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Apparently, the investigation substantiated that is is his fault.

Dissolve the Fed, bring back normal economic cycles.

I'm not seeing how any of that is deflationary. With the number of dollars in the system stable (and in all likelihood, increasing), your examples all decrease the supply of good and services. So the same number of dollars chasing fewer goods = inflation. And let's be real, the govt is going to give even more money to those unemployed workers. Remember that currency is just a standardized way of exchanging human effort. Increasing productivity and decreasing input costs will be deflationary. More human effort available to be bought with the same number of dollars means a dollar buys more human effort. Also shredding dollars makes them more valuable. The biggest catastrophe of covid is that the governments of the world removed a spectacular amount of human effort from the economy, while at the same time increasing the number of dollars at unprecedented rates. I'm sure we'll make up for a little bit of it by further automating some of the jobs that can't be filled right now, but it's not going to make up for the fact that the labor force participation rate is very low and has not recovered. Right now deflation seems very unlikely, but stagflation is certainly looking more probable. If the Democrats find a way to pass this $3T bill, it's only going to get worse.

AA 777 FO. I've done 767/787/777 international and 727/737/MD80 domestic. Most of your work is done from leaving the gate to level off and then descent back to the gate. Domestically, you are going to do that several times per day over multiple days with shorter layovers. Hotels are hit and miss. Mechanical, weather, hub delays only make your day worse. International trips you fly 2 legs with a longish layover. ETOPS doesn't allow for many open mechanical issues and we usually have a maintainer on standby to get problems solved. Hotels are usually nice. Long layovers means you can explore local history, restaurants, beer. Downsides are time zone/body clock and sleeping issues. Legal flight routing can put you over some barren terrain with few divert options dealing with marginal English speaking controllers. With seniority, a widebody FO can make more than a narrow body CA and work fewer days. You need to find what works for you.

In my opinion, it extended much further down than just the top level GO/FO leadership. Long but interesting anecdotal story. When I was a young staff officer I was assigned to be my command's GSOS lead (Global Special Operations Synchronization, it's how SOCOM is supposed to prioritize where it puts SOF, feeds into the GFM process). BLUF is its a multi-phase process with a lot of data collection/processing and in person PPTs to a board. During my second year doing doing this, SOJTF-A J35 was presenting their Campaign Plan for the conference (presented to a board of 6 O-6s from SOCOM), SOJTF-A team was made up of an O-6 and several O-5s and civilians. The SOJTF-A team VTCs in and has this very bright, optimistic "this is the year we turn it all around, X years to stem the tide, XX years to seize the initiative, we're gonna take it to them with this new strategy, etc, etc, etc). I think they even used the word "defeat" in some of their presentation. The O-6 board receives the presentation, asks a few minor questions, then says great job, go get'em, we really appreciate you", or something to that effect and starts to move on. That would've been the end of it except for 1 O-5 Army Strategist (extremely intelligent guy who was about as cynical as they come) in the audience. He stands up in this room full of 50 people with god knows how many others in VTC land and politely asks what's different about this year compared to all the other years in the Stan (this conference was in early 2018). When SOJTF-A says they don't understand his question, he expands by saying what they've presented looks remarkably similar to his 2005 experience, which also mirrored the time he was there in 2009, while not differing all that much from the strategic plan in 2011, seemed shockingly similar to his deployment in 2013, and he didn't see all that much change from 2015-2017. He then asked how on god's green earth they were going to seriously degrade or possibly defeat the enemy with a fraction of the resources previously available and an ANA that wasn't that much more capable and suffering a record high number of casualties. The crazy/really eye opening moment to this whole thing was that the SOJTF-A guys just sat there dumbstruck, like they couldn't believe anyone wouldn't believe in or would dare question their plan. They literally had no answer. I seriously think several of them honestly believed the nonsense they were presenting. The O-6 board quietly ruffled through their notes or stared at their hands. The O-5 strategist shook his head and sat down. Will always be one those random moments in my career I'll never forget and the moment I knew we could've been in the Stan for another 20 years and it wouldn't have changed the ultimate outcome one bit.

