MooseAg03

It’ll be a sad day when/if the green flight suits go away. I feel like we earned the right to wear them by earning our wings. OCPs just make me look like another ground pounder.

Can’t get out fast enough...

This actually makes me feel much better since the average would be more like a historical mid 80s.

We lost 5 out of 26 in T-6s and another in T-1s. There were also 2 who washed out of my IFS class. When the Air Force upholds standards, people do wash out. Now they are only interested in production so good enough is ok. Why do you think IFS morphed back into IFT?

I remember taking the BATs test which was supposed to judge hand/eye coordination and fine motor skills. There’s a newer version of it, but it’s still the same principle. A mentor when I was applying told me that some people just can’t hack UPT due to their lack of fine motor skills. I’m afraid this shows we will continue to push people through as mentioned above who lack these skills. It’s been said here a lot, but I think it means a lot more jets will be in the dirt over the next few years.

This was my thought as well, my PCSM was a 91 and my AFOQT were fairly high as well. The officer recruiter initially told me I wasn’t competitive because I didn’t have 200+ hours and all of my civilian ratings. I always felt lucky to be selected during a competitive time, but damn that seems like dropping the bar pretty far.

I’ll gladly take back pay for my Creech assignment. $400/mo would have been over $20k. Now it just makes me even angrier and want to separate even more. AIP ended right before I got there and now that I’ve left it’s coming back. Damn you Air Force.

When they cancel the light attack idea, the buzz phrase they’ll use will be “we need capabilities to win the next war, not the last one.” Even though we’ll be still fighting the last one when the next war kicks off.

Can you elaborate on this one? I’m debating how long to wait before dropping PC paper work. Right now I’m shooting for 8 months prior to desired separation date (not including terminal).

They are saying fly only guys will fill flying related jobs all the way to the staff level - training, Stan/Eval, flight safety, etc. I would expect a wing chief of Stan/eval to be a Lt Col whether he is fly only or not. If I were on that track and became a gray-beard tactical expert high time evaluator, I would also expect to compete for on time promotion to Lt Col, instead of being penalized for 2 years. If you’re choosing the fly only track to avoid greater responsibility then I agree you shouldn’t be handed Lt Col. I just want my increased responsibility to be related to the mission, not planning change of command or other queep.

If the IRS was just doing their jobs why did Lois Lerner plead the 5th? https://www.cbsnews.com/news/lois-lerner-pleads-the-fifth-again-doesnt-testify-on-irs-targeting/