Leaderboard

Youre going to have to explain what you mean by “direct effects.” If I take an 29 ship of C-17s loaded with a brigade from the 82d, wrap them in a gorilla package of SEAD/Strike/CAS/ISR, and send them north of the DMZ to seize an airfield, that has “direct effects” on the enemy. They teach that at the WIC... Or do you mean “weapons effects” when you say “direct effects”? If so, I’d say that limiting the WIC education to the employment of guns/bombs/missiles/radars is a Blue-4 level of understanding of the employment of airpower. The WIC is not about that (beyond Core One/Two academics...) it’s way more. Your post is littered with double speak and lack of understanding of not only what the Weapons School teaches and produces but of the operational-level employment of American airpower. But it takes time and experience to comprehend how much one doesn’t know, especially about other MWS’s, employment, tactics, etc. and I’m far from an authority... Just trying to give you a view of what the WIC sees - take it or leave it. It’s already been said - the WIC isn’t all about weapons employment. If the name is all that matters to you, I don’t really know what to tell you and you certainly don’t want to hear it from me. Chuck

You’re gonna have to explain what you mean by “political posturing” brother. Your post says having experts is good, having schools is good, but you’re hung up on the “Weapons” piece of it? Then you loop in the quip about ISR... and it tells me you don’t know what youre taking about. And there’s no argument. The really interesting one is cyber. Those guys can have devastating effects... does what they employ classify as a weapon? Should they have a Weapons School? You’ll be hard pressed to find a warfighting commander willing to go to war without them... As a commander I want to be able to have go to guys there when the shit hits the fan. I can look at the squadron/AOC/Staff, see the patches and universally across the USAF it’s understood what the patch means, what those guys do, what those guys know. From personal experience, when ops were being planned and despite the expertise in the squadron, I pulled in the patches first and everyone else second. Thats all we are talking about, and it’s the only piece about going to the WIC that matters. Getting hung up on the “Weapons” piece of Weapons School is missing the forest for the first tree seen. Chuck

That’s not what your mom said.

He's a dishonest huckster because you believe you've found a semantical flaw in the phrase "cultural Marxism" that he uses in a few of his arguments? He repeatedly admits he is open to the idea that there could be errors in his logic, and seeks to find intellectually honest debates to find "truth". You're simply dismissing the entirety of the man's ideas because you disagree with the way he placed two words together, yet you're providing no original alternatives to any of them... and it took you 4 paragraphs to do it, which reeks more of pseudo-intellectualism than anything he has said.

(Forced gazing) Seriously. I wish I could understand a 1/10 of that. Seems like it would be interesting. Oh well, back to football and beer.

AFPC will start loading one by one after public release. Then it is up to your MPF and training monitor to inform you. I would realistically envision Thursday at the soonest for most.

Those are methods for getting a monthly airline schedule. A "line" is a month's (typically) worth of trips. When someone talks about a "line" they are usually referring to actual trips all month. There are also "lines" of reserve "on call" days but those usually aren't referred to in the same context as "holding a line" - which means you can avoid reserve and actually go fly regularly for the month. So - line bidding means that someone (union pilots, company workers, a combination) builds schedules using a series of individual trips that have already been constructed before they get put into lines. They do the same thing with schedules of reserve days. This is done for every aircraft type and each seat in that aircraft. Enough schedules (of both flying and reserve) are built so that there are enough for almost every pilot in whatever aircraft and seat they fly. So, the 767 Captains in a particular base can look at their February bid pack and see each individual flying line and reserve line available to them. The #1 seniority pilot picks first and so on. Once the schedules are awarded in seniority order, everyone has their schedule except for maybe 5-20% of the pilots in each fleet/seat (depending on airline). Those who don't are the ones who couldn't hold one of the pre-set schedules or chose not to. Their schedules (typically called secondary lines) will be determined later once the line holders and reserve pilot's schedules have dealt with known conflicts between trips or reserve days and other events like mil leave, recurrent training, vacation and conflicts with trips from the current month carrying over into the new month for which they just bid. The unassigned trips and reserve days that results from those conflicts will be built into new schedules for those 5-20% of the pilots still waiting for their schedules using inputs for what they want (again in seniority order) that they give to the planners. PBS is essentially the secondary process I just described for the 5-20% applied to the entire pilot group. The flying and reserve days are not built into pre-determined lines (schedules). As a result, the schedules are built to avoid conflicts from the start and there is no need for the secondary process I described above. This is obviously more efficient and requires fewer pilots overall. Instead, everyone inputs their desires for types of trips, days on, days off, reserve if they want it, etc. The schedules are then built using a program that considers seniority, pilot's inputs, FAR legality, contractual rules such as minimum days off, etc. The key driver, as always, is seniority. The number one guy gets pretty much what he asks for as long as it's legal with the FARs and contract. The guys at the bottom get what's left. You've probably read the pros/cons of each system and the various opinions of each, so I won't go into that again.

This. Good attitude, great words. Humbleness will take you far and it sounds like ABM land just got a great officer. All the best

Can anyone explain the differences between line bidding and PBS to an idiot like myself? Pretend like you're explaining it to a 5th grader. Examples would be great.

Chuck nailed it as usual (sts). My observation as a MAF black border is that anyone who believes the non-CAF bros don’t belong at the USAFWS or somehow are less deserving of the patch have not spent time at Nellis truly integrating across the WPS’.

I don't think there is a financial justification for staying past 20, you do it because you have a desire to continue serving/flying that is more important than maxing out your pay for the period of time you go past 20. To each their own.

Your position on the topic is obvious. For context, would you mind sharing your aircraft and if you graduated from WIC?

