Disco_Nav963

Piggyback... Not that I'm one to be taken advantage of, but if you are a commuter can you "opt out" of receiving per diem/subsidized lodging? I might be okay with just breaking even on my potential Reserve gig if the right civilian job was paying the bills, and I can handle sleeping on a buddy's couch if it's the price of keeping one foot in the jet. Would this get me beaten up as a scab by the commuter union?

"Two." In the last six months, two school selects and a Wing exec I know all applied for VSP or Palace Chase. The good kind too, not pepper grinders. Definitely influenced my own decision matrix.

Are the BUFF slots dropping as Nav/EWO slots at PCola, or is that getting sorted out at the FTU?

The Minot club is notionally mixed, but the only enlisted that show on Friday nights are a couple of CMSgts that hang out on their own side of the room. The two flying squadrons generally make a good push after Roll Call—mine moreso than our sister squadron, because frankly our wives are more fun than theirs. We each have our own table, and the bartender makes no objections when we do shots on the table and throw our shot glasses into the ceiling tiles. We tip her good and she treats us well. It's what I always imagined club life used to be like—minus the stripper poles. I look forward to moving somewhere warmer someday, but I will miss the Minot club. Remoteness has its perks for club economics.

It's definitely been done though... A guy I went to JSUNT with who flew AWACS for several years and then JSTARS at WRAFB got picked up on the most recent board. We commissioned in 2006. PM me and I'll shoot you his info; maybe you can find him on the Global and see how he cracked the code on that ETP.

Young Major, not sure the YG, but very likely little UPT ADSC left if at all. Point taken.

The 11B wing exec at KMIB was approved... So there's that.

Which is amazing, considering the first thing I was handed at the 11th for Initial Qual was a CD with all the Tech Orders, the 3-3, the JFIRE, etc. I can have it on my personal computer; my commander can have loads of FOUO on his government BlackBerry-- but God help you if you have FOUO on your government iPad.

In 3D. Well worth the price of admission.

The one saving grace of World War III will be when the Chinaman bombs the s--- out of that building.

Maybe it could be framed as the political answer to the "getting rid of the A-10" problem. Especially if they promise Senator Ayotte to base them in NH.

Once upon a time I was not overly committed for or against Air Force independence. Then one day at a certain non-disclosed location in Southwest Asia with a big tent that looks like a woman's bra, I happened to attend a daily meeting that was all about identifying opportunities for ISR integration/crosscues in the next day's ATO and talking about the metrics from yesterday's, and someone related the story that convinced me. The day before, weather at Manas (I think that's what it was... it has been some time) had grounded a significant percentage of the tanker assets that were supposed to be over AFG that day. Consequently, one of the big 707-based ISR platforms (cannot remember which) was going to lose its scheduled A/R, creating a dilemma. If said asset surveilled RC-East, they would bingo out pretty quickly due to the longer drive time. If they hung out in RC-South instead they could get 2x or more station time. Someone at the CAOC called someone at IJC to ask the question, because exactly as you say, the Army controlled it. RC-East it was, because that day it was "RC-East's asset." Since then I've been a true believer, because of the Army's fixation on having the commander in the field control his supporting assets, that the Air Force's dogma that "Airpower must be centrally controlled by Airmen" is 100% correct. I actually would like to see the Army, in an alternate universe, corporately own the CAS and ISR missions just to see their heads explode when they realize they actually have to manage a finite number of resources and just yelling "More! Faster! Now!" isn't a solution.

"2." Having nav'ed both E-3s and BUFFs, working slightly more arcane issues like optimizing AWACS orbit placement in OEF to minimize the UHF radio jamming we got from the Army's RCIED jammers on the ground (to better delivery our "non-kinetic effect") was a lot more fun than sitting in the shack (again), waiting for the klaxon. Simultaneously, don't decide based on what particular airframes are doing right now, because it will almost certainly be different by the time you finish UPT/UNT, IQT, and MQT (i.e. don't discount the BUFF, for instance, because of a few Sad Pandas that can't imagine the BUFF in combat just because they've never seen it; when I got to E-3s a lot of excessively-family-oriented people had picked AWACS because it wasn't deploying--we were in a ~3 year "reconstitution" period or whatever they called it--and sure enough the community started going to the desert again about the time I was starting IQT). Weigh in your mind the whole spectrum of that MDS's missions, potential locations, and crewforce morale (which you'll only learn by asking people). I was an oddball who put Nav and ABM as #1 and #2 on my dreamsheet in ROTC because I couldn't imagine the 10 year commitment for UPT. I've now been in for 7 1/2 years, so in hindsight that was a shitty reason. Wouldn't take back a second of my career as a nav, but highly recommend you spend some time pursuing the powered flight thing before you write off pilot over "bad hands." At the very least, solo and get yourself 20-30 hours before you decide you hate it.

I'll drink for even remembering this, but aren't you supposed to "reverse taller tap" before marching for a significant period of time to avoid these problems?

Name one sexual assault enabled by our culture.

