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I just googled “fuckin new guy” to find some funny meme to post. Low SA...wish I could take that search back.

Can’t stress this enough. For some context I had P99/N99/AA99/V97/Q99 and 99 PCSM, 3.8 undergrad, 4.0 grad GPA both in engineering, industry experience etc etc and got 2 interviews after being told no for maybe 10 other apps I’ve sent out mostly fighters, and maybe a 135 and 130 sprinkled in. So as people say low score isn’t automatically disqualifying, high scores aren’t automatically qualifying either. I wasn’t a believer before, but it’s extremely important to connect and meet the guys at a squadron you really want to get into. I’m lucky the first time I visited the unit I’m with now was at my interview. I felt super at home and I was pretty much cheesin the whole time during my interview because I just thought it really fit me well. Somewhat related, I think we as a community of current/prospective guys online should shift from the mentality of “Am I good enough” to “How can I improve myself even more”. You can’t control who else is applying but you certainly can control how well you present yourself, so as long as you are being the best you can possibly be, that’s what’s good enough. Just my 2 pennies in time of coin shortage. Best of luck gents and ladies.

Lol so the guy graduating the course, graduating the B course, finishing MQT, and completing a combat deployment doesn’t pass your standard? Wtf does?!

Timely question for me, as this as recently become a hot topic of discussion on the homefront. Stumbled upon this in Quora of all places, which I think captures what a lot of folks think. Not all encompassing by any means, but you get the idea.

Hello everyone, So, in the last 9 months, I've applied to pretty much every fighter opening with no bites. It's been a little discouraging, so I'm looking for some updated opinions/feedback. I'm a current regional airline pilot trying to get a pilot slot with a guard fighter unit. Age: 23 Finishing BS in Aeronautics from ERAU (finished by the end of November) GPA: 2.94 from one year of community college, 3.81 from ERAU AFOQT: Pilot-99, Nav-99, AcadApt-70, Verbal-79, Quant-56 PCSM: 94 ATP with 2625 hours, 1072 airline hours, current CFI/CFII, tailwheel LOR's from retired USAF Lt. Col./F16 driver, AA 737 captain/mentor 1 year experience as full time CFI/CFII, 2 years 4 months with the airlines As far as 'extra curriculars' go: ALPA P2P and scheduling committee for my airline 7 years in CAP, started as a cadet, current senior member captain, national flight academy instructor, worked FEMA missions for Hurricane Harvey, RPA escort pilot, and Assistant Wing Emergency Services Officer I've asked for some feedback for the units I've applied to, but haven't gotten any. New Questions With everything going on in the aviation world, and me being reasonably young, I'm seriously considering enlisting, both for the secure income source, and to check another resume box. The unit I would be enlisting in would be my 'dream' unit. Is this a wise course of action or no? If you think I should enlist, what MOS should I have (crew chief, weapons, and life support and been mentioned). Thanks

Many of you will know Huggy, so he needs no introduction here. Here’s Part 1 of my interview with him, released to coincide with the 65th anniversary of the U-2’s first flight.

I also don't recommend enlisting. Keep rushing, ask specific guys for feedback; ask the other guys that are rushing with you why they think you aren't getting good feedback. I don't know you but ask yourself if your attitude is holding you back. People don't like to give feedback that "you don't fit in with the squadron" or that you have a bad attitude. Again, I'm not saying that's the case, but you have to ask yourself. Good luck.

The free market does not mean the stock market. One of the ugliest manifestations of crony capitalism, supported by both Democrats and Republicans, is to favor any policy or legislation that directly supports the prices in the stock market.

Arrived today and the L fit my 6'2" 205 lb frame fine. In fact, it fits perfectly. I'd only be happier if I had gotten one free from a squadron, but that wasn't going to happen. Luckily I scored a great deal on one new with tags. However, with it being August in southcentral Texas, it doesn't look like I'll be wearing it anytime soon. I did try it on and it seemed to breathe well, so it won't have to be freezing before I can wear it. I also have a Gortex, so worst case I can double the two up to be cozy warm and dry!

Trump beat 24 GOP largely lookalikes in 2016 precisely because he wasn't like them and didn't seem to care if he's called names by the opposition (or the GOP for that matter). Biden won because he's the centrist-ish of the Democrat field and the party knew that some of the really wacko left-field ones would absolutely doom them again. The current push to get Biden across the line seems to "well, he's not all that, but he's our guy." There are dozens of articles/essays in this theme on-going. Doesn't seem to be enthusiasm for the selection, just a "not Trump" mantra. Not wanting to vote for someone has historically reduced turn-out since the ass pain of voting usually outweighs the resigned casting of a luke-warm vote. Not sure the "get rid of Trump" wave is strong enough to push Joe across the line. If he actually does debate and, as is expected, shows that his time mentally is well passed, then I simply don't see how he wins. If, on the other hand, he does manage to be energetic, focused, and coherent for 3 X 90 minutes, then mabye so. Will it be enough? I'm skeptical. But then I really thought Hillary was going to win in 2016. I was very pleasantly surprised to wake up the morning after and find out I was wrong. And I do take comfort knowing she is not president. Daily.