There is a reason the final block of USAFWS is called Integration. That is the biggest thing a patch brings to the fight. A tanker patch may not be flying the night one vul up to the refueling track but you had better believe that they are intimately involved in the fuel plan for the push (if they're not editing PRFs for the Wg/CC). ICBMs have patches. It's not because they need tactical experts to employ their fire-and-forget missile, but because they are ostensibly experts at planning and integrating the available assets and target from the NTO into the OPLANs directed by JCS. A Huey Weapon School (proper) would not work at this stage because there is not that integration. Yes, weapons are employed and tactics are used but outside of Security Forces nobody is integrated with (unless you add the AFDW mission but you know that they don't like to play nice with outside agencies). Any talk of it is just an OPR circle jerk by officers that want to put their name on things.

Effects Based Operations for Air Force Bands.

No

Not sure you answered the question. But thanks for your personal wing king history.

Weapons School isn't about weapons? Man, we must really suck at naming things! Here I thought it was about realizing our fighter pilots weren't trained well enough to maintain the 10:1 kill ratio from Korea, and trying to fix that.

Agree that what AMC does should probably be renamed Advanced Tactics School. I have no problem with them wearing a fighter pilot’s patch tho.

Jesus you're dense. His Ph.D. is in clinical psychology. All his refereed publications are in psychology. To the extent any of them touch on politics, it's on the personality traits of liberals and conservatives. He has no peer-reviewed publications in history, economics, or political theory. To the extent he has any formal education in those subjects it's a B.A. in Political Science... So did my high school soccer coach. His own statements show he is hardly "exceptionally educated" about those subjects, or Marxist thought in particular. Of course there are Marxists in academia. There are also postmodernists/poststructuralists in academia, which is his real bête noire and what he means when he says "cultural Marxism." The two groups do not overlap. They believe very different things about basic epistemology. Saying "cultural Marxist" is like saying "Malthusian infertility medicine"; you're conflating two schools of thought or fields of study that not only don't overlap, but are actually fundamentally contradictory. Marx made specific claims about economics, politics, and history (claims that were severely wrong by the way) based on an underlying belief in epistemological realism—that is, that objective reality exists. Post-modern critical social theorists (like the gender extremists that hold gender is entirely socially constructed) believe the opposite. The targets of Peterson's ire disagree with Marx on epistemology, and they also don't care much about economics either. But "cultural Marxism" sounds scary and taps into people's concerns about contemporary academia. Ultimately it's a meaningless pejorative like Neo-Conservative (which the Left stripped of its domestic policy meanings to use only to refer to a particular subset of foreign policy thought on the Right, because it conveniently sounds like Neo-Nazi), Neo-Liberal (which once had a particular meaning in international economics, but socialists have co-opted to attack liberals), or "Globalist." It appeals to people whose knowledge of political theory comes from owning but not actually reading/understanding Jonah Goldberg's "Liberal Fascism." Dishonest oversimplification and claiming to speak as an expert about subjects outside your field is not what academics do. It's what hucksters do.

10 U.S. Code § 616: The number of below-zone promotions cannot exceed 10 percent of the number of officers authorized for promotion by a statutory board selecting officers on the ADL. However, the SECDEF is allowed to authorize up to 15 percent.

That’s probably because there are no actual weapons in AMC - hence why the Weapons Instructor Course in AMC is STUPID!! I forgot that we’re all warriors in today’s USAF though, so maybe I’m the stupid one...

Local voucher is a decent fix. When they cancelled the orders in DTS, it should have had a message where it says something about fees paid, etc that the cancelling party likely blew past without reading where it could have been fixed in seconds. Sometimes we’re too efficient for ourselves...

Am I disappointed I didn’t get picked up for UPT? Of course. But I will say, I feel better about it seeing the quality of the people who did get picked up. It was quite competitive and there were a ton of folks who probably deserve an opportunity. With that being said, I’m also a firm believer in everything happening for a reason. I’m looking forward to becoming an ABM.

On three separate occasions I have gone 4 months overdue and one time it was so far overdue that they shut down my card. Not once I have I seen at hit on my credit score. One of these times I even had a finance SSgt over the should my entire voucher process and somehow it still got fucked up. I put everything that's reimbursable on the card and nothing that isn't...if it's on the card, it's the governments responsibility (as long as I do my due diligence and submit the voucher on time). Our FM tried to dick swing on this issue and used the threat of a credit hit to try to coerce me into paying the bill. Dude, I paid cash for my last house and car, and have a credit score of 800+...I'll be just fine, do you damn job and pay my card. How fucking hard is this! On another note, it's been over a year and they still haven't unfucked our (part-timer) flight pay. It's pretty humorous to log into mypay and have 7 pay stubs per month, with half of them being $3.33 to catch up my flight pay. I honestly don't even care anymore because it's peanuts, it's more of an ongoing metaphor for how fucked up things have become. In other news, I just checked...Delta got my greenslip paid correctly.

Here's the entire Bitburg documentary this is from:

Honestly, there’s a lot of people in the AF that have the same stuff as the WW2 and Vietnam guys that had that legendary camaraderie. What’s different now is the society in which they’re living. The very realistic fear of ending up in serious hot water for actions that were commonplace 40 years ago is a huge part of how things have changed. Pair that with a risk averse culture rewarding the risk averse continues to feed on itself. However, if the big one kicks off, that same stuff that was present in the guys in RP 6 and over Berlin will reveal itself. And that’s what really matters.

I have several of Bob Stevens' There I Was... books around here, great cartoons from the good ol' days!