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Tonight we honored a fallen soldier during a ramp ceremony at BAF. As his team unloaded the flag draped casket from the HMMWV and walked him up the C-17 ramp, five soldiers from the 10th Mountain Band played Amazing Grace and another somber and respectful song. Soldiers in the 10th Mountain Band carry weapons, can pull guard duty and are capable of killing the enemy. They also have unique musical skills and equipment to honor the dead and comfort the grieving in combat. Their primary purpose is combat and ceremonial duties while entertaining is a collateral duty. Our Air Force bands primarily entertain and should be cut to the level where they only support ceremonial events in the DC area. We can contract the entertainment if we decide we can afford entertainment for a fraction of the cost. Cutting our AF bands (not including TIB) by 75% would save $180M in personnel and O&M costs over the FYDP. Cutting AF bands and eliminating their AFSCs are easy decisions that should have been made years ago.

2 on what Day Man said...call up the flying squadron scheduling shop, tell them who you are and what you want to do. They should find an Lt or young Capt to bring you out to a jet within a week. If they don't they're stupid. Nobody likes the zipper-suited sungod prima donna reputation and most guys actively try to fix it. We do pet the jet tours about every 3 weeks for the FTAC course at Spang for every FTAC class. I have given a couple of the tours and some of the Airmen had no idea there are fighters in the fighter wing...it's something. "So do you fly the big jets on the other side of the base too?" is a fairly common question. I've also heard that at a non-RoK PACAF base during the mandatory in-processing briefings they actually give the Secret // NO-FORN mission brief of the base and some capes of the jets at a classification higher than "overseas air show." Another thing that has started happening more and more recently is referencing the base and squadron DOC statement missions. I don't know if the CS has a DOC statement mission, I assume it does. Enabling X A/C to deploy in Y hours or something like that?

call the squadrons, ask to speak to the newest Lt, request statics with them...OPR bullets around, perspective gained for your Amn.

Negative. It's a culture we've allowed to build up over time in all communities. I can't tell you how many Comm guys I get to re-educate about how the aircraft flying is more important than patching their systems, or doing some nerd work. Look at the ESD, you think anyone educated about providing air power had a hand in deciding to roll-out.. and then kill that atrocity? But.. you think only support guys were involved in that decision? No, it's a failure of Support and the Rated officers who run stuff in the Air Force. I imagine some of the same problems persist with our MX brethren as well. Cyber can't get anyone but Space Generals running. Good thing they know what the local Comm Sq. is going through. I'm very thankful for this board because it's helped me realize the Ops side of the house. The Amn in my Flight don't even know the aircraft at my base. I'm trying to think of ways to fix that.

And knowing Big Blue, each year they would be given a hearing test and sent to Keesler (or wherever) to re-establish their baseline....

Fact. However, the on-the-ramp lower ranking wrench benders will give 100% to provide quality maintenance and fix the jet and get it back on status. Those guys just want fix the jet right the first time and not dick around doing "good enough" to meet some magical 8 hour fix rate established back in the 1980s where we tons of people and jets. Give em' the parts and time they need and it'll get done right the first time. It'll hurt but once problem areas are highlighted then steps can be taken to correct them. It's at the AMU (do we still have those?) supervision level where the stats and finger pointing game gets played.

"DOC" = Designed Operational Capability You may not have one, I don't know, that's why I asked. Your wing almost certainly does, it's the SIPR side mission statement of what your base is expected by the COCOMs for war making. If you don't...maybe you should get one. It might help your lack of mission focus.

What? Posted from the NEW Baseops.net App!

It would cut the disability claims for MX engine troops and crew chiefs...

Maybe? Posted from the NEW Baseops.net App!

Part of the problem is we operators need to do a better job educating the support folks. Granted you'll find a lot who could care less but still. Back when I was a young captain and the squadron EWO (insert nav joke here), I took some of the defense avionics troops into the sim so they could kinda see how we use the stuff (would have loved to get them a flight, but crew chiefs should go first and not enough flights to go around). They were really jazzed about it and the senior guy was a MSgt who told me he'd been working on the B-1 for 15 years and this was the first time a crewdawg had taken him into the sim to explain how we use the equipment he worked on. Did the same thing for the radar maintainers and got the same response.

What kills me about MX playing stats games is that those stats should help highlight things like under-manning and acquisitions problems. Guess it's better to hide the problems and kick the can down the road.

" economical driven" is simply another way of saying cheap skilled labor from the 3rd world. Companies like Bank of America are lobbying hard to open the flood gates of skilled labor visas. If you don't believe me there is an entire apartment complex in Charlotte full of computer analyst that are contracted by the Ta Ta corporation from India. They bring these people over for 6 months at a time, cram 6-8 in an apartment, and pay them 1/3 of what they used to pay a skilled American worker. Both political parties are an abysmal failure. Democrats what to turn these people into a future constituency, the republicans want to appease the cheap labor lobby who want to exploit them for cheap labor. Here's another fun fact, culturally Hispanic aliens vote for whoever is giving out the bacon in their own countries. They are not, as a voting block, value voters. Pat Buchanan has made the most articulate argument regarding this issue. He is absolutely correct when he says that America is no longer a country, but rather a "geographical expression" when you take into consideration the apathetic response to the current invasion.

Hence why the navy calls its navs NFOs. NFO: No Future Outside.

Or dental school, med school, oil rig work. Jesus Christ, it's amazing how much the nav mentality abounds amongst public workers.