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By pretty much any definition (whether you are talking about declared wars, undeclared conflicts, other uses of armed force, murders, rapes, assaults, other petty crime, total number of people killed violently due to the action of another human being) statistically we are living in the most non-violent times in the history of the mankind. It's been a little while since I've read On Killing but from what I remember Grossman's argument is that we are living in the "most violent times in history" from the standpoint of people being more conditioned to kill, particularly in the developed world, making crime rates and the like go up...but this is statistically untrue as violent crime rates in pretty much every category (murders, rapes, assaults, etc), both in the U.S. specifically and the developed world in general, have been on a steady decline for the past 20+ years (during the same time where the things that Grossman claims are responsible for increasing the conditioning to killing among the general population have been on the rise...violent movies/TV/video games, other popular glorification of violence, etc). Grossman does a lot of good stuff and has a lot of good and interesting ideas, but his work has some pretty serious methodological flaws, and that's one of them. Another would be that he based his "U.S. soldiers in WWII rarely fired their weapons because they weren't conditioned" thing off of S.L.A. Marshall's work Men Against Fire, and that particular claim has been revealed to be more or less completely made up bullshit on the part of Marshall...but at the time Grossman wrote On Killing Marshall's claim had already been disproven yet Grossman still made it central to his thesis. Ironically enough there is evidence that Marshall specifically included it in Men Against Fire (despite being on very shaky empirical ground) in part to spur Army leadership to institute the very conditioning that they did wind up using, and the type that Grossman talks about.

Re: Grossman, here's a link to his calendar. AF wise looks like he'll be at Scott on 9 Sept and at the 163rd RW in California on 3 Nov. Looks like he/his webmaster do a good job of keeping it updated a ways in advance, so I'd check back periodically if you are interested to see if he's coming somewhere near you.

The mention of Boyd reminds me of something JSF related Bill Sweetman said a few years back..."The Navy is not happy with the new joint-service fighter. It's gained weight during development, but more importantly, the Navy isn't sure that the capabilities it provides are what they want to spend more money on. It's tempting to scrap it and go with an alternative from a company with recent carrier jet experience. The obstacle is a headstrong Secretary of Defense who's staked his reputation on the joint program, but the signals are clear: the moment he's gone the Navy's going to bail. But enough about the TFX. What's new with the JSF?" And yeah, kind of hard to do a legitimate comparison due to the completely different development timelines involved between the F-X program, the LWF competition and the A-X on the one hand and then the JSF program on the other. Of course, that difference in development timelines in and of itself kind of provides an answer to the unspoken question here.

Flip side argument regarding WIC...do you honestly expect non-flyers to understand what something like WIC is? I mean, I'm not saying I agree with giving SOS DG more weight than that (not at all), but making this out to be some conspiracy on the part of the evil shoes to keep flyers down isn't really seeing the whole picture. Here's a test: how many of you guys know (without googling) what AMMOS is? How about ALROC? (No, I'm not saying those are in any way comparable to WIC, I'm just trying to make a point.)

Unless something has drastically changed in the past week while I was on leave they aren't coming up here for 13-1. They were supposed to send WLOs to 12-2 last month (they sent reps to the planning conference back in January), but that fell through and didn't happen.

Also worth mentioning that with EPRs the only thing that truly matters promotion wise up to MSgt is the back side rating, since that is all that impacts promotion because there are no "PRFs" or boards on the E side until you go up for SMSgt (they'll look at history, so getting bullets right on your MSgt and senior TSgt EPRs actually matters, but agonizing over bullets on a SSgt's EPR is even stupider than agonizing over bullets on a junior Captain's OPR, which is saying something.) Of course, the flip side of that is that decs do generate WAPS points so those can actually be important.

Here's a story with a few more details from the local newspaper up here. It's got quite a few details about the mishap and the search that followed. This part stood out to me:

ANR released a public statement today saying F-15s from Kadena were sitting alert up here.

Not Kadena (or at least they weren't last time I checked a couple of weeks ago, maybe the Guard folks swapped out with them) but yeah, the Raptors haven't been sitting alert up here for quite a while. 67th was here last summer before the Misawa dudes had their marathon AK winter vacation.

Reminds me of the AFCOMAC students in a 15 pax GOV that got caught in a drive-by in lovely Linda, CA. I heard it was fun explaining the bullet holes. Re: RF-A, I can't say this with certainty since I have no experience with the Nellis exercises, but it seems to me that some of the better MAF integration comes from the fact that generally speaking the Det at Elmendorf is only supporting airlift and C2 assets, so it's a little easier to focus more on airlift. It also probably doesn't hurt that a lot of the international folks at RF-As (almost everyone) brings C-130s, and for quite a few of them that's all they bring. Since PACOM AOR partner engagement is one of the big focuses currently for RF-A, this tends to raise the visibility as well.

Worst MXG/CC ever. If I worked for him I'd have a molester-stach 365 days a year.

Already up.

I'm going to throatpunch the next asshole that throws out the "well it's never been used in combat so therefore it is useless" card. The Eagle spent over a decade in service before it was ever used in combat, guess it was completely useless. Don't get me wrong, I'm as frustrated as anyone with this damn OBOGS issue as well as all the other Raptor problems (have friends/colleagues working it on the mx side, so I'm under no illusion as to the problems), but that bullshit card has always pissed me off. It shows a total inability to understand the purpose of the U.S. military (hint: if we're actually fighting a war we've already ######ed up to some degree) as well as an inability to think strategically or long term. As far as the "test mission" thing goes, I guess multiple intercepts of Bears with live weapons on board are just "test missions."

I can't speak with certainty as far as billing for in the air, but for servicing on the ground (fuel, ammo, etc.) it's generally either an FMS case or an ACSA (Acquisition and Cross Servicing Agreement.) It's an AF to AF level thing (the U.S. side is run out of the SAF/IA office), and my limited experience with it has led me to believe that the paperwork just changes hands enough times until people don't care about it anymore and forget about it; there may or may not be an actual exchange of money that goes along with the shuffling of paperwork.

I'm sure most of y'all have already seen it, but the actual AIB report has been posted on the JAG website, if you want to get it straight from the horse's mouth instead of reading a news story about it. Here's the summary, and here's the full report.