they do the daily ATO matches, but there's still a lot of fluff (meaning a lot of time with ISR assets on station watching things with no immediate value when there are other taskings that would have immediate value to the commanders). Until the supported units can get their requests under control, this insatiable need will continue.

No. This is what I'm trying to bitch slap into your skull. You are not right. And it does affect the paper's core argument. You can pull whatever math textbook geekery out that you want, but there is no fucking way that you can say with a straight face that your risk is more than manned guys. I don't do statistics and probabilities, but I do caveman math and here's how it plays out: Falling to sleep on the way to work--How many dudes have you lost in the last 10 years doing that? Creech terrorist attack--How many guys have you lost to that? Then why don't you tell me how many dudes we've lost in manned airplanes in theater and tell me if that's more than the others. No formulas and gibberish can get you past that one. The fact is that this does affect your core argument because your core argument 1) includes the concept of risk with regard to combat and 2) is intended to try and influence an audience. Your intended audience cannot see past your ridiculous statment. Therefore making that ridiculous statement--and continuing to defend it--means that your core argument is ineffective because it's not being heard. FYI...you should know that your article has gone viral on AF email and the commentary all reads something like "UFB". I know you are trying to help your bros--and that's admirable--but this risk argument is an embarrassment to them. An absolute embarrassment.

To be fair, I think he's just trying to show that even under worse stressful conditions, maintaining a positive attitude is important. When I think of good things my commanders have done, I have to say that one of the best things any of them did was to sit us down as a squadron and lock the doors. He then asked us, what problems we were having. He had the exec write down everything on a white board. What he expected to be a 1 hr session went to nearly 3 hrs. We got a LOT off of our collective chests. At the end, he wrote down everything, told us that if anyone had any further things they didn't want to bring up in the group, he'd be in his office. A line formed otuside his office and he took complaints for the next couple of hours. Now anyone can sit there and listen to people bitch left and right, but HE DID SOMETHING ABOUT IT!!! He wen and got stuff changed to make our lives easier. He started watching why we were stepping to the jets late. Instead of blaming the aircrew, he pointed out to the Group Commander that OG policies dictated the impossible for crews to step on time with the tasks they were required to do, much less if there were any problems. He made sure we had appropriate pubs for the jets and got on Stan/Eval to fix their programs. He worked with the OSS to have our gear ready for us at step time (not 5 minutes later). He took care of the little stuff and made us a better squadron. And it all started with a bitch session... ...put that in your pipe and smoke it Psychiatrist!