I’m sorta ambivalent on $15 min wage. It would obviously help put money in the pockets of working people, which is very good for an economy driven by consumer demand. On the other hand large jumps all at once do cause problems. The Fed min wage, along with many many other government program payment numbers, should be pegged to chained-CPI or similar and then automatically raise or lower with inflation. If you don’t do that, inaction ends up being an affirmative choice to devalue current programs which is not what congress usually intends. See the pilot bonus and flight pay issues where they were the same from like 1990 - 2017 even though a lot of the value had been lost to inflation. In principle the AF didn’t value pilots any less, but in practice they absolutely did; same goes with all these other programs. If you had to hold my feet to the fire I’d say I support a higher fed min wage so long as we chain it to CPI from here in out so it doesn’t become an issue again in the future. Seems like the historical high water mark adjusted for inflation would be IVO $12 in today’s dollars so maybe that. Happy to post in good faith from the Dem POV...echo chambers don’t help any of us and I enjoy most of the perspectives here and in my squadron, which are more conservative and/or libertarian than my civ friends and family.

I mean if the weatherman says there’s a 15-20% chance of rain and it rains, do you never trust the weather again? Some folks were too certain of a Dem victory in 2016, but relatively low probability events do happen sometimes! The national polls were very accurate in 2016 and while some state polls got the absolute outcome wrong, there weren’t egregious misses in terms of what % wrong they were. I have no problems with Harris and am familiar with her background. GL trying to smear her, she is tough. WRT to Biden, I’m pretty impressed that y’all are making the same mistake we did last time with Trump. We set the expectations very very low and he didn’t clear them by much but he managed to keep it relatively together on the trail and in the debates, minus the grabbin’ em by the pussy audio. If y’all keep saying Biden has dementia and then he gets in TV and does fine, it’s gonna backfire. He just gave a speech I saw part of the other day and he did fine.

I'm with you on all of the above except for the bolded...curious of your thoughts/rationale behind it. BTW thanks for posting and providing a generally minority (for here) viewpoint.

Guard. Active duty assignments are given out during the B-course.

Seems like they’re a fundamental misunderstanding here. All the things you listed sound like fairly standard GOP policies boiled down to their most positive-sounding values statements. Which is fine...if you want better Republicans then vote for them in the primary! It’s not the job of the Democratic Party to “win over trump voters.” It’s their job to win elections and enact the policies they ran on, based on the values they personally believe in and the party in general supports. That can be accomplished without wining a single solitary person who voted for Trump in 2016, although obviously it’s easier if you peel away some small percentage of the people who did in key states. I have no expectations that most Republicans would be all that interested in higher taxes on the wealthy, addressing climate change in a robust way, etc. I’m not mad about that necessarily, I just don’t vote for them. So it’s silly to hate on the Dems for listening to the people who vote for them and supporting more liberal policies than you, a conservative, support. I’m happy to have a detailed discussion about policies that actually poll really well with a broad swath of the public...it’s a specific interest of mine to get the “low hanging fruit” things enacted rather than see the parties spend political capital on unpopular policies like reparations or building the wall or some of the other silliness that a minority of people agitate about. A quick list of examples that all poll >60% among US adults is: universal background checks, legalizing marijuana, letting people buy into a Medicare and Medicaid, a $15 minimum wage, and creating a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who are already in the country.

Was with you til this. The DJIA only reflects a small minority of the economy and doesn’t relate to how the majority of people are actually doing.

Dude... CENTCOM is in Tampa Bay and we have been way beyond “committed” to that region for decades. The strategic and economic value of the region has never been a question. Should we move that to Jordan to let the locals know we are in their corner? Africa is a real suck as far as support and infrastructure. No matter where you placed your HQ element within that continent it was going to effectively be no less isolated from any other portion than being based Across the MED. the difference being as far as effectiveness now you can send people there on non remote tours and get some continuity of work out of them. You try convincing good talent at 6-9 years of service to go work staff without family living in a prefab support barracks Kenya or something. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Good luck getting any work done in Italy. Don’t get me wrong. I had many great TDYs to Aviano and anyone who has the opportunity to be stationed there should absolutely jump on it. That said, ever try getting dip clearances or even filing a flight plan with the Italians? “A-sorry a-sir. The route-a you file-a.....it not-a available on-a Tuesdays after 1600 when there’s a full-a moon. Come-a back a-tomorrow.”

