nsplayr

Cheers to all my Republican/conservative friends 🍺 The House is still too close to call but either side will have an extremely slim majority. The Senate will either be +1 to the Dems or decided in another December GA runoff. Glad to see some of my favorite elected leaders & ballot issues have good nights (Polis in CO, Spanberger in VA, weed legalization in MO and MD, Medicaid expansion in SD.) I'm glad voting seemed to have gone smoothly and at least so far I don't see anyone throwing a fit about the results. Overall it was a very strong performance at a midterm for a party with trifecta control of DC, the norm would have been to lose ~30 House seats and a handful of Senate seats. It may end up being -4 in the House while maintaining control and +1 in the Senate, which is batting well, well above that historical average. Hopefully the GOP will put some more thought into blindly following Trump endorsements re: candidate quality. I want to see better candidates from both parties! On the plus side for the GOP, y'all may yet still get one or both chambers when all the results are finalized, the 2024 Senate map is brutal for Dems, and Biden's age will be a factor even more so than 2020 for his potential reelection. Better luck next time!

I’m surprised to hear that. I’m good friends with 2 of the 4 sitting ops squadron commanders and they are fantastic dudes. I guess YMMV and I’m not there anymore myself, so perhaps things change…

I had the issue last year where DFAS didn’t stop my contributions when I got the max in the fall, but TSP (wisely) stopped accepting them. Created a debt that Uncle Sugar owed me. Despite numerous emails and phone calls it didn’t get resolved until April when I basically had to stand on someone’s desk at finance to get them to give me my MFing money back 😡 Good luck to all, it’s a BS system that finance runs and they play a poor hand badly on top of it all.

@kaputt outstanding, good points on all, thanks homie. We're looking for something to practice stick-and-rudder skills with, have fun, plus operate really cheaply. There are several people who potentially want to fly 150+ hours per year for hours-building purposes, so low GPH and lower fuel costs are key to meet our mission objective of not getting yelled too much by our wives 😆 Being able to hack instrument and commercial ratings in the plane we own is also a feature we're looking to have in whatever we buy - seems like the most common avionics configurations of the Sportcruiser fit that bill. Do you just transport mogas to the plane when you go fly, or does your home base have mogas on the field? How have MX expenses been on the Rotax? One potentially interested pilot also happens to be an A&P, but he's never worked on that engine before and is curious if it's anything cosmic. BL: would you wanna go up and do 3-4 hours sorties in the plane on the regular?

Anyone flown or owned a Sportcruiser? I'm considering buying an aircraft with a couple of other pilots in my squadron to start a flying club. Pros/cons are appreciated for anyone who has flown one but especially if you've owned or worked on one. 🍺

Yea, all 18Xers for the last while go through Pueblo DA-20s or had a PPL already.

That’s fantastic man, good look and Godspeed! While I’d love to see a TX course, shit, if there was the capacity just waterfall every willing and capable 18Xer through UPT 2.5 and call it a day, that’s fine too. Seems like there would be some redundant skills learned but the end product is the same, other than the significant ADSC incurred under the current model.

Still some good work getting done when possible. https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/somalia-says-it-killed-al-shabaab-co-founder-2022-10-03/ VEOs on a continent as large and diverse as Africa are going to exist. TBH I’m a fan of relatively minimal force being used in order to support friendly governments and “mow the grass” when it comes to the very worst guys. Otherwise these dudes don’t pose that great of a threat to the US and I don’t think we should spend a ton of brain bites opposing them. Over-the-horizon intel collect with very occasional strikes or raids is not a bad strategy for an AOR that’s at absolute maximum 4th in importance right now. Continued economic development in Africa is the biggest thing that would move the needle toward relative peace and stability - let’s facilitate that whenever possible.

@CaptainMorgan sure looks like you ain't much of an expert on the syllabus when it comes to if is PA allowed huh? 😅 Maybe a former nav & current RPA guy could in fact know a little something about how to write a syllabus, and even remember what it says! Just spitballin' here. I keed mostly...let's write that 18X -> 11X syllabus together. Save the AF some manpower it will otherwise inevitably lose, fly fight win, accelerate change or lose, ::insert buzzword of the day:: I'm on swings shift right now so I've got the time.