Remember… Gerrymandering is strictly a Republican problem… Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

I thought a lot about your question last night and to be honest I don't have a good answer or even know if there is one. I've said it before but I personally felt that Milley and McKenzie should've resigned for the way the Afghan withdrawal was conducted. That isn't really an answer to your question though, because they just happened to be the guys in charge when everything came crashing down; tough to blame them for at least 18+ years of official fallacies we (both State and DoD) were telling ourselves and the American public about how the war in Afghanistan was going. My thoughts in no particular order. 1. Part of this is cultural, both in our military and in our political leadership. We (in the officer ranks) all should bear some responsibility for this. On the military side, we rarely (almost never) want to or will actually say "no". It's in our DNA that if we're given a task or mission, we'll figure out a way to get it done. And nobody gets promoted for saying they can't accomplish something (see the Navy's destroyer mishaps as the latest example of severe consequences of this mentality). We've grown and groomed our leadership this way. Almost no one from the top generals/SESs down to probably the at least the FGO level wanted to admit that things weren't going well and that the goal of an independent, democratic Afghanistan free from most Taliban/VEO interference (if that was the goal) wasn't attainable (at least not in any reasonable timeframe). 2. We (talking the royal we, USA at large) tend to have a belief that the US is capable of accomplishing anything if we set our minds to it. And in the late 90s-early 2000s we were still coming off of the rapid, smashing success of Desert Storm. The American public was willing to keep things going so long as the casualties were relatively low and they didn't have to personally pay anything for it. Our public is also as separated from the military as it's ever been and our political class hasn't voted for "military action since the AUMF back in '01. A lot of us also mistakenly hold the belief that everyone in the world wants our version of democracy. 3. "Sometimes you have to let things fail". Don't know how many times I've heard senior leaders say this one in my career but I've rarely seen it actually utilized. I get that "failure" with something as large as the entire Afghan campaign is orders of magnitude different than some new process at the squadron level but it feeds back to point #1. Nobody in our senior leadership wanted to be the guys holding the bag when things ended in the Stan. They would have rather kept the war going indefinitely than admit our ever shifting goals were unattainable. Honesty was less acceptable than the static quo because no one could admit that we were going to fail. 4. Tactical success vs. Operational/Strategic failure. This one goes without saying. If our Operational/Strategic goals were unattainable from the get go, 20 years of killing people and spending money was never going to translate into a win. To answer your original question about who to hold accountable, I honestly think it's probably the bulk of the DoD and State leadership chain for the last 18 years (from at least O-6s all the way to the top, maybe lower). I don't believe the US military was able to be honest with either itself or our civilian leadership about the war. I understand that's probably not a popular opinion. I know a lot of vets were having trouble (a lot probably still are) processing what happened two months ago. The bulk of the rhetoric/messaging has been aimed at us doing our duty, no more attacks on the homeland, etc. That's all well and good, and probably appropriate for the time, but we lost, and I think we need to figure out how to avoid these sort of mistakes/failures going forward. I don't think anyone is going to get fired over this, so to your question over accountability, it'll probably be hashed out in the history books versus public hearings, resignations, some GO/FO or retired GO/FO actually saying "I'm responsible". Not a very satisfying answer I'm afraid.

Oh, the old tape over the static ports trick!

I think it's been said here before, but this certainly illustrates the point. We weren't in Afghanistan 20 years. We were in Afghanistan one year, repeated 20 times.

Keep an eye-- 47th FS A-10s are making their way to Randolph today, and Vance tomorrow. A few of us will be around to show off the Hog and tell some lies about things we've done over the last decade to 1/4 century. On the official note, and the reason this didn't go straight to the Squadron Bar forum, a handful of us FTU IPs were invited to take a roadshow of UPT by MGEN Wills. One of our IPs is heavily involved in some online forums, and his continued commentary (always constructive... mostly) generated the all-expenses paid trip to see what all this hullabaloo is all about first-hand. We've got questions from our perspective as the next in-line to the UPT/IFF product, and we'd be happy to talk and see what's happening out there. Even if it is for a short turnaround at each base. So keep an eye, and fight's on. Attack! Zero

I have the same quals but only mid-30’s.

Change the narrative a little and it still fits what’s happening in today’s USAF.