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I'm shocked. Guess GC and his cronies have it all figured out. I can't thank dipshits like him enough. As a 2nd year UAL guy now, I pick up a 3% pay raise in Jan, which on average months, nets me 150% what I made as a AD Major. In Feb I get a nice 4.4% raise again (thanks DAL bubbas). Then, in mid-Feb I'll receive a profit sharing check that exceeds GC's entire monthly pay, whatever his rank actually is. Shortly thereafter I hit year 3 and pick up another 23% pay hike. On top of it all, I average over half of the month off and currently live three miles from Lake Tahoe. My family finally has a home and is happy. Even my fu(&;ng dog is a happy camper. Life isn't perfect but it's pretty damn good and exponentially better than it ever could've been on AD. I do USAFR shit on the side because I want to and don't let it detract from my life. It doesn't pay and also doesn't interfere while still letting me do something worthwhile. There is no comparison between where I was and where I am. I didn't post to brag. I posted to help those facing such a grand decision and turning point in their lives. Take the leap. Life is good. If you don't, mama blue will be there to coddle you and GC will be there to continue ass probing you with big black veiny!

NS, overall I agree with and appreciate your post. The one place I disagree is quoted above, and it's semantics. Did they really hack our democratic institutions and processes? They didn't actually change any votes, influence voting machines, or manipulate the election day vote counts. Certainly they maliciously uncovered and exposed the dirty laundry of one of the political parties, but the laundry was already made dirty (and hidden) by that party. Had our investigative media done what is arguably their job and been willing to bring this information to the fore, we'd be celebrating the exposure. In the absence of an independent media, however, average Americans were left to rely on normally unthinkable sources, and the DNC's arrogant reaction certainly didn't help things.

My decision to leave just keeps getting easier and easier. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Nonsense, now you're just arguing an obtuse position. That's like saying we should never have have had the Watergate tapes. This is exactly the kind of corruption bullshit that journalists are supposed to be exposing, instead of jerking off about tweets and hollow one-liners. They're supposed to develop contacts, get a whiff of something foul, prod for someone they know who has knowledge of it and doesn't like what's going on, then expose it. In this election, the DNC was more threat to our national sovereignty than any foreign state, so no, I would rather not take steps towards conflict about it. Let's save these "red lines" for things that are actual problems. Edit: Like hacking part of our grid with spearphishing, maybe.

I'll agree that there is no evidence Russia was able to affect the actual votes, I don't think anyone is really claiming that they did. The election results were what they were. #MAGA That being said, it's not like they didn't try. More than 20 states faced cyberthreats during the election, although as is pointed out in the story, state databases and digital systems are probed and pinged pretty much constantly. Luckily for us all our election systems are very, very decentralized and our state election cyber folks seem to have better security practices than the inept idiots at the DNC. I would argue that our major political parties and political campaigns are a part of our "democratic institutions." They have confidential data about our national leaders as well as future Presidents. Parties have opposition research on both the other guys as well as their own candidate - potential health issues, financial vulnerabilities, non-public financial disclosures, strength/weakness assessments, etc. As long as we run elections through political parties, I don't want the Russians or any other foreign country or group to have access to that kind of data, data that can be used against an incoming Presidential administration or the country as a whole. John Podesta's emails would not have been "revealed" by an investigative journalist...the Russians literally hacked his password through spearphishing. If a journalist would have done that, they would be put in jail. So yea, sunshine is the best disinfectant, but it's a slippery slope to wish for your adversary's "dirty laundry" to be aired via hacking. Marco Rubio, whom I disagree with on many things, had the right take on this. He said: “I will not discuss any issue that has become public solely on the basis of Wikileaks. As our intelligence agencies have said, these leaks are an effort by a foreign government to interfere with our electoral process and I will not indulge it. Further, I want to warn my fellow Republicans who may want to capitalize politically on these leaks: Today it is the Democrats. Tomorrow it could be us. Just think about this: Do we really want to be a country where foreign leaders or foreign intelligence agencies can blackmail our elected officials and say to them that unless you do what we want you to do, we’re gonna release emails from your campaign manager, your wife, your daughter, your son, and we’re gonna embarrass you. So unless you wanna be embarrassed you better do what we want you to do. Is that what we want? Because I’ll tell you that’s what Vladimir Putin does. I think there’s plenty of material in which to line up and take on Secretary Clinton. I think this one is an invitation to chaos and havoc in the future."

3rd year NB FO. Worked 88 days this year and flew 559 hours. I grossed $169k. Good luck Air Force!