Former CSO, current MQ-9 IP who has written a TX syllabus before so yea, I think I could take a hack at it! A random major with irrational self-confidence, what problem can he *not* conquer! 😅

Why? We just took civilians fresh off the street with zero flying hours, zero military experience and winged them as 11X pilots in ~6 months. Why would you hypothesize existing MQ-9 pilots would need more TX training than this? https://www.aetc.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/3107596/upt-25-a-new-generation-begins/

Valid points, but if we as a service are kicking and screaming about a pilot shortage (which we are), why not open up all options? For group A, yea, if you can't hold a class 1 then sorry you're probably out of luck. Small data set, but out of a group of ~50 pilots in my squadron, I think we have maybe 2 who couldn't hold a mil class 1? For group B, don't make it a new 10 year ADSC. You've already served 6-7 years, and this is TX would be targeted at people who want to stay in longer if not the full 20. Just send them through a TX, then to a manned pipeline IQT and give then a 2 year ADSC as if they had been an 11X and switched platforms. For group C, PCSM score is now out the window, you're a winged Air Force aviator. Are you succeeding/thriving? If yes, and desire to switch to manned aviation, push toward TX. If folks wanna stay RPA for the remaining lifespan of the MQ-9, great, stay and succeed. If they don't have the skills or mentality to fly manned, then either don't push to TX or fail them out of TX and they get to be the last of the 18Xers. I personally know folks who probably fall in all three of these categories but very, very few would be totally unable to succeed in manned military aviation IMHO. I would argue it's a great investment for the Air Force to have a more flexible pilot force that can evolve with different platforms over time. If you have mid-career MQ-9 IPs/EPs who want to fly other things but happen to be 18X, you should give them a pathway to do so, there's very little downside there. Any 11X pilot gained out of the process is a win and frankly it doesn't have to be a whole separate pipeline - send them to UPT bases on a shortened syllabus as skills allow, just like we're already doing with some off-the-street civilian pilots. We all lament that the AF is losing valuable mid-career IPs who just wanna fly and be good squadron bros, but we're gonna let a bunch of people that fit this bill die on the vine if we continue to shoehorn them into MQ-9 only. I agree that the most valuable pilot in the Air Force for the organization would be a brand-newly winged butter bar who has already signed a 20 year ADSC and is completely at the mercy of the service for two decades; that doesn't mean it's the best deal for all parties involved. Yea, you can say that twice. I fully expect the AF to make the dumbest, most short-sighted decision possible, as usual. At some point within the career span of our young 18Xers, the MQ-9 will go away and there's no plan to replace it with a similar RPA AFAIK. Lots of different COAs are being thrown around, but my view is that the writing is on the wall and 18X is a box canyon for new folks. AI/manned-unmanned teaming/etc. will mean the next RPA may not be directly controlled by a pilot the vast majority of the time, meaning the 18X career field would be greatly reduced if not wholly OBE by technology. I could be wrong on this and we'll buy a shiny new MQ-Next controlled directly by a similar number of crews, but that's not what I've heard is the primary COA. Until a TX pipeline were created, I would not advise any young gun to go the 18X route unless there was truly no other option. I would 100% advise them to extinguish all options for going to UPT, including the Guard and checking out sister service aviation, or go active duty CSO or even ABM because there are more well-worn paths for going 12X/13B -> 11X, especially because you'd start your career in a manned platform. BL: there's little cost to writing a syllabus to allow for a 18X to 11X transition at existing UPT bases. If Big Blue didn't impose a whole new 10 year ADSC and didn't start TXers at square one like a random civilian off the street, you'd get plenty of takers. All at a time when we need more manned pilots and the only remaining RPA is seemingly well on the back-half of its service life with no planned similar replacement. The changes already underway with UPT Next, UPT 2.5, etc. are a great opportunity to build a TX syllabus for all willing and able 18Xers and we should do it.

Hey how's UPT Next going? We lost the thread about a page-and-a-half ago... What I want is an 18X -> 11X pipeline. ~4-6 months should do it. DA-20 refresher then maybe T-6 only or even straight to the T-7. If you can supposedly make a brand new 11X pilot off the street with UPT Next in ~6 months, shit, you can certainly make an 11X from an 18X who already knows chock-to-chock AF flying, AF pubs, tons of mission stuff, etc. The AF says it's short of pilots, the airlines say they're short of pilots, well the MDS with the most pilots is the MQ-9 and with satellite landing & recovery / ATLC / LEO satellite ops coming online now, those people are doing everything from engine start to shutdown, including killing our country's enemies. It's one weird trick to having more Air Force pilots (also CC the FAA please 🙏). I'd love to see a TX pipeline for getting the (typically) younger, more motivate sub-set of 18X MQ-9 pilots into manned platforms and frankly that should lead to shutting down the 18X career field entirely. It was a stop-gap in the first place and everyone who is an aircraft commander should go through UPT, learn the same skills and have the same wings IMHO. Especially with the only remaining RPA platform eventually sunsetting, 18X is kind of a death sentence for a brand new LT on active duty because there is absolutely not a plan for what to do with you when the Reaper is put out to pasture.

