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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.

So I'll engage in a little sport bitching here; I just got hit with a $17K bill from the gov't from my recent deployment. After looking at my voucher, the lodging portion of the flat rate per diem had been removed by the local finance people. So I went VFR direct to ask WTF and the SrA said flat rate per diem only applies to PCSing and that you always have to provide lodging receipts. Is it too much to ask for the Finance folks to know the Joint Travel Regulation which explains the flat rate per diem and says lodging receipts are not required for that? It was a different airman than the one that changed my voucher so it was not a single instance of a clueless airman. I was amazed to have to explain their own regulation to them. Why aren't their NCOs teaching them that stuff? The SrA said he'd never heard of flat rate per diem for deployments.

A scaled-up Rutan Ares (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaled_Composites_ARES) might make a good A-10 replacement.

@Beaver, the way it was explained to me is we teach Spanish, Talagog, Korean, etc. because so many of the native speakers can't get SCI clearances for whatever reasons. Also, the LEAP program is designed to get you to a translator level which most native speakers aren't at so hence the pay even for common languages AFAIK.

Yet another good experience with National Bank of Kansas City. I worked with Travis Smith for our mortgage and he was very patient, responsive, and helpful. I got a better interest rate than USAA offered and was able to close faster.

Part of the problem is we operators need to do a better job educating the support folks. Granted you'll find a lot who could care less but still. Back when I was a young captain and the squadron EWO (insert nav joke here), I took some of the defense avionics troops into the sim so they could kinda see how we use the stuff (would have loved to get them a flight, but crew chiefs should go first and not enough flights to go around). They were really jazzed about it and the senior guy was a MSgt who told me he'd been working on the B-1 for 15 years and this was the first time a crewdawg had taken him into the sim to explain how we use the equipment he worked on. Did the same thing for the radar maintainers and got the same response.

Add to that the large percentage of Iraqis (or other Middle Easterners for that matter) who marry cousins. Some studies I found on Wikipedia (I know, I know) put it at 30% of Iraqis (about the same for Afghanistan) married to 1st or 2nd cousins which after generation after generation has got to induce some health issues, mental or otherwise.

One person's paradise is another person's hell. While TDY in Singapore, met a SMSgt who said she hated Singapore and couldn't wait to get back to Holloman. I was shocked as Singapore looked pretty cool to me. I just spent 3 years at Camp Smith while living at Hickam and I'm glad to get away. Great place to live for a while but the traffic, high costs, and island fever started to wear after three years. My favorite place to be assigned was Randolph and least favorite was Goodfellow (I liked Kunsan better than Goodbuddy).

I was always amazed when I was in a flying squadron how many dudes bitched about pme, AAD, addition duties, etc. and claimed they just wanted to fly and yet they didn't even take the flying part seriously. Maybe it's just the aircraft I was in but I saw plenty of pilots and WSOs treat it like a flying club and seemingly could care less about employing the jet as a weapon. Never saw those dudes in the vault studying and they knew just the bare minimum tactically to get by a checkride. I can think of a dozen guys like that of the top of my head that I wouldn't get in the jet to go to war with. I didn't like the queep anymore than anyone else but I sucked it up and did it. And I also spent lots of time in the vault and sim trying to be better at my primary job. I'm with Liquid; from what I've seen over the last 20 years the promotion system is by and large fair but one must recognize how much luck and timing plays into promotion. From what I've seen that's like 50% of the equation right there. Also, remember you don't get promoted, your records do and if they don't paint an accurate picture because you had poor writers for raters...