I'm no stranger to Air Force programs. If you think I'm getting DG, you should have a chat with my Flt/CC here. And since my promotion board to O-4 will be completed before I finish SOS, it wouldn't do much anyways.
I'm doing it because I raged long and hard for years about the title of this thread. Period. They scrapped the original think tank and targeted this one to the CSAF's letter, and I like most others here thought the letter was a spot-on representation of the things we've bitched about for years on BO.net.
I'm no fool. I had dreams of unicorns and magic carpet rides when the last CSAF got rid of Blues Mondays. I will not be similarly enraptured by mere letters from the new CSAF. But after being here for only a week and listening to the various levels of leadership at AU talk about the problems, I haven't found much to disagree with.
I spent all day yesterday in Destin with a beer in my hand soaking up some significant skin cancer fuel. Friday we ate crappy tacos and watched our classmates hit each other in the face with padded sticks, Thursday we went to trivia night at a bar, Wednesday we ate brats and watched a baseball game. Again, all with a beer in my hand. Classes have been almost entirely focused on leadership theory and application, which pilots often lack based on our limited CGO leadership opportunities. And the geeky "think tank" instructions were to use whatever means and methods we choose to gather unfiltered opinions from across the ranks and figure out how to begin solving (it's only four weeks, after all) the single greatest issue fueling bitch-fests in every flying squadron heritage room AF-wide.
Maybe I'm just the luckiest pilot ever to go through SOS, but I gotta say fellas, if this is the experience we've been raging against for so long, maybe we really have lost touch. I wouldn't have turned SOS down three times if I knew it was like this.
Anyways, /rant. Not attacking you, Duck, but I've been facing an existential crisis here because I was expecting to be the lone naysayer in an ocean of shoe-clerk Kool-Aid, and even when the SNCO Academy students came over to "cross-talk," we had a hard time finding topics to disagree over.
Maybe things are so bad that everyone at the squadron levels, officer and enlisted, are finally aligning against the same malignancy. Or maybe they gave me a Kool-Aid enema on day one and I don't remember it. Either way, I could use the help from the one forum that has done more to articulate the problems we face than any think tank or focus group Maxwell could ever assemble. And all you have to do is click some up and down arrows in a website.