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Closed with Travis Smith at National Bank of Kansas City for our second house/loan with them. As always, expeditious and the rate they gave us was .5% below USAA. Also, my real estate agent was surprised by how quickly NBKC was able to get everything done. As mentioned, this is the second loan we got through Travis and he was great to work with!

Doesn't seem like prices have fallen all that much however. However, I have noticed whereas I paid around $2000 for a Keltec RFB in 2013, they are going for about $1200 now. Doesn't seem like the top tier stuff has gone down in price at all though.

The one gotcha to Amazon is that you have to be willing to relocate to where they want you to live. Retiring AF friend of mine interviewed with them and during the 2nd interview round the first question was, "Are you willing to relocate to where we need you? If you answer no, the interview is over." I spent 23 years putting up with living in places I didn't want to live so Amazon was not for me, plus another retired B-1 WSO who I know got an Amazon ops manager job, quit after a couple of years because he said it was too many 12 hour days. I'd recommend any non-pilots looking for post-AF employment get a PMP program manager certification which can be had for free through Syracuse University Veteran's Transition Program as that seems to be a very common thing to have for transition into the corporate world. You can also take the exact same courseware on AF e-Learning but then you'd have to pay for the $500 test yourself. Got a late start on mine but I wish I had done it as a junior major as I learned a lot of stuff that would have been useful for the AF jobs I had. Hell, I think the AF would probably be better off replacing ACSC DL with a PMP cert course.

No, it's in a suburb of Atlanta. Thanks for the support though!

Hasn't been my experience. My wife has wanted to start a bar/restaurant forever and so we decided to go ahead and do it concurrent with my retirement. In preparation, I read a couple "how-to" start a business books and attended a Boots 2 Business course on base. Now I understand why many entrepreneurs say you have to fail a couple of times before you become successful. Running this business has been the steepest learning curve I've every experienced. I've also been floored about the amount of red tape and expense involved in getting business licenses, meeting code, etc. from the local government. For example, we rented a place that already kitchen equipment installed and when we went through the initial health inspection we were told the code had changed the previous year and we ended up spending an un-budgeted $20K on getting it up to code. I mean, FFS, the science in restaurant health and safety is so immature that such big code changes are necessary year to year!?! We also had delays getting licenses due to the slow pace of the city in processing them. I've also seen some unexpected things like the cops showing up repeatedly saying there was a report of a fight at our establishment. Probably our competitors trying to scare customers away.... Also, everything for business costs twice or three times what it would if you bought it for yourself. For example, deposit for electrical service for a business was $2000 and the monthly bill is $500 (1500 sq ft restaurant) and water is $450/month. It's also disheartening when you run into all of the rent seeking and rigging that goes on. We had to spend $500 for an alcohol survey to a surveying company to prove the restaurant/bar isn't within 500' of a school or a church. It probably took that surveying company all of five minutes to figure that out using a geographic information system (my undergrad degree incidentally) and I'm 90% sure they used GIS data from the city or county. Sweet deal for them... Also, only being allowed to serve alcohol bought through select alcohol wholesalers (was a real pain to get any of them to call us back to set up an account) doesn't help the bottomline either. Granted my wife picked the riskiest kind of business to start, but it's been 95% stress and 5% reward and we aren't even remotely close to breaking even after 9 months either. From my experience, if I was to do it again, I'd buy an existing business or I'd go into a business that catered only to other businesses as that seems like where the real money is.

And the whole fixation on ISR allows the intel types to think that they are operators, not support.

The north Koreans want nukes to effect reunification on their terms and it's far more than just an extortion racket. I was a Korea RAS/FAO and in my opinion these two gentlemen have the situation pegged light years better than any other academic or pundit; B.R. Myers (https://sthelepress.com/index.php/2017/07/03/north-korea-nuclear-armament-and-unification/) and Joshua Stanton (https://freekorea.us/2016/09/01/how-kim-jong-un-can-still-win-the-korean-war-part-1/#sthash.GxqDMieE.Hsc2HPHL.dpbs). Ignore the rest.

When all the existing services can pass an audit, then maybe we can talk about adding another one....

As a Korea RAS and a dude with a Korean wife, I can say this statement is categorically false.

I thought it was Congress who forced this all-the-services-buy-the-same-jet on us, not the USMC.

https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2017/3/9/the-price-of-payload-light-attack-for-pennies-on-the-pound Good article on light strike, written by an assistant district attorney in Texas. Sad that a random lawyer seems to have a better grasp of this issue than our generals.

I'd love to see Hillary win the race for mayor of NYC. Those idiots deserve her and it would show just how corrupt and villainous she is. Her disastrous term as mayor could always be pointed to show why it's a good thing that she lost the Presidential race.

