pawnman

So, I did a quick search (sorry if it wasn't in-depth enough)...but there are apparently two-year, accompanied positions opening in Guam for B-1 folks. I'm curious what info the forum has regarding Guam. Is this something I should jump on immediately, avoid like the plague, or something in between? I'm married, with an 11-year-old. I've only been in flying positions, both in the line squadron and the FTU, my whole career. I'm told the Andersen assignment is also flying, but I also know B-1s will only be there for a small time during the two years this assignment would span.

I have a few guesses. I don't know how much fucking studying it takes to just ask the guys in the field why they are bailing at the 4-6 year point.

At that stage, why do we even need officers in the career field familiar with computers at all? If the solution to retention is hire people who can't get jobs on the outside, then your model is broken.

Dude, it's a step in the right direction. I'll take it. It won't solve all the problems, but it's a damned easy kill and serves to boost the morale a little bit, so let's take it in the spirit in which it was intended and build on this victory to try to get our morale patches back.

I'm all for using our influence culturally, diplomatically, and economically to promote freedom around the world. This idea that we're going to invade third-world hell-holes and shape them into industrialized Western democracies has got to stop, though.

To SWAB. Great pilot, great officer, and great dude.

I think we should have caged our expectations to reality. Desert Storm was such a success because we did just that. The campaign was to remove Iraq from Kuwait. We removed Iraq from Kuwait, crippled their ability to try it again, and we went home. We could have done something similar in Afghanistan...attack the Taliban's strongholds, destroy as much of their capacity to inflict fear on their neighbors, and walk away. Instead, we're on our second decade of trying to build a nation where one has never really existed in a form we're familiar with. Same with Iraq take-two...we invaded the country, dismantled every part of the functional government, then we were caught off-guard when we had a hard time building a democratic government from scratch. My point isn't that we should never get involved. It's that we should take a cold, hard look at whether that involvement is in our own interests, rather than the pursuit of some noble and unattainable ideal of "liberty" or "justice". When we get involved, we should do so on the smallest scale possible. At our current rate of progress, we'll be in Afghanistan into the 2050s, and that's probably being optimistic. In short, we need a more pragmatic approach to our foreign policy. Saddam was a terrible person, but because he ruled Iraq with an iron fist, he kept groups like ISIS from emerging. Qaddaffi was a long time antagonist of the US, but he was willing to work with us on getting rid of WMDs. Now Libya is just a giant, messy civil war (much like Syria)...perhaps the US needs to recognize that foreign dictators don't have to be good people to be useful to US interests.

You may be right, but I'd question how well our policy of supporting democracy and freedom around the world has really gone so far. We ended up in Korea to a stalemate, and we're still there. We pulled out of Vietnam with our tail between our legs. Iraq hasn't exactly blossomed into a stable democracy after three tries at it. Afghanistan is still as corrupt and ungovernable as ever. Libya had a dictator willing to give up his WMDs and work with the US to repair ties...a few tweets later, we're bombing his administration, giving Iran a close look at why they should NOT abandon their own nuclear weapon research. Egypt was a strong ally of the US for years, but again, a few tweets, some action-packed protest video, and we pushed their leadership under the bus in favor of an overtly hostile political group. There have not been many times where our direct intervention has actually helped. So maybe, just maybe, instead of responding to every crisis in the world with a "we can fix this, we're a super-power", we should weigh our options and think hard about what we're going to get out of our involvement first.

It seems like a lot of people already think we went to war in Irag and Afghanistan for oil (even though Afghanistan doesn't even have appreciable amounts of oil). I wouldn't be for taking over all their oil wholesale...but I would be for some agreements that actually benefit us, like forcing Iraq to pay for all the equipment they keep turning over to ISIL.

I'd prefer that the President pick the next SECAF based on their ability, not their looks. If Mrs. Wilson spends half the time managing personnel that SECAF James spent taking selfies, it'll be an improvement.

Is there anything the MAAP cell does at AUAB that can't be done at Shaw?

11Bs and 12Bs are picking up a LOT of 11F 365 and 179 taskings. My wing alone has filled something like 7 365s in the past year...which is not helping the FTU manning (currently at 43%) which, in turn, puts a crimp in production, which means less 11B and 12B folks to take the next round of taskers...

I'm not disgruntled with my job because of the deployments where I got to kill ISIL assholes on every sortie...

Sounds to me like the Republicans knew exactly what they needed to do to win, announced their strategy, and then executed it...all while the democrats fell asleep at the wheel. I don't see the problem here.

Must be enough to warrant this: https://www.argusleader.com/story/news/politics/2017/01/11/lawmakers-vote-against-barring-sexual-contatct-interns/96448914/ " A legislative panel voted down a proposed rule change Wednesday that would have explicitly prevented them from engaging in sexual contact with legislative interns and pages. "

Fuel spray, staring at the boom, constant power corrections as the jet gets heavier, and a constantly shifting center of gravity as you fill the tanks makes it more challenging.

As long as they don't touch anything.

You're more optimistic than I am. I've seen all the ways benefits have been eroded (chipping away at BAH from 100% to 85% of housing cost, the ever-dwindling number of conditions Tricare covers, the reduction in per diem if you're TDY 30 days or more...). I also know that the Air Force cut something like 20,000 people just three years ago for budget reasons, and we've been struggling to recover ever since. I don't sit in on the votes, but I do read the NDAA when it gets passed, and the latest one sounds like bad news for military paychecks. I hope your right, but I have my doubts, especially with Sen. John McCain taking aim at BAH every year.

I know you said you weren't on the SASC, but what is the over-arching plan on rolling BAH (and BAS) into a "single-salary" system? From where we sit, that seems like it would be a huge pay cut due to the spike in taxable income, while not actually increasing the size of the pay checks. It also seems that the NDAA had language directing retirements to be "held stable", as in, retirement checks wouldn't stay 2.5% per year of service of the new "single-salary", but would instead be closer to the current 2.5% of base pay excluding BAH, BAS, and any incentive pays.

Bingo. The Russian hackers may have been targeting Hillary, but she gave them a target in the first place. It wasn't the hack, it was the content of the emails that hurt the campaign.

Exactly. It builds the idea of a team, and of something bigger than yourself, than the constant whining about entitlements. Giving someone the perspective that it's not just about them, but about the nation as a whole, could go a long way to improving the national dialog.

Heard it from the Bomber rep at AFPC. If a T-38 stud is fighter qualified, he's getting fighters. No ifs, ands, or buts. We've had one or two 12B B-1 guys go to pilot training hoping to come back to the B-1. Both were sent to fighters. One was told "sorry, you're an average T-38 student, we're sending you to F-16s".

The thinking in Vietnam was under a very different paradigm than our current wars. Politicians at the time believed a draft was more politically viable than activating guard and reserve units.

When McCain was in, drafting people was a solution to manning problems. I'm not sure we want to go back to that style of personnel management.

Well, that's never failed before.