NKAWTG

Removing candidates from the IDE process is going to have very bad second and third order effects on the moral and motivation of a majority of the officer force. At one point, your O-4 promotion list and your IDE select list were separated in time because of how depressed people were at getting promoted, but missing out on school. Removing the carrot from 85% of your officer force is sending one hell of a message. If we do this, leaders need to be upfront with people. What you do in years 3 to 9 set your ceiling on how far you can progress in the AF. I know Big Blue has a problem with SDE candidates coasting. Decisions like this will only make this more prevalent and extend down into your IDE ranks. By slotting us all in our places at the 8 year mark, you remove an important incentive in bettering ourselves and the organizations we work for. The appeals to the core values and "bloom where you're planted" speeches are going to ring hollow when you remove merit from equation after your Major's board. Right now, all of the mentoring and force development is focused around the 15% select, or on how to achieve that 5% candidate slot. Throw the other 85% a bone here, and lay out what we can and can't do. And yes, I understand the counter argument. Not everyone is going to be CSAF. 15% go to IDE, and 85% promote to O-5 and there will be opportunities for everyone. But what kinda of dynamic are you asking for when you run the two track system in earnest. You are removing an incentive to not clock watch to 20 years. What positive outcome is trying to be achieved here?

At the risk of defending GC, your Wing king is allocated only X amount of personnel for the base. How he allocates the resources between getting the mission done, managing the queep, and developing his folks is his responsibility. I've seen it done OK, and I've seen it done very very poorly. If your wing king thinks he needs a DS, 3 execs and a secretary to manage the queep, so be it, but it comes at a cost of shorting the squadrons. Anything above the UMD comes from somewhere, because it's always a zero sum game. If he lets some dude slide from staff job to staff job and doesn't make it equitable with the guys humping the mission, then it's a leadership problem. That's what GC is referring to. But it's a leadership problem he'll never be judged on. From the Wing king's perspective, he wants to pass the ORIs, not have any accidents, not have to deal with DUIs or sexual assault cases, and pretty much all the other risk adverse things you can think of. So he'll factor that in when he allocates people to the XP shop for 2 straight years. Balancing mission and people is great talking point, but only can get you fired if you screw it up.

One thing this exchange has revealed is in the eyes of big blue, the 11F community is the only one need of a bonus to boost retention. Imagine the backlash if they had offered your fighter types up to 225k to stick around without giving something to the other rated folks. The bonus was not needed to boost retention in any other community, but since it's been going on so long, they don't have an idea of what it will do not offer it. Or maybe they do since they delayed this one for so long. I imagine there was quite a bit of back and forth within the puzzle palace on this issue, because the bonuses for the rest of the rated types are only there because of fairness, precedent and to fight the perception that the world revolves around the pointy nose types. That would explain the "ought to be grateful" comments from someone who realizes the stated reason for the bonus isn't actually true in most cases.

The shortfall the bonus is trying to compensate for is not lack of pilots, but a lack of experienced 11F types who need to fill roles other than flying. Because of the way the Air Force has arranged force structure in the fighter community, there are not enough AD fighter squadrons or cockpits to crank out the experienced 11Fs the Air Force needs. Flowing more pilots out of pilot training to the fighter community will not help because a glut of junior pilots will compete for the already scarce flying hours and slow down everyone's progression. The solution for the supply side is increasing the number fighter cockpits, but that will be decades in the making as the F-35 comes online. The other side is the demand from the Air Force on the 11F community. Your patch wearing bright and shiny types are needed on staffs and in the AOCs to bring that brand of expertise to the planning processes, and operational command and control functions. Your middle of the pack guys are needed in the trigger pulling UAV community. They have tried mitigating this problem by throwing MAF guys into CAF billets (I'm one of them), cutting down the staff manning requirements or just plain not filling spots. For some reason, they desire 11Fs to be the ones flying armed drones, so that is a problem of the Air Force's making. Bottom line is if you sign the 25K a year till 20 bonus, realize the Air Force wants to keep you to do everything but fly. The Air Force needs the skill sets acquired from 10 years of flying the line, just no longer in the cockpit.

Just so we're clear, one side is the Syrian government, Russia, Iran and Hezbollah. On the other side are Al Qaeda, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Israel. Who are the good guys, and what national interest would this serve again?