Democratic party center of mass is not median that appeals to people on the right. He also can’t complete a sentence.

I mean, feel free to believe whatever you want, but that’s exactly what the party did in most people’s minds. As of today, Biden is polling +8.3 in the RCP average, has pushed the tipping point state well outside the toss-up category, and is beating Clinton’s polling lead in both absolute terms as well as steadiness. He’s in the best position of any challenger since the advent of modern polling. Lots of time left and things change blah blah blah, but that’s the state of the race today and any honest person with any professional training in electoral politics and polling will tell you basically the same story. Biden’s policy vision is Democratic Party center-of-mass and he’s a very well known quantity both in the party and in DC. He’s not a radical socialist reformer, which was the other prominent option for the last 8 years, and his broad appeal both inside the Dem party and among independents is evident in his current large polling lead both nationally and in many more battleground states than are needed to win the election. I 100% agree he’s lost a step or two and personally I’m very ageist in my Presidential politics...Uncle Joe wasn’t anywhere near my first choice specifically due to age. Age 45-60 with experience in the Senate or as a Governor is ideal IMHO, with exceptions for compelling candidates on the margins of those criteria. Keep in mind that President Trump is also quite old and those living in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones re: rambling, incoherent statements because that is kind of Trump’s shtick.

Repeating, of course.

You lose track of time. It 0110 past curfew and you're 6 Moscow Mules in at G2's. You try to walk back to your apartment without getting caught but make a mistake detour to EFES kebab for some sleep snacks. As you step out, in front of you is town patrol, walking your direction. You look left, you look right, and in a side alley there is Songton Sally. "Honey... Honey.... Come here....." You have the aircraft:

Based on that logic, 1/4 of our military should be in the desert and that's where we typically have fought our wars in the past several decades. But this isn't a military decision, it's a presidential one based on politics. I agree that we don't need such a large force in Europe, but the same elsewhere. I don't think it's as much of a deterrent as we are led to believe. If Kim Jong-un gets the harebrained idea to cross the DMZ, no number of conventional troops in the south are going to stop that. That bloodbath will occur despite our presence. Our current presence in Europe is not about WWII, it's about a commitment to NATO which was never about preventing the rise of another Nazi Germany. It was about the Soviet threat and while the name may have changed, that threat is still real and even stronger. Countering it conventionally during the Cold War was actually easy as it could be done simply through numbers, but we still haven't figured out how to deal with new informational today and it's hurting our ability to shape and influence that part of the world badly. Plus, none of this is about the overall mission of NATO and EUCOM, it's about Trump putting the screws to Merkel. Not that she doesn't deserve it, but his claim that this is all due to Germany not putting enough of its GDP for defense is ridiculous when the countries that will benefit from this move spend even less. Germany does have a stronger economy, but that is not the point. This is an emotional move by Trump and one that makes no sense. And your point about a "33% manning boost" is moot. You act like the forces in Europe are not doing anything, whereas in fact they train as much if not more than those CONUS. That robbing Peter to pay Paul comparison doesn't increase our investment or capabilities. It may reduce the cost of having forces (it's cheaper to station people in some of the shitty assignments Stateside versus Europe), but it doesn't make us more effective operationally. In fact, I would argue the latter is the case. Russia is kicking our ass informationally the same as China is kicking it economically. COVID has put a bit of a damper on it, but they'll adjust and survive; but I believe much of the chaos in this country is due to the amount of misinformation being pumped into it from abroad. To quote Agent K, "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." Society in general is gullible and will believe whatever the media (social or otherwise) tell them, and will respond accordingly as they don't know any better. Ever wonder how one dog can control and corral hundreds of sheep? Same analogy. But anyone who thinks this move will somehow improve our influence worldwide is sadly mistaken. It's politics pure and simple, and costly ones at that. I've spent time at SHAPE and Patch, it will cost billions of dollars to accomplish and in the end nothing will change. And I didn't add a 'STS' to that as literally we the taxpayers will be taking it up the ass for this decision...

