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All righty. Going to breakup the monotony of this thread and just say. I survived command on a 365. One of the best experiences in my life probably because I wasn’t a shiny penny. There may be some wrong in the USAF but not in the deployed environment where the mission hackers make it happen. There are a lot of eager and aggressive Airmen out there who are only limited by the system they exist in. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Two of the absolute worst commanders I’ve had were pilots. Two of the very best were navs. The radiator shield does not automatically qualify one to be a good commander.

I dunno about y’all…but I am so damn sick of hearing “Delta variant”, “second wave” etc…get the goddamn shot so we can stop living in this damn bizzaro world

Amazing how many Trump supporters want to shit on what was probably his greatest achievement as a president. Operation Warp Speed is a triumph of modern scientific research and biomedical engineering, funded and supported by Trump...and it's mostly Trump supporters who won't take it because "I don't trust Fauci" and "I don't trust Biden". I wonder how many of those Trumpers would be vaccinated if Trump had been re-elected then tweeted non-stop about how awesome Warp Speed turned out to be and what a genius he was for finding the "cure to Covid".

Jesus people. The Trump administration, for all of its faults, knew that the way to get back to something approaching “normal” was heard immunity, and that the fastest way to get there is through vaccination. Hence ‘Operation Warp Speed’ which, to give credit where credit is due, was an unqualified success. No, not “everyone” needs to get vaccinated. Seventy percent or so will do. When you have half of a population unvaccinated it leaves plenty of room for a virus to mutate. Hence Delta and probably Echo and Foxtrot and so on until we have heard immunity. We can wait a few years for that to happen naturally or we can all get a shot and watch this thing disappear within a few months. It’s not a fucking difficult concept to grasp.

Turn off the Newsmax.

Hoss I get what you’re saying. However, as I know you know, command is a mindset. In my experience a rated aviator who is willing to look at multiple perspectives and educate themselves on all the crew positions under their charge as well as take care of airmen and safely execute the mission will be successful...regardless of the wings on their chest. Ive coached youth hockey for 20 years now. I’ve seen fantastic lifelong hockey players fall on their face behind the bench. I’ve seen complete ankle benders who are new to the game win championships as coaches. How do the benders win championships? They surround themselves with smart people, they study the game, they play to their strengths and they solicit the advice of others when they know they have a gap in their knowledge and they earn the respect of their players. While a CSO or ABM will never hold an A code, any one of them worth their salt SHOULD have the experience and perspective after years of flying the line in their given airframe as an instructor in their crew position to effectively lead a squadron. Now, when we take a shiny penny, fluff and buff them, make them an exec and then ship them off to every non-flying school and special duty assignment known to man, or in the MAF ship them from airframe to airframe to “broaden” them, one may never gain that perspective or experience within their community to fully understand the cultures and challenges. Maybe it turns some of them into that coach who played hockey all his life and won’t take inputs from others because he thinks he’s that good. I dunno. My rambling $0.02 I guess.

Makes it a lot harder to fail them out of Phase III. Turns It from a commander's decision and a handshake into an FEB.

I've met a number of Navs... and even one Flight Surgeon... that would have made excellent SQ/CC's had the AF decided to actually let them command a single-seat flying squadron.

Smoke and mirrors. They are essentially just executing phase 3, but with wings. I don’t understand how this changes anything, except maybe gets them a form 8 earlier so the MAF bound guys can be softened up to Q3s and re-quals earlier in their career.

That is a very valid point. That’s not “MAF standard” but there is a lot to be said for that.

I've had both pilot and WSO Commanders, and there were good and bad out of both camps. I consider it a good thing that there are some who I'd really have to sit down and stretch my brain to remember if they were front seaters or back seaters. That being said, I remember being at SOS and having one of those "senior leader seminars" with my flight. The guy who led the seminar for my flight was one of the original CROs, a big burly dude who was emphatic that any "leader" could command any unit, regardless of specialty. I offered that such a thing would not work in a fighter unit, to which he scoffed and told me I just wasn't evolved enough in my thinking about leadership to understand that I was wrong. I said, "in my community, our Squadron Commander generally is the lead pilot of the first formation to cross into badguy territory on the first night of the war. How are you going to inspire your warriors if on the first night of the war you're sending them into the IADS while you're going to watch them all take off into the night, then stay behind in the office and watch it on CNN?" His only response was, "that's not a fair question."