People are referring to a top 50% / bottom 50%. That's not really the way the Air Force makes the cuts. More like a top 20% / bottom 80%. First time the Air Force will tell you where you stand in relation to everyone else is the Major's board, and whether you are a school select. Once on that path, your career is managed, and big blue will put you into positions to succeed up to being a SQ/CC. You can screw it up at that point, but you'll make it that far once a school select. The occasional late bloomer will appear, but the system isn't really set up to accommodate them. Good dudes will get passed over all the time, but enough competent people will get promoted to keep the machine running. Promotion boards are about getting enough of the right people, not getting all the right people. As a corollary, the reason our recent RIF boards were so screwed up is they took same process for ID'ing the top 20%, and tried to get the bottom 20% out of it. It simply didn't work because the bottom 80% looked roughly the same, and it never really mattered before to separate 25th percentile from 90th percentile.

I'm pretty sure they would never do it, but getting rid of TA for officers will be a step in the right direction. If you have to rely on your own paycheck or GI Bill to fund the AAD, you would have to be more picky about a worthwhile eduction versus a diploma mill degree. That would have to go lockstep with upping AFIT opportunities to educate people who need it for there job instead of assuming having everyone get a masters means you have a better overall force. It could never work because we have 10 years of leadership who substitute box checking for evaluating their people.

Does anyone have the insight as to will they or won't they offer it. Despite what the CSAF said a couple of years ago, the people I knew not offered continuation were blindsided by the change in policy. I know that decision has led to a fair amount of people punching after their first Lt Col board to make sure they can still be hired on by a guard unit. It is one hell of a crap shoot to hang on for that miniscule ABZ promotion, hope for continuation and risk no retirement at all.

The only time I've ever dinged someone for canceling IFR to early was when he tried to do so above FL180 while on an IP training sortie. I was fairly sure it was the first time he had uttered those words since pilot training.

If you are approaching MacDill from the northeast, the first runway you see is Peter O Knight. Having flown into MacDill a handful of times, it does take a couple of seconds to process seeing the shorter runway and realize it does not match your instruments. I can understand how it happened, but it was a 100% screw up on the crew. The standard MAF operating procedure is to Q-3 the crew, the crew's spouses, kids and pets. The crew was also probably put on a bus back to Charleston, and a different crew would be sent out to recover the aircraft.

As many have mentioned, not playing along and getting SOS and your masters done just eliminates you from consideration. SOS is rather worthless for what it gives to you to perform your job, but invaluable to leadership to figure out how pick the next batch of Lt Cols. Here is the reasoning: 20% go in residence to IDE (ACSC). In residence to IDE has been almost automatic for promotion to O-5. 10% of SOS graduates get a DG from SOS. A DG from SOS eliminates the need for the Senior Rater to make qualitative judgement on your potential, because some Captain teaching SOS made it for him. It allows the promotion board to make an easy call on school selects because that marker fills half the quota. As much as I would like flying ability and the ability to lead a crew to matter, it really doesn't. The only aviation marker is becoming an instructor in a MWS (sorry FAIPs), and that is the weakest marker overall and the most easily overcome for promotion. Everyone's aviation record looks the same in the eyes of the promotion board, unless you are really bad at the flying thing. Even then, it can be easily compensated for because your FEF is never under review by the board, only inferred from your records. From this cynic's perspective, here is what matters in judging your potential for promotion: DG from SOS is single most important marker you can get. Finishing first in your class or getting an annual award from SOS will make you very competitive for BTZ for O-5 When you get your masters done is more important than where it is from, or what it is in. There is an Air and Space Journal piece which gives a good analysis on why that is. The premise is a masters is a signal of commitment to the Air Force, rather than a measure of ability or potential. Getting it done ahead of your peers will get you stratified higher earlier, and once you get on the #1/XX train, you tend to stay on it unless you screw it up. Mediocrity isn't enough to knock you down at that point. The qeep involved in planning the Christmas party becomes important because everyone's job performance is about the same on paper, and how you spend the rest of your time is the only differentiators for the boards judging quarterly and annual awards. Leadership has been brought up in a system that passes the buck on making qualitative decisions on the people they lead, and instead relying on quarterly award boards and Maxwell to make those calls for them. You really can't fight the system. To be in a position to effect the system, you need to play the game, which in turn makes you value playing the game above all else.

The train wreck that has people talking about a stop loss is still a few years down the road. It has to do with the draw down of current fighter/bomber cockpits and the spin up of the F-35. There will be a couple year gap between sending the F-15/F-16/A-10 to the bone-yard and when the F-35 goes operational. Given our current track record on acquisitions, this gap will be larger than anyone is predicting. Regardless of what the actual MWS manning is, the A1 guys will be panicking because they have no idea how to fill projected experience shortfall and/or ramp up the UPT T-38 track when the new squadrons stand up.