Here is what I posted to a post from Prozac in a different thread on the topic regarding our national interest in the Pacific vs Europe: Noone here has forgotten the whole lesson about US involvement in European instability. However, that lesson is receiving heavy scrutiny now because of its cost. And it should receive scrutiny. There are no "natural laws" or "rules" in geo-politics. We should always be adjusting our thought. First off, I'm skeptical anytime mentions US foreign policy and "track record" or "history" in the same sentence. 200 years isn't history. Its a sneeze. China has seen continuous governance under a unified identify for over 3000 years. Sink that in a for a bit because its a bit amazing to think about. Sure they've had overthrows and invasions that took power, but they always remained predominantly identified as a single people (disregarding discussions of sub cultures like the Han, im talking specifically, how long has there been a "place identified as China"). So building trend data off of two events that happened only 20 years apart probably isn't prudent global planning on our part. Second, saying that a secure "Europe" is better for American prosperity is a bit dishonest. Europe is a geographical feature that says nothing about where the global balance of power lies. Pre-WW2, many of those powers happened to be conjugated in Europe. Today? Not a single European player (outside maybe France in the UK as notable exceptions) has global influence. The center of power has shifted dramatically from Western Europe to the Pacific. The top 6 military power centers in the world on the Global Firepower Index all have borders on the Pacific Ocean. (8 if you count Britain and France's Pacific holdings) 6/12 of the largest economies are on the Pacific, including the Top 3, the US, China and Japan. The problem with the above philosophy is it puts WAY too much importance on how much influence Europe has on the world order in modern terms. Third, we tend to have a lens that puts too much emphasis on the WW's as what happened in Western Europe. We forget, that they were global wars, and especially in WW2, most of the fighting did not take place in Western Europe. I promise you the Chinese don't frame their historic perceptions of WW2 as something that mainly occurred in Europe. As our #1 adversary, that should be something that we take important note of. Fourth, having the basic premise that a continent cant organize their shit so we have to occupy and pacify them for our own successful aims just doesn't sound like a good long term strategy. We invest 320K DoD personnel in Europe. That is literally 1/4 of our entire military, on one foreign continent. The largest military in Western Europe is the US military. Think about that for a minute, and then think about what your squadron could do with a 33% manning boost? To quote your terms, why are we spending "on peace and prosperity in Europe" when we should be spending on Peace and Prosperity in the United States, the largest threat to which, is in Asia. I totally understand and hear your point of view. But I find it outdated and irrelevant with what is actually going on in the world right now. I think there is a growing crowd of skeptics that question if Europe is "worth" our investment

Please elaborate... Russia is more of a threat to us militarily than China. Economically, it's the other way around; but force presence is contingent on the military threat...

How can it be that nobody's yet posted the clip of Baseops' @Steve Davies vs @HuggyU2 battling for ultimate domination of YouTube? https://youtu.be/ZgR3wzOioks

Back when I was active duty I used to have a similar perspective about police being overly-militarized. But then I went to the Guard, became a cop/detective, and the perspective changed. Its easy to look at social media and think police are out of control. Sure, every department has one or two tackleberries who love gear and guns. But everything our patrol guys carry on their person or in their vehicles has a distinct purpose. Police tools and tactics are inherently reactive to trends in greater society and the criminal element. AR-15s and similar high powered, semi-auto rifles have become more commonplace in American homes. Naturally, they have become more prevalent in barricaded gunman incidents, domestic violence incidents, active shooters, etc. A 5.56 round will go through a patrol car and a soft kevlar vest like a knife through butter. Last year one of my buddies was shot and killed by an armed fugitive despite wearing a kevlar vest. Just a few weeks ago a rookie in my area was shot and killed through a door on a domestic violence incident. I'm sorry if people get butt hurt seeing us wearing plate carriers while we respond to armed subjects...but I'd rather not go to any more funerals. I think there is alot of room for police in the US to be reformed. There are some legitimately good ideas floating around out there. But they aren't getting real traction because of the hyperbole and political agendas that benefit from casting all cops as wannabe soldiers or racist thugs.

I sincerely hope if that’s the case, they roll up the assholes with the high powered lasers first.

I would really curb this type of thinking before your AFOQT and start sending out apps. Ive got a 92 pilot, 93PCSM and 500+ hours and I probably get every fourth interview. I've been at units with guys who have everything above 90 on the AFOQT and 99s on pilot + PCSM and they don't get everything they apply for. Obviously I'm not on a board, or I wouldn't be having this conversation, but every unit is looking for something different, and you never know what it is. You might fit the profile exactly at one unit, and miss by a mile with another one. As it's been stated above, you really just have to visit the units you want, and cross your fingers on the rest.

The police absolutely raised the stakes, and we let them. Post 9-11, we went from peace officers to telling every cop they were the frontline in the war on terrorism here at home. We radically altered the viewpoint that they were here to serve the public and turned them into a force that is constantly seeking out potential life-threatening enemies. And turns out if you roll into every situation expecting to face an armed and motivated enemy, you become much more trigger happy. I don't fully blame the cops, although their training programs certainly bear some of the blame. We did this to ourselves by teaching cops that putting the odds in their favor to the max extent possible overruled all other considerations, including the rights of the citizens they are policing.

The Massif is nice. Great for cold...ok for rain, but if it heavy rain you'll need the goretex.

Where the fuck did you go wrong in your life?!

I've used the Massif with the mid layer up to -30C at Arctic Survival and was toasty.