IMHO investing doesn't need to be rocket science. If you've lost money overall 2017-2022, yea, please fire that company ASAP and name/shame so others can avoid. My plan, at age mid-30s, is: AD mil pension in ~10 years 🤞, worst case Guard pension at approx. age 56.9 Primary home that is modest in cost but in a high-growth / high-upside town 1 rental property that I manage myself ~85% investments in VFIAX/C-Fund ~15% investments in more conservative assets (right now that's I Bonds + a little G-Fund) Rebalance biannually as required, max roth IRAs first, then TSP/401Ks, then anything else TL;DR - basically this + real estate

UTFSF:

Agreed on all, although Finland is historically very efficient with their relatively small amount of military power 🇫🇮 Sweden is also currently below the 2% target, but their really good diesel submarines are a huge asymmetric advantage for them that will be a nice boost to NATO’s sea power.

Especially compared to anyone else. Like Einstein said, it’s all relative.

The US dollar is stronger than ever, economically we have weathered the COVID storm better than Russia, China and Europe, our population is growing without any latent time bombs (cough cough China), and Russia is taking (for us) unimaginable, catastrophic combat losses in Ukraine with little to show for it. Europe is painfully now realizing relying on Russian gas was always a bad idea and is switching to both US LNG imports, renewables, and at least holding steady on nuclear rather than closing plants. They will make it through. I’d rather be no one else on the global stage right now and there’s no more viable economic model than US-led western-style capitalism. We have the strongest economic outlook and by far the strongest military, especially considering who we have as allies. Putin can crash his fading, overestimated military against the hard rocks of Ukraine for as long as he’d like and cling to the last drips of oil and gas as the rest of the world passes him by. Whenever the Russian people have had enough and want a piece of the long-term prosperity available to them by properly joining the global economy (like their neighbors in the Baltic states and Eastern Europe have more or less done), I welcome them. Let Vlad have an “unfortunate fall from a high window” and let’s be done with him.

I mean I hear ya, and in some cases that might be true. But there's no shortage of well-integrated women in the United States for example. In my ops group as an example, out of ~50 pilots, the four who are women are as follows: 1 is a patch, 1 is a Commander, 1 is an IP, and the fourth is a soon-to-be-IP and probably future patch. They're significantly over-performing on pretty common tactical and leadership job milestones compared to the average rando dude in the squadron, including yours truly! BL: We need more pilots like that to choose from when it comes time to hire new folks, and there's not really a great reason I can think of for there not to be more women who apply or who we reach out to and recruit. I agree with you here. Please don't take the terminally online SWJ left DEI warriors to be the only voices on this issue. Trust me, I think they suck just as much if not more than you do because in this case, they and I are on the "same side" in general, but I really think they're f-ing up a lot of chances to make positive progress by taking everything up to 11. Most people are not overly racist/sexist/etc., and I want to convince more conservative people to see the added value in looking for and embracing diversity along many vectors on top of what you should always screen for in the first place - competence, intelligence, interpersonal skills, future potential, specific job skills, etc.

If this is a war of economic attrition between Russia and the entirety of NATO...I feel freaking fantastic about winning that one! Fuck Putin...you can live relatively peacefully in your petrostate dictatorship for the rest of your days if you KIO with all the polonium and invading your neighbors. I sincerely wish better for the Russian people, but that's on them at the end of the day. But the minute he stepped across the border and started murdering innocent people, it becomes our business. It should have been our business in 2008 when Russia unjustly attacked Georgia and we failed on that one. As has been reiterated many times over, the relatively small amount of money being spent to help the Ukrainians defend their country and bleed out the Russian war machine has got to be the most efficient DoD money pound-for-pound spent since probably 1945.