The only thing that stops this is when we collectively say we’ve had enough.

Congrats, I may or may not know the challenges you faced first hand, especially with leadership. You were always willing to mentor the younger guys and shoot the shit with us. You’re one of the good ones.

How many aircraft did we lose back then? What were the accident rates? I’ll wait...

UPT 2.5 is after UPT Next in the iteration of bad ideas from AETC timeline, I think.

That was an easy call in May of last year when we crested five weeks into “two weeks to flatten the curve”. This was at its essence, a $30T behavior modification exercise. And it has been successful beyond anyone’s wildest imagination. Expect all of our learned vocabulary and behaviors to be trotted out on a regular basis. I was expecting “a particularly bad flu season 😳😰😱”, but COVID19-2 is also a reliable plot device.

You think AFPC thinks ahead?

Depends on which bonus you are talking about. Technically (Reserve side, can't speak for Guard) we have two bonuses going on right now. 1. We have a 14% salary bump that gets paid out on each LES. That's bonus #1 2. AFRC a few years ago signed off on an annual pilot retention bonus as well. It comes out as an announcement on MyPers each year. This year its $18k per year and you can sign up for it for 1-4 years. Kicker is AFRC got lazy and copy/pasted the AD bonus verbiage so even though its an "ART" bonus, you have to be past your initial UPT commitment date to get it.....

Or Grand Forks AFB. That base should have been shuttered when the tankers left. Especially now that the Global Hawk is gone.

Why is the E-9 lapdog opening his mouth at all about an aircraft commamders decision? STFU.

Well that's their mission, not training, which is what the sign is getting at. I agree in one sense because we won't even fly through a thunderstorm on a combat mission. We'll fly around it, but never through it. More on the subject in the context of this conversation. I've never shown up to work only to been told to go home and come back in 12 hours to go fly without being offered go/no-pills. If this training was important enough, then the docs would have given them the pills.

That Senator did some great things, but he thought that the compensation he had in the 70s was sufficient and blocked a lot of progress on that front.

We rail against the AF for not giving us $100k a year bonuses but as you know they are restricted by what Congress authorizes. I remember a certain senator from Arizona had a big say in that. 🤷‍♂️ What I do think is totally f’d up, beyond belief, is that the AF doesn’t max out the bonus for every pilot to the $35k allowed. It’d be pennies on the dollar in their annual budget.

There's more demand for doctors across the board, and they take longer to make than a pilot... The air force trains a pilot and gets a 10 year ROI via the ADSC. And there's no shortage of young Americans that want to fly jets. The AF gets a 1:1 return for the doctors who take the scholarship money to pay for their medical school, so at best a 4 year ROI. Then again, the AF only pays about $400k to get a doctor, while the cheapest pilot (C-17) is $800k in direct training plus roughly $200k in pay/allowances, so the payback is about the same ($100k per year old ADSC) It takes roughly 2 years to have a basic pilot trained, and roughly 2-4 years to become an AC/IP/4FL, so 4-6 years to get a "fully qualified" pilot. It takes 4 years med school plus 1-6 years in residency, so 5-10 years to get a certified doctor who can practice. Not all doctors get rock star pay either. https://www.dfas.mil/militarymembers/payentitlements/Pay-Tables/HPO4/ If they don't sign a retention bonus, many get paid about the same after they complete their residency as a pilot on the bonus after their initial commitment ($43k for most medical specialties, compared to the $12k+35k=$47k for a pilot, though the pilot has a multi year ADSC the doctor does not have). The big money goes to certain specialties, and those spots to get into those specialties are competitive nationwide (mil and civ). One thing the doctors on scholarship give up is their selection of specialty: no matter how good they match to residencies, they are still needs of the AF. So even if they scored well enough to go to say anesthesiology to make the big bucks ($300k+ a year on the outside in a major city), if the AF needs flight docs that year, well, they are going to go be flight docs/general practice. Even if there's an anesthesiologist residency position in the military, all med school graduates can compete for that spot, not just the ones on military medical scholarships. This also essentially locks them into that specialty for the rest of their career, and switching specialties means recompeting for a residency match (which again are limited, and competing against the new med school grads), and then completing the new residency at resident pay (1-6 years at $25k-50k/year working 60-80 hours a week. That last part is why my brother decided not to take an offer for a military medical scholarship-there's a loss of control over your career at a critical point, the initial residency match, which has a significant impact on your career earnings potential.