Dramatically reducing the size of the Army in order to take this option off the table might be a good start. The Army goes around saying that only boots on the ground can win wars yet they are 2-3 (Vietnam, Panama, DS, OEF, OIF) in the last 40 years. Airpower may not win wars by itself but it has never lost a war either. If you are going to tell the NCA that boots on the ground is the best COA, then you better actually be prepared to succeed.

No, we should totally go out of our way to antagonize a ferociously paranoid nuclear weapon state. What could go wrong? <sarc>

All the married guys want to be single; all the single guys want to be married....

@Kiloalpha, when I attended the ROKAF Staff College, not one ROK officer I asked about us leaving the Peninsula mentioned the alliance, US-ROK friendship, our sacrifices for them, etc. They ONLY mentioned that it would be too costly for them to replace our capabilities. They only care about the money. Even the pro-US ROKAF guys were like this. As an aside, the most pro-US ROKAF officer I've met in my RAS duties is Lee Chol-sul, the ex-NKAF MiG-19 pilot who defected in 1996 and was a ROKAF Lt Col (since promoted to colonel) when I was at the Staff College.

The other half of mentoring is the person being mentored has to been willing to listen and apply the advice they received. I got some great mentoring from a 1-star (then BGen Keltz) but like a dumbass, I didn't listen and now I'll retire as an O-5 instead of as an O-6... I've always tried to mentor people coming up behind up and help them learn from my mistakes but the "take-the-advice" rate only seems to be about 50/50.

The poor Coasties seem to be so underfunded that they could only get that in their wildest, 4-day-bender-in-Vegas dreams. I've never understood why, if Homeland Security is our #1 priority, the Coast Guard is chronically underfunded.

There is a very easy fix for all of this general/flag officer personal misconduct but, sadly, it will never be implemented. If a GO/FO gets cashiered for personal misconduct, the service should lose that GO/FO billet for 3 years. With this, you know that shit would get fixed literally overnight. Screening and selection would instantly double in rigor. Afterall, maintaining GO/FO billets is are among the services' highest priorities...

I don't think the scenario will go down like this. They will eliminate gun rights via death by a thousand cuts. Massive tax increases on guns and ammo is the first step. Shut down shooting ranges because of "lead contamination". Repeal CCW. Etc. They certainly won't send police and military around to confiscate firearms. There's an easier way; once they have ownership lists (whether via registration, data mining, asking your kids at school, etc.), they simply make any interaction with the government contingent upon surrendering your firearms. Want to renew your license plates? Turn in your guns. Want to get a tax refund? Turn in your guns. Want to vote? Turn in your guns. Etc...

Cel nav isn't a worthwhile skill IMO as it's been made obsolete by laser ring gyro INS. Fielded INS in USAF aircraft have low enough drift rates that learning cel nav isn't necessary especially if you have a decent radar to update the INS with a fix.

I second ATIS...get PRK/LASIK and shoot for pilot. I flew B-1s as a WSO (CSO) and have spent 22 years in the AF and wouldn't recommend anyone become any other kind of officer in the AF except pilot. Don't get me wrong, I loved flying in the B-1, got to do some really cool stuff (dropping iron in Operation ANACONDA), and have even got to do some really cool things besides flying too. However, realize, even if you do everything you the AF asks of you and excel even, the AF still hates you because you're not a pilot. That's just the way it is. From my limited experience around the Navy at nav school at Pensacola and in my previous joint staff job, the Navy treats its aviators more equally.

I wonder why Air University doesn't do an end-of-career PME survey to figure out what our PME needs to be. I would think if you asked every retiring O-5 and above about their PME experience throughout their career, what they needed versus what PME taught them, etc., AU would get a lot of useful feedback.

Like many here, we had a great experience getting a mortgage with NBOKC. However, if you have to deal with them for a property loss, beware. We had a kitchen fire and our insurer, USAA, cut a check to the lienholder, i.e. NBOKC, so we could pay for the repairs. Dealing with their Loss Draft dept. has been a nightmare. Numerous times we thought we were done with a step, having submitted all of the paperwork only to find out there was more paperwork they didn't tell us. And so it's been two months since the repairs we complete and we still haven't been able to pay our contractor. Talking with a supervisor there hasn't sped up the process after their mistakes either. For my next mortgage I'm not going with NBOKC. To be fair, I think their Loss Draft dept. might be subcontracted but I'm not sure. If they would have given us all the paperwork up front, it should have taken two weeks, not two months. YMMV. On the insurance side, while USAA is more expensive for homeowners' insurance, they were a dream to work with on this.