Leaderboard

Appreciate all the insight! We’re pumped for the assignment.

PCS’d out of Mildenhall 2 years ago. Best assignment of my career! “2” on AFsock’s recommendations. Either store or sell your nice vehicles and buy a beater! The side roads are brutal because they are built on farm/drained marshlands. I bought a reliable 7 year old car for $2K and sold it for the same when I left. If you’re a 135 guy you’ll be busy, but the missions are challenging and rewarding and mostly priority 1 and 2. Over my 4 years I did 4 “deployments” to locations where your family will want to come where you’ll be supporting French ops in AFRICOM. Enjoy! I’d swap places with you in a heartbeat!

Ask your wife. She's the one that'll live there.

Listened to this podcast: https://warontherocks.com/2019/07/net-assessment-is-america-poised-to-lose-the-next-war/ and read this article it discussed. Not a short read but not onerous either: https://s3.amazonaws.com/files.cnas.org/CNAS+Report+-+ANAWOW+-+FINAL2.pdf My TLDR summary: The way the Joint Team fought in the 90s and 2000s for Desert Storm, Kosovo, OIF, etc... MOB establishment, unrestricted overflight rights, piece by piece threat/enemy destruction, etc... will not work in potential conflicts with Russia, China. A new approach will be required to dissuade aggression, defeat if required and allow options for favorable escalation/cessation of hostilities. Worth a read IMO, from an AF perspective it seems the AF to support this New American Way of War needs greater range, greater self-deployment capability along with a dispersed/austere basing capability. This would mitigate the reliance on safe, relatively close MOBs as Russia/China would not allow those sanctuaries to exist or function in a potential conflict within reasonable range of the conflict, enable faster surging for to Deter and React if aggression appears imminent or occurs and presents the enemy with a much harder targeting problem by proliferating tactical assets to unexpected or changing temporary locations. He mentions several times hard choices and giving up on assumptions, ideas, paradigms that will not work or don't apply in a Great Power Conflict, to me this sounds like (in relation to Airpower) the classic Destroy the Enemy's Will / National Capability to Fight vs. Destroy the Enemy's Forces. The Strategic (conventional) vs. Tactical. Equally applicable to other services in shaping their Capabilities Portfolios. I'm not 100% convinced he's wrong, putting aside our personal preferences and biases, is it time to reforge the AF to meet this growing threat? More Strategic and less Tactical - thoughts?

From the 30,000’ view, tour lengths, “reflect the general desirability of each location and force protection and anti-terrorism considerations,” “full range of facilities both on and off the military installation,” and job (e.g. Defense Attaché Service and Security Cooperation Office, etc). Short tours are typically, “Remote and arduous locations with limited family support facilities or with economic conditions not supporting a quality of life reasonably comparable to U.S. standards,” or, “Locations lacking adequate family support facilities or with potential threat to the safety or security of families.” https://www.esd.whs.mil/Portals/54/Documents/DD/issuances/dodi/131518p.pdf You can also see the specific factors they consider at the end of that DoD Instruction (population, geography, climate, housing, medical, groceries, banking, etc). As discovered by Ram, short tour credit is based on the above conditions, not on whether your family is with you or not. Some locations will still allow families. Any location with an unaccompanied tour of 15 months or less on the following list is considered a short tour location: https://www.defensetravel.dod.mil/Docs/perdiem/browse/Travel_Regulations/Appendices/appQ.pdf Everything else and all AF specific stuff is in the posts SurelySerious linked you to.

A guy in my UPT class got a waiver for this very issue under the REACT study. I'd say try again with a waiver request.