afnav

If anyone has had to live in a place like Saudi, and I don't mean on PSAB or an isolated compound, you will likely understand that I did not take this job by choice. I will say that you stand a much higher chance of getting killed in a traffic accident in Riyadh than you do getting knocked off by a jihadi. They drive like lunatics, and I pass wrecked cars every day I go to work. I liked my job at USSTRATCOM, but last February, I could tell that public service would become too unstable for my family to survive, and I jumped ship. Unfortunately, my forecast has proven correct. In talking to others, expating in more favorable countries is a very positive experience. When my contract is up, I'm hoping that things back home will be better than they are now, but for the present, the horror stories are keeping me overseas. Maybe I can luck out with a job in Europe next time. I went to an embassy town hall a couple of weeks ago, and heard stories from a few young teachers about their contracts being violated by their local employers. That has not happened to me, but it is a glaring example of what happens when you take a job overseas and things are not what you thought they would be. The embassy staff could not do a damn thing to help them, and the State Department should get the word out that employment overseas can be a risky proposition. Sometimes, the higher pay is not worth it.

No. Yes. Big yes. Yes.

I worked for Carey at USSTRATCOM. He was a very open-minded guy that accepted ideas from others. He was nothing but a great leader to those of us in J3. There's no telling what the IG was looking at on him, but Big Blue might be trying to catch up with the Navy's firing rate.

Carter had a good reputation in acquisition circles. One man can't fix the screwed-up system that took decades to build.

I'm an expat in Saudi Arabia right now. I still carry my US passport, but I am tax-free up to $90k or so. We are supposed to get residency papers, but we've been told that we will not lose our passports. It beats the hell out of my oh-so-unreliable GS job.

Great news they made it out safely. I had a lot of friends in the community. Just curious, but is that on or near the Belle Fourche range?

Good for her and the other vets that have real disabilities.

There was a witch hunt in one of the AWACS squadrons in the late 90s about straight girls not wanting to share their room with who they suspected was a lesbian. As far as I know, it ended with nothing happening to the accused women.

We bomber guys always called for 'rings, rags and tags' on the bus prior to exiting for the jet. Even in E-3s, guys would remove their patches to keep the shoulder straps from staining the light-colored ones.

The suicides may be people that signed up to fight and for whatever reason were unable to get into theater.

I completely concur with this assessment. Spot on.

One thing that concerns me is that Syria is a follow-on to Afghanistan. The war there trained at least two generations of jihadis in intense combat operations, and filled them with a fervor that lasted 20+ years. The insurgents are getting a lot of trigger time, are seeing a lot of their friends die, and are getting a steady stream of religious training to prepare them for another wave of conflict in the region. Hezbollah rightfully knows that if they lose Assad, they will be completely surrounded by Sunnis that have a grudge and Israel. The conflict will get dirtier and will spread, definitely to Israel, and possibly to Jordan and Turkey.

I would think single-pilot ops would be fine for a regional, but what would the crew duty day of a transatlantic or transpacific flight do to one guy? The Brits flew their bombers with a single pilot during WWII. I'd like to see their accident stats and compare them to ours.

I see bags every day of the week at Offutt. Once I found one that fit well, I cared for it like it was made of gold.

That was out of the syllabus by the time I came through in '02, but the pictures were on the wall everywhere.