Here's the thing. This isn't just the DNC being embarrassed. You're making it sound like, "Eh... no biggy. They hacked a major political party and released that through wikileaks. Possibly influencing an election in their favor (proven by next-Pres tweets). No harm, no foul." Meanwhile we've got Russians using cyber for real world effects other places: Ukraine Annex, and the increased harassment of diplomats and on-going effects there. Georgian War Ukrainian Power System (twice) NATO, Finland, Germany... lets just call it Europe Joint Cheifs getting hacked Tons of other stuff not for here Why aren't you looking at this Russia cyber involvement as a whole against the electoral process? Do you not consider the Info Op as that, or do you think this is a one off? What would be your red line in this instance? I've been reading a lot about the Intel/Info Ops side of Russia for the past decade and it's fascinating what Putin's put into place and now how he's starting to extend that overseas. It's a very interesting form of power projection we're not used to, and ill-equipped to deal with at the moment. I consider the DNC hack part of that overall campaign, and am wary of simply concluding that because no one died and/or money was lost we should just call it a wash and wait for next time to at least say something. We're very close to being back in a Cold War state with a peer, not even near-peer, in Cyber. This could just be something we agree to disagree on, as I've had to with much of my hyper-right-wing family who doesn't care if it was Russians. Which... given they grew up under Reagan, is very strange.

Quite a few of my friends in the ANG side have just outright quit or transitioned to non-flying positions inside the unit and outside. Sent from my iPhone using Baseops Network Forums

The ARC is going through their own problems. I Palace Chased to the ANG over a decade ago and open ART/AGR positions at the time were non-existant. My unit had at least a dozen bums brown-nosing as much as they could to prove their worth so the unit would even think about hiring them into the next opening. More than half of our full-time positions were filled by Lt Col's (furloughed airline pilots) who got hired into lots of vacancies (from the 99-01 airline hiring boom) after 9/11. Today, it's full-timer mass exodus all over again. We can't fill full-time jobs with anyone other than 2Lt's fresh out of UPT. It's great for them. A GS-13 job as an Lt is not so shabby cash for someone with very little responsibility. We can't even fill AGR jobs. Noone wants to be stuck in a long tour in the event a legacy calls them. We've got part-timers who are taking non-flying jobs (both inside and outside the unit) to finish out their last few years to get to 20 for a Guard retirement. We've got others who are pushing the button right at 20 when in years past, they'd go to 28 as a Lt Col. You have to understand that a 15+ year FO at UPS who makes near $20k a month loses a lot of money to drop a trip to come do duty at the unit or even more to do a 30 day rotation in CENTCOM. AGR's get the same pilot bonus Active Duty gets and they are just now giving incentive bonuses to ART's, but at the end of the day, very few besides the ones who don't have enough flight time to get to major airline, are interested. The ART program is antiquated and not on par with the pay/benefits of a commercial airline job. There are specific job series groups who get special payscales and better retirement benefits (ATC and LEO), but for some reason they chose to keep the pilot series the same as every other GS (aside from a flat 30% locality across the country). The 30% bump up was essentially supposed to be a bonus, but the powers that be at the time didn't feek it was smart to add a bonus on top of locality. For people that live in higher cost of living areas upwards of 25%+ locality, the "pilot bonus" is pretty much non-existant. Other job series get a better FERS retirement. ARC ART's are still at a 1:1 ratio (1% of your highest 3 years for every year of federal service). I believe ATC gets 1.7:1. $100,000 with over 20 years for us is $20,000 per year; for ATC it's $34,000. Quite significant. Their justification was that ATC controllers have a shorter federal career. Um... hello. So do us pilots! The old ANG is gone. We're pretty damn busy and we're only manned at about 30% full-timers. We've got traditional guardsmen getting 150-200 days of mil duty per year on top of having civilian jobs. It's not a flying club anymore. All of the complaints about ancillary training, additional duties, shoe clerk driven policies, you name it... we live with it also and just imagine trying to keep up with all of that doing it as a "part-time" job. Sent from my SM-G935V using Tapatalk

The language is actually significantly more complicated than that. It reads: "Necessary modifications to the military retirement system, including the retired pay multiplier, to ensure that members of the Armed Forces under the pay structure are situated similarly to where they would otherwise be under the military retirement system that will take effect on January 1, 2018, by reason part I of subtitle D of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2016 (Public Law 114–92; 129 Stat. 842), and the amendments made by that part." That 1 Jan 18 retirement system is the new one that includes TSP contributions. Clearly they want to modify the multiplier. I hope us old guys will still be grandfathered as we were supposed to be with the new system, but that will be very complicated with a mass multiplier adjustment based on an entire new pay structure. Might by time to buy stock in KY.