Don't know anything about Baker, but Boykin is well-known to be an assclown. WND is a hive for birther fanaticism and is slightly less credible on defense issues than the "Washington Free Beacon."

Because perhaps it shows that our sexual assault problem stems from environments disproportionately filled with young men and women living away from home for the first time, not a smaller body of professionals who are disproportionately older, more educated, married, and who happen to enjoy a little off-color humor and early afternoon drinking. The thinking of the so-called leaders mentioned in this thread is truly Underwear Gnome logic: 1. Curb the double-entendres in flying squadrons. 2. ??? 3. Reduction in "unwanted sexual contact" among junior enlisted members. Before the PR kerfuffle over military sexual assaults started, I suppose, about 18 months ago I actually bragged to my civilian friends about how extensive our efforts were in that area, relative to higher ed: i.e. the big push to educate people about their reporting options, the existence of restricted reporting, the SARC program, the mandatory pre-deployment briefings, etc. Could things still be improved on? Sure. Is any sexual assault/harassment "acceptable"? Of course not. Will we ever get to zero? No way Jose. But IMO what we have here are a body of leaders who are either making uncontextualized conclusions about the prevalence of the problem based on their emotional reaction to specific cases or The Invisible War (and hasty generalization of anecdotal evidence is one of the classic logical fallacies), or they actually know that there isn't much more they can do and are simply doing something visible because they won't get to the next rank by not being a team player. It reminds me of nav school, where when the Friday safety briefs weren't quite enough to keep one or two of the four hundred mostly 22-26 year olds from making bad alcohol/driving decisions, everybody got to sit in the Taj Mahal in service dress to hear how serious the leadership was. I'm not going to lie and say that a substantive crackdown on fun at work would actually make me get out short of 20 years... I'm an economic realist. But I don't have to be happy about it, or pretend the Air Force wasn't once a much better place to come to work.

I would love to see an actual breakdown of where sexual harassment/sexual assault claims are coming from (sts) in the Air Force. I guarandamnedtee you the Operations Group will be significantly underrepresented (and within the OG, the OSS will be significant overrepresented... just as they are for DUIs).

Don't know if it's been mentioned yet, but at Minot we are no longer allowed to use "balls" in conjunction with tail numbers. I know I'm a young guy, but it's amazing how much worse the Air Force has managed to get in only 7 years.

"2."

At the KMIB Sexual Assault stand down day mass brief, as soon as one of the SARCs started talking about how to avoid putting yourself in higher-risk situations (i.e. not getting blackout drunk), a shrill voice came from the back of the auditorium shrieked "Why does it matter if she was blackout drunk?" FML.

I wouldn't be so quick to condemn... She does not control the questions put to her (the committee does) and she said she's against taking convening authority away from commanders, which is no small thing (not going to score her any points with Senators Gillibrand or McCaskill).

The Air Force has turned into the dictatorship from the Woody Allen film "Bananas."

If so... Then that OG/CC would have been my SQ/CC when I was a 1LT in E-3s at KTIK, and he is one of the best leaders I've worked for. That squadron had ~330 people, and he absolutely had a handle on us as individuals, not as lines on a spreadsheet. He maintained evaluator status, and (I was a scheduler) always flew way more than the minimum... Respected instructor (with experience in four airframes at that point) and big picture evaluator. Great mentor. Now, at his current base I'm sure he has a metric buttload of CGOs between MC-12s, U-2s, and RQ-4s, and if they're doing things like my current base (I'm at SOS right now with 6 other dudes from my squadron, mostly '05 and '06 year group guys) I'm sure older dudes are the priority for SOS slots, and they tend to be further along than younger dudes. So if you have 6 slots and your squadrons put up 10 dudes, and 3 of them are Master's complete, 2 of them are Bac+, and 5 aren't either of those things, all other things being equal, it would be harder to fill that last slot if you are one of those 5. But unless this guy has changed his colors, he has a pretty good idea who his strong and weak swimmers are, and he's not going to send a tool with a Master's over someone who is shit hot and hasn't quite gotten it done yet. Case in point... When he was in my Sq/CC, we had an AC with no Master's who had done B-52 Nav-->UPT-->C-21s-->AWACS, and consequently hadn't hit instructor upgrade in time for his O-4 board either. The boss put said individual in charge of the squadron scheduling shop, wrote a solid PRF on him, and successfully pushed for the Wg/CC to give him a DP. Dude made Major. So IMHO Slick may be interpreting advice or rumor as policy... Unless this guy has just fundamentally changed.

Remain over night... In this case it sounded like they just had some hours to burn for off-station training (and where I have a problem with the investigator's argument is that some kind of RON was going to happen somewhere, and hypothetically if they had gone to Sacramento instead and Wilkerson banged some woman he had never spoken to before, that would have been considered perfectly okay). Agree with pretty much everything you said... The ex-Wg/CV sounds like a real piece of work. Knowing what we know now, the right thing for Wilkerson to do would have been to come clean to Franklin and agree to serve in a job that doesn't require a clearance until he could retire.