Leaderboard

At least I get to peruse this while doing my CBT on what the AF thinks a brothel looks like.....they must be into some low class whores.

Agree completely. In my experience, people were much happier in the AF in the 90s. Even the people who were getting out weren't leaving because they'd been screwed over, or were pissed at big blue in general. The commanders were largely pretty good, people did their job and went home to their families. I hate to say it, but in my opinion the AF is measurably worse in every area. I've been trying to think of just ONE thing I can honestly say is better now than then, and I can't come up with anything. Seriously. It breaks my heart.

You left off all the additional duty bullshit, makework queep, the Social Justice Warriors running rampant, nauseating careerism, and the abuse/mismanagement of the pilot career field. Active Duty is so fucked, yet it was all so preventable.

The only thing that saved the Air Force from the late 1990's low bonus take rate was 9/11, the airlines stopped hiring and there was an obvious rise in patriotism. IMHO today is a perfect storm of intense hiring pressure from the airlines (partially do to increased demand but also a function of age 65 retirement kicking in), combined with a force that is fed up with the relentless ops tempo and constant trips to the desert.

It's an easy game: give people some semblance of family life ability and don't waste their time on bullshit taskers, deployments, stuff that has absolutely zero to do with their job, etc. Keep doing that shit and 95% of the "golden children" will keep punching. A few incentives go a long way, but the AF has apparently zero capability to pull its cranium out of its ass and see that.

Which AETC guys are X-Banded and deploy to shitty staff jobs for longer times than they did in their MDS. YMMV.

With you 100% on that. But in reality, we'll never be so limited on capability that we can't keep going to 3rd world shitholes, so I'm not so sure limiting our capability against larger threats would overall have the effect you and I want. I hate to say it, but I think the only real way to stop going everywhere is to get our shit pushed in (and I mean for real). Congress/the public doesn't give a shit about what has happened the past 15 years, but they would care when a draft starts, we're losing 20 aircraft per day, etc.

It was on JQP. It must be true!

The irony. Promo boards never see the FEF! And many of those deployment Q3s were viewed as spiteful by the home unit, so... those just make for interesting airline interview stories. SWA inteviewer: TMA your Q3. Dude: I wore a baseball cap while flying troops from A to B. Commander Douche saw it and didn't like it. SWA: Yeah, what a douche. Say, what was his name so we can blackball it? Out