You missed the part when this new plan is supposed to include a way to keep retirement payouts at the same level, and not increase them by increasing base pay.

I'm a Dem, but nice try. And Americans observing the level of corruption within the DNC should probably be turning over that information to American journalists. The foreign influence in the Clinton Foundation, the intentional tanking of Sanders' campaign, etc. Those things should not be part of our political process. Let's fix that stuff. Snowden: don't tell me that you equate stealing/releasing classified information with uncovering political underhandedness committed by some cronies. Not the same.

The watergate tapes were leaked by multiple Americans to American journalists. There was a crime committed at the behest of the president. What crime was there committed at the behest of the DNC? What was a threat to national security from the DNC along the lines of Russian Influence Operations (it was not hacking) of our election? Simply because we disagree with their political platform doesn't mean they're going to send the country plummeting into the abyss--R's kept the legislature. Don't intertwine what journalists are supposed to do with this stuff. I guess you'd say Snowden leaking the NSA's secrets (including telling them we knew Russians were hacking their own soon to be assassinated journalists) was great for the nation to? Is that the kind of corruption bullshit you're talking about? Or are you talking about the kind of bullshit where it's ok for Russian Intelligence Services to target US political parties to influence an election through a biased intermediary (wikileaks) and we all pretend it was ok because it was someone we didn't want to vote for? Also, the "hacking of the power grid" thing.. really? They found it on one laptop not on the grid with the indicators from the report and RAN to the press to report it ASAP. Didn't get a Cyber Security Org (ex. CrowdStrike, F-Secure, Mandiant) in there to figure out what was going on. So.. if there was indicators in the power grid, they're now gone.

No, but when you're making decisions that could push us closer to conflict with Russia about some DNC shenanigans that should have been unearthed by an investigative journalist worth their salt, it seems warranted to provide some real justification.

I'm aware. Just pointing out that they didn't even try to pass a Constitutional Amendment the last time they controlled both houses of Congress and thus controlled the agenda. Besides, I'm not aware of a Constitutional Amendment ever being passed without bipartisan support, so if it wasn't worth progressives' efforts when they had super majorities then I don't know why they would bring it up now...because surely their current argument can't just be because of politics, right?

That would have added ~$5,376 to my last Active Duty income tax bill. Wow.

Dude, you're at quibbling level MAX here. I'm sitting here telling myself to shut up because hearing this from the token liberal member of the forums won't change your mind, but I just can't. This should not and cannot become a partisan issue. Russia, our chief state-actor geopolitical foe for the last 70+ years conducted a cyberattack against our country's democratic institutions and processes and we need to be unified in standing up and saying we're not going to take that lying down. Let's review the facts: The October 7th Joint DHS and ODNI Election Security Statement was put out by, you guessed it, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. If the DNI's support seems to be what you're hung up on, go back and read that statement. The first sentence reads, "The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations." In support of that October 7th statement, additional analysis was released yesterday. In the second paragraph of the new Joint Analysis Report, it says, "This determination expands upon the Joint Statement released October 7, 2016, from the Department of Homeland Security and the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security." This new JAR is a direct follow-up to the October 7th DHS/ODNI statement, meaning that both DHS and the ODNI support its conclusions, along with the entire rest of the intelligence community. It's almost like Homeland Security and the FBI are the relevant agencies to analyze an attack on the homeland and they were tasked by the ODNI to lead the analysis that backs up the ODNI's October statement... Let's be clear: there is only one primary incoming policymaker in particular who denies that the IC has reached a consensus or that Russia is behind the hacking...the President-Elect. His personal staffers and cabinet members are following the boss' lead. Look at a sampling of Congressional leaders from the President-Elect's own party for some contrast: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, “Any foreign breach of our cybersecurity measures is disturbing, and I strongly condemn any such efforts. The Russians are not our friends.” Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, “As I’ve said before, any foreign intervention in our elections is entirely unacceptable. And any intervention by Russia is especially problematic because, under President Putin, Russia has been an aggressor that consistently undermines American interests.” Senator John McCain, “We need to get to the bottom of this. There’s no doubt they [Russia] were interfering. There’s no doubt. The question is now, how much and what damage? And what should the United States of America do?” If you'd like a bipartisan statement, on December 11th, Senators McCain (R), Graham (R), Schumer (D) and Reed (D) said: "For years, foreign adversaries have directed cyberattacks at America’s physical, economic, and military infrastructure, while stealing our intellectual property. Now our democratic institutions have been targeted. Recent reports of Russian interference in our election should alarm every American. This cannot become a partisan issue [emphasis mine]. The stakes are too high for our country. We are committed to working in this bipartisan manner, and we will seek to unify our colleagues around the goal of investigating and stopping the grave threats that cyberattacks conducted by foreign governments pose to our national security." There's so much we can disagree on political and policy-wise in this country...let's not choose to completely disregard the facts and disagree about an attack by another hostile state upon our own.