I wasn't gonna really say much more, but you asked specifically... I think it's valuable to have a wide variety of points of view, backgrounds, etc. in a high performing group of people. That doesn't mean you can't perform well with more homogeneity, but I think diversity of thought/experience/etc. adds additional value. Some others don't share that belief and that's ok, but that's the starting point for me. That doesn't mean you're necessarily doing it wrong if you have a group that's fairly alike. My current group has, for simplicity's sake, ~50 pilots. There are three black men and four white women, and the rest AFAIK are white men. I think we have no Asian/Native/etc. and maybe 1-2 with hispanic/latino background? Zero LGBT I think as well. Those are the fairly easily discernible dimensions of identity; obviously there's way more diversity in terms of airframe background, AD vs Guard baby, how you grew up, where you grew up, family situation, etc. etc., which is all good. Hell they even let in a token liberal! #DiversityHire We are a fantastic group of professional aviators and are highly mission-ready and effective in combat - the most important thing for a leader to think about by far. Overall the AF, ops and the Guard are all fantastic career opportunities that a lot of people would both benefit from and would contribute positively to. So it's a bit curious that we're so overwhelmingly white and male...I mean I am a normal person so I understand why this is, but I look at it genuinely curious. With very few exceptions, all the people I've seen hired have been fantastic and I have full faith that hiring decisions were made fairly, without bias, and were geared toward choosing the best pilots possible from the group of applicants. That being said, why are so few women applying? Why so few people of other races? I look at "solving the diversity 'problem'" like an evangelization challenge - I want more people to hear the Good News about the Air Force, being in ops, and the Guard. I was not aware at all about the Guard when I was thinking about joining the military nor was I properly briefed on how being in ops is far superior to being a noner - I had good luck, fell backwards into flying, eventually saw the greener grass from the dusty confines of Cannon and finally wised up to joining the Guard. So my questions, after looking at our group: are people from all kinds of background hearing about our unit and how great we have it? Are lots of different kinds of people seeing themselves as future-pilots and working on the pre-reqs required to even apply? Are we reaching out to fantastic but underrepresented people and encouraging them to give us a look? I firmly believe that talent is relatively evenly distributed among races, among men and women, and around the world, so what can we do to get the best of the best along all these dimensions of identity to look at our unit and decide to apply? I think any good Commander would both be asking those same questions, yet would also hiring only the very best people each round of hiring based on the candidate's potential to succeed as pilots and officers. That's the right way to do it IMHO and I think my local leadership sees it in a similar way. It's not about preferring one person over another due to race/gender/etc. nor is it about "quotas" or changing your hiring decisions to favor anything but competence and potential for flying skill and leadership, it's about finding the best people from a variety of backgrounds, getting them to apply, and then picking a lucky few from an abundance of excellence. Realistically though, you also need to always save a few spots on the roster for the sons of random ORFs (old retired farts)...because it's still the Guard 😅

^ this is fair, but I’m also not sure that’s what the OP meant. If so…as I was!

Yea that’s weird…because the numbers on the fact sheet don’t match the 2010 data not the 2020 data so who knows 🤷‍♂️

When I looked at these targets vs the 2020 US Census they looked pretty close; not sure what data you looked at for the country at large. Using the "race alone" numbers from the 2020 census (i.e. you identify as this race exclusively), here's what it looks like: Target White: 67.5% Census White: 61.6% Target Black: 13% Census Black: 12.4% Target Asian: 10% Census Asian: 6% Target Native American: 1.5% Census Native American: 1.1% Target Hawaiian/Pacific Islander: 1% Census Hawaiian/Pacific Islander: 0.2% Target Hispanic/Latino (although not strictly a "race"): 15% Census Hispanic/Latino (of all races): 32.7% Multiracial is harder because the census used "some other race" as an option, which 8.4% of respondents chose, but also uses "race together" for people who want to choose multiple races from the above list, and then also tracks "multiracial" as a combined category, which 10.2% of the population falls into. Either way, both 8.4% and 10.2% are higher than the Air Force target of 7% for multiracial. The target for gender split is also 64% men to 36% women, which obviously significantly over-targets men given that the broader population is much more balanced with women being the slight majority. It's also worth considering that based on age, the younger age cohorts that would be being targeted by recruiters for military service are also significantly less "white alone" and more racially diverse than the number for the population at large. So if you wanted an officer corps that was broadly representative of the US population, a worthy goal IMHO depending on how you hope to achieve it, the biggest miss both by percentage as well as in absolute numbers is a significant over-targeting of men vs women, and of white people being disproportionately overrepresented in this hypothetical "target" future officer force makeup. TheMoreYouKnow.gif