pawnman

Drinking is optional, but hanging out in the bar on a Friday isn't. You don't have to get plastered drunk, but you do have to be a good bro. We had a few non-drinkers in the B-1 community, and everyone appreciates them being a good DD option.

Are you looking at a different tracker than me? I just looked at the status of boards on MyPers and it still says it's with the Air Staff. Last updated June 19.

I suspect that's exactly HOW they get empowered. Tell the Bobs everything is sunshine and rainbows while grinding the folks who rarely, if ever, talk to the Bobs into the ground. My last job was in an IG office. Place the blame however you want...maybe it's the O's fault for not being in touch with their people, maybe the SNCOs fault for abusing their people...but the majority of complaints were young airmen/NCOs against SNCOs, and when we referred it to the unit commander, they rarely had any idea that it was even going on.

Bin Laden wasn't a US citizen.

Now we can't even produce enough sorties for B-1 aviators.

You can definitely see it in the faces of the guys working the jets. I think it's a combination of not enough manning, not enough parts, and no real solutions to either. We tell our maintainers that they are so critically manned that they can't cross-train or PCS...but there's no SRB for maintenance. And we're solving that problem by shoving anyone with a high enough mechanical score into maintenance, regardless of the job they actually want. Add to that the increasingly ludicrous demands placed by the Air Force on things like CBTs, volunteering, awards, additional training, and additional duties...and then pile on leadership that has forgotten how to say "no"...and you've got a recipe for working 12s every time a line cancels or the WG/CC gets a good idea fairy.

Do you have heartburn with his 16-year-old son being killed in a separate strike two weeks later? Also an American citizen, and this time not even accused of anything.

MyPers is still showing the status as "Air Staff". Still has to clear SECAF, SECDEF, and Congress. I'd be amazed if that happens by the end of August.

This is a government that sent $4 billion in stimulus checks to dead people. What do you suppose the accuracy rate for voter records is?

Lord forbid we just use blue lettering. What asshat has stock in the company that makes spice brown thread?

The police absolutely raised the stakes, and we let them. Post 9-11, we went from peace officers to telling every cop they were the frontline in the war on terrorism here at home. We radically altered the viewpoint that they were here to serve the public and turned them into a force that is constantly seeking out potential life-threatening enemies. And turns out if you roll into every situation expecting to face an armed and motivated enemy, you become much more trigger happy. I don't fully blame the cops, although their training programs certainly bear some of the blame. We did this to ourselves by teaching cops that putting the odds in their favor to the max extent possible overruled all other considerations, including the rights of the citizens they are policing.

My point is that if one of these asshole police beats a protestor bad enough to put them in a hospital (for example)... How does their agency hold them accountable when they have no individual identification? When someone calls to make a complaint, they just say "oh, the third one in the left in camo" as the whole description? Why do any police ever wear a nametag or badge with a number, anywhere? Hell, why do we wear nametags if this is such a security concern?

How does the government or department handle misbehaving officers without the ability to identify them? Not like their bros are going to tell anyone... Thin blue line and all that.

Perhaps. I'm not a huge fan of undercover stuff anyway. It seems most prevalent in drug cases...which IMHO, shouldn't even be crimes in the first place. But the police wearing full tactical gear to arrest protestors and/or rioters are not in any way, shape, or form undercover. And unless they plan to do shady shit (like, say, take a knife to cases of water at aid stations or shove an 80-year-old man to the ground), there's no reason for them to conceal their names and/or badge numbers.

And crowd control requires police to be undercover...while wearing giant "police" labels on the uniform?

Also, as a member of the military...I'm not a big fan of federal law enforcement putting on very similar uniforms and conducting these anonymous raids. As if I didn't have enough to worry about from ISIS and Al Qaeda, now DHS is putting a target on my back for every antifa and BLM wannabe revolutionary. I'm also not a fan at all of the anonymous aspect. When they talk about "unmarked", the don't mean the "police" velcro on the uniform. They mean that there are no visible badge numbers, nametags, or other identification. No way to hold a bad cop accountable, because no one knows who it is. My personal thought is that you don't need to hide your name from the people paying your salary unless you're doing something shady.

Oh, I agree. I'm not waiting around for another crash, just kind of hoping for it when the time comes. I'll be putting the money in either way.

Most likely voting libertarian based on: 1. Ending the war on drugs. It has cost us so much time, money, resources, and destroyed so many lives. Just make marijuana legal everywhere and tax it. It's a policy that actually generates revenue while allowing us to slash costs. I'm more extreme than many...I'd go so far as to legalize every drug. Then the FDA can regulate the quality, doseage, make sure it isn't cut with drain cleaner or scouring powder, it deprives gangs and cartels of their largest revenue sources, and it frees up the Coast Guard and DHS to handle things that are actual threats to national security. 2. Ending the war in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq. Places are shitholes. They were shitholes before we got there. They will be shitholes when we leave. So let's stop investing time, people, and money into trying to make them less shithole and focus on the high-end fight, the way the CJCS and SecDef are telling us we need to. 3. Immigration reform. I'm a fan of border security, but I'm also a believer in the idea that America was created by immigrants. I would remove all limits on legal immigration and put the full force of modern technology behind the necessary background and safety checks. It should not take months or years to immigrate to the country legally. It should take a day, maybe a week if you have a complex case. Welcome anyone who wants to come here and make a better life for themselves. And yeah...that includes amnesty for people who are here illegally but haven't committed any other crimes. However, I fully support getting rid of anyone who has committed a violent crime while here illegally. Make the legal immigration process easy and fast enough, and you can really focus border enforcement on criminals...because they will be the only ones with an incentive to cross the border illegally.

You've clearly had different experiences with military medicine than I have. If your bar for success is 30 day waits to see a PCM followed by denying specialist care, treating everything with Motrin, and pushing most of the intake care to people without medical/nursing degrees, then sure, it'll be cheaper for everyone involved.

Just got my annual bonus installment...you know, for all the bad parts about this job, the money ain't too bad. Gonna keep it in checking until this PCS is over, then probably dump a fair amount into an ETF. Part of me is hoping for another stock market crash before I pull the trigger.

I'll be that guy...what's a GUT simulator?

I think so, but less because it's a "fighter pilot's Air Force" and more due to manning in individual MWSes. In the B-1, it's almost impossible to get picked up for a special program or staff job unless you're coming directly out of in-residence PME. We just don't have the people to man the flying squadrons, especially the FTU. Meanwhile, BUFF guys are getting staff jobs, special jobs, etc...maybe some of it is because they can keep flying while on the staff at Barksdale. That then ripples into promotion statistics....B-1 WSOs have the worst promotion rate of any rated officers, largely because they can't escape flying the line to do any kind of career broadening while their BUFF brethren do.

Maybe, MAYBE, that's a valid concern for fighters...I don't know, and I don't have a strong opinion about it. But flying T-1s may actually be better prep for the crew coordination required in a bomber. None of the bombers are getting into high-g dogfights or flying in fingertip.

Had a few come through the B-1 pipeline. It's not like there's a magical barrier that prevents a heavy guy from learning to employ weapons.