MCO

Career badges are impossible to decipher. Give rated wings, kill all the other badges and give them basic tabs not broken out but broad. CE, WX, SF, ATC, etc. don’t make 10 different identifiers for each career field. Gives people pride and makes it easy to see what they do. Pilots do it with flight suits, let everyone else have a little morale and pride as well, within reason.

Both are problems. Yes you need to focus on creating lethal pilots, but the FGOs are the ones setting the rules and working to make the space to create those pilots. Shitty QOL, development, and leadership leads to people getting out. Everyone left becomes the shitty leadership because there is no one left to choose from for a quality cut. These shitty leaders/pilots make decisions destroying QOL and good pilot development driving out the younger pilots and continuing the cycle.

I love these hate on other platforms stories. I did 4 months in Afghanistan in Herks and we’d hate on C-17 and tankers for the same thing and didn’t call in anything or get AFCMS except the plane that came back with holes in it, but we assumed all of the other dumb platforms who don’t know what they are doing were. Like the C-17 on short final into Kandahar 5 miles in front of me yelling on the radio he was taking fire while I was staring at him on nogs seeing nothing. Everyone else that doesn’t fly what I fly is dumb!

He’s either a troll or an idiot, why is everyone arguing with him?

Or the realization there is no point arguing with you in this.

Why would NATO sign that?

Solid it depends here. Top 5 or 6 in my class were all commercial rated before UPT. The #1 guy had 269 hours of formation aerobatic jet time. I’ve also seen the 2000 hour regional pilot that is bottom of the class.

This. Peacetime managers vs wartime leaders. Some people are good at both but many aren’t. 2 different skill sets and not being at war it’s hard to know who is actually a good wartime leader.

I think it’s understandable considering they probably started pilot training September 2001.

Yep. The fighter year groups from 07-09 are tiny, especially 07. 07 got ravaged by UAVs and backed up B courses making only about 1 fighter pilot per class across all three UPT bases. We just didn’t make any fighter pilots. Now everyone on staff throws up their arms like we never saw this coming.

Aren’t they inviting them back because it was congressionally mandated they invite them back?

“We don’t want to pigeonhole ourselves in strictly special operations”- Air Force Special Operations Command official

Dogs are fine and getting a car is not hard. The paperwork on the other hand is painful, but that’s true of everything in Germany.

I was in a briefing with a bunch of 3 stars and a 4 star. Our team briefed some COAs and a 3 star asked the briefer why some majors and Lt Cols think they get a say when the proposed COA was presented. As the briefer was trying to find words the 4 star said I’m going with their suggested COA. Briefing concluded.

Damn dude. Shitty timing and you even laid out the issues with the timing. Transitions end. Shit will still need to get moved to the front of the fight. Also, turns out we also train to worst case peer in peer but if we get into another less hot conflict guess who is going to be bearing the brunt of the intra theater airlift again? Every deployment is different. There are squadrons that deployed and did 100+ airdrops on 1 deployment and literally the next group out did 0 on their 6 month deployment. They don’t make requirements based on what’s fun but what’s needed. Some of the stuff we’ve done in Africa is pretty cool, but it’s always changing from current world politics. No 2 deployments are the same. There is a ton of stuff in the AF to get mad about and this is obviously an extra one, but you sound like you checked out as a 6 month FP.