This is my surprised face.

In no way will they let this benefit us. But that would be a nice incentive! Sent from my iPhone using Baseops Network Forums

I wonder if my retirement pay calculation will include the housing "compensation." May make those last 3 years in DC suck a tiny bit less.

nsplayr did a good job of articulating the benefits...the key one being workload. The second major advantage was a selling point for other versions of light attack and that was the ability to fly with a host nation aircrew member. If you go back and read our doctrine it actually says we don't want to be in all these small fights, we want to build partner capacity to fight the small fights in their own back yard before the turn into something more serious that requires our participation. The "reattack" on lite attack in the mid to late 2000's was based on the construct that we would fly the aircraft to country X, spend a period of time training them to fly and employ the aircraft, then our folks would fly home commercial and leave the aircraft for country X to fight with. Another huge benefit not related to one or two seats is cost to operate. The A-10, F-16/15E, B-1/52 and Gunships are all great airplanes but they are expensive to operate. Scorpion and other versions offer 80% capability at 1/4 the cost.

Good luck getting AFRC to give more money. ART jobs just aren't desirable like they used to be, even with superior qual/recruitment/retention bonuses. Everyone wants MPA while their apps are in at the majors .

I do it intentionally including and especially to those who wish me "Happy Holidays." 99% of the time you can see the relief on the well-wisher's face that they aren't A) going to be sued or called racist and that B) some traditions remain. I started to post the below in the "leaving for the airlines thread" since it essentially dealt with a form of stop-loss. But in the time from work to driving home, the powers that be caved to liberal pressure so to here it is posted: Rockettes must perform With this as a nice chaser: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/23/donald-trump-voters-revenge-giving-holidays-christmas-gifts-donations Tell me again how it'sboth sides that need to "get along?"

The common ground has been there, but I just don't think the issues dominate politics today. It's a popularity contest. 2008: Dems masterfully slipped in the "first black President". He was the cool new guy and didn't fit the old, grumpy, lack-luster politician look that McCain had going on. 2012: Romney reeked of snobby rich guy, and Obama just put out the zingers during the debate and everyone drooled over the "cool-guy" persona again. 2016: The media shoves Clinton's "credentials" down our throat and calls her the "most qualified candidate in history" - just 4 years after telling us that being qualified wasn't "cool" and that we needed less politicians and more cool guys like Obama that treat the President's podium like a celebrity roast. Also, the moderates aren't in control of the media... So as a moderate Republican, all I hear is: -Don't want to jail/kill a cop for shooting someone who acted like they had a gun, or actually did have a gun pointed at the cop?-> Racist -Want to vet immigrants from a war torn country? -> Islamaphobe -Are you a successful straight white male? -> Everything was given to you. -Unsuccessful woman, gay, and/or black? -> You're not successful because the straight white male dominated system is out to get you.

And what's the plan to magic up all the instructors who will need to train these dudes? It should go without saying, but to replace a pilot with X years experience, it takes X years. Trading combat experienced IPs for UPT grads is a shit deal. Sent from my iPhone using Baseops Network Forums

A commercial pilot with a Murcielago? I need a new job.

On the other hand would it be better to have guys who know what a dead 18 year old looks like instead of all chickenhawks ,neocons and east coast elitists who have never served. VP Pence son is a Marine, I believe having skin the game comes a new way of thinking.

There is at least a 1% chance mad dog will walk the pentagon halls with a fire hose just blasting weaklings out the windows. Probably a 99% chance status quo is maintained. But that 1% is highly attractive! And no matter how it turns out, I doubt he'll spend energy on crafting the right tranny integration policy while we're losing wars everywhere, which is certainly how the past few years have looked.

John Kennedy, conservative for US Senate...in a commercial on how powerful the US military is. Nice work.

We have a plan to backfill the bomber community with additional UPT grads to make up for any shortfall you may see over the next few years due to staff demands. It will be better for your communities as well, since new pilots have more longevity. All-around win-win. Hopefully the fighter and RPA guys get excited about the first bonus raise in a generation. Definitely a sweet pot of money on that rainbow: $35K/yr for 9 years! I am pleased that the issue of "raising the bonus" finally worked out. We had a lot of personnelists spend many hours to make sure our pilots are paid the correct amount via the bonus. Very exciting that it finally happened. Pilots, wherever you are at, please thank a personnelist. That small gesture will make a world of difference. Merry Christmas, all.