So we’re ok with the argument that an obese person’s life is worth less than a healthy person’s now? How much less? Is an obese person worth 1/2 a healthy person in our society? 3/4? What is the value you would place on an obese person’s life? Honest question. Not saying encouraging healthy living shouldn’t be a goal in our society. I’m 100% on board with ending the obesity epidemic in our country. But writing someone off ‘cause they’re fat? Seems pretty jaded, cold and inhumane.

Of those 600,000, weren't 80-90% obese? Let's not act like the virus targeted everyone equally - And yes I am completely skeptical of that number of 600,000. Did that many people die? Yeah probably, but did that many people actually die from covid? I have doubts. Maybe it is "risky" living an unhealthy life every single day of one's life? Maybe to save fat people we just simply don't let them order certain foods and drinks at restaurants and grocery stores, I mean its for the betterment of everyone - Right? Many people seems willing to force me not to have a choice... How many people does obesity kill every year? Probably more than 600,000 - Why isn't there a war on obesity? Or what if the increasingly likely probability that it was released from China, and covered up, caused a majority of those deaths? What then?

One thing to point out is most people I've talked to aren't worried about dieing from the vaccine. They are concerned with more subtle side effects like unexplained pre-diabetes in 20 years despite a healthy lifestyle, or reproductive difficulties that increase frustrations with getting pregnant. In either of these cases the right of the individual trump's the public health concerns for right to life because both of those situations are life altering to the quality of a person's life.

Okay that's something.. But is that ever going to happen in the real world? What other medications do you know of where the manufacturer/government preemptively accept full financial liability for any/all future side effects? In this hypothetical scenario, how would you even go about proving the vaccine is causal in a medical problem you have 10 or 20 years down the road? And which side effects should be covered? Also are we going to apply this rule to other medications? I'm sure in a country of 300 million I can find five people who died after taking Advil. I'm asking these things because if the line in the sand we're drawing is unrealistic, maybe we need to come up with a better one. For me the calculus is very simple. We don't know the long term effects of the vaccine or covid so there's no point trying to compare two unknown variables. What we do know is the short/medium term effects of both, and even for young healthy people a bad vaccine reaction is orders of magnitude less likely than dying from covid 19.

As interesting as this conversation is.. I am neither a fighter pilot nor a nav and I'm curious at what point the quality and quantity of data supporting the efficacy/safety of the covid vaccines could convince you guys to get it. Is there a benchmark you are looking for it to surpass? A certain number of years without widespread major side effects? A specific number of long term studies that prove its safety? A certain entity whose data you would trust? Would the emergence of a more dangerous covid variant change your calculus? I'm just wondering, because without a logical, measurable benchmark to evaluate this on it's essentially the same trash argument as the granola munching anti-vax mom crowd... I'm seeing a lot of similarities "I don't trust anyone, the science was rushed/flawed, the data is doctored" etc.. So what data, when, how much, and from whom do you want for it to be good enough?

Is this the same guy who said (on FB) that airlines won't be hiring for "a long time." Same guy that said he had no details on the bonus, but then proceeded to give a "do it for God and country" speech, as a precursor to the release of a shitty bonus?

Maybe, or like most of the guys I know in my group +/- a few years, they’ll fly fighters their entire career. Timing (and seniority!) is damn near everything.

That person deserves to wear blues everyday until they leave the AF.