I don’t deny the amount of work the majcoms and cocoms place on the MAF, my issue is with the mentality that apparently some tanker dudes have according to joes post below. It’s up to big blue and the bobs to fix their overuse shit show of CENTCOM and the poor scheduling of both MAF and CAF assets. It’s up to the aircrew to stay in the proper mindset of being the best pilots possible and not getting killed in war, even though what we do in CENTCOM isn’t very tactically challenging 95% of the time.
The post above makes it seem like they can’t even manage that. COIN deployments aren’t very demanding from a flying standpoint outside of a few TICs every now and then. I can’t imagine what someone is worried about, outside of personal life matters, when meeting receivers in a totally permissive environment. I can probably count on one hand how many TDYs I wanted to be on, however I didn’t half ass my training/participation in it because I was going to the desert, rather than Russia or China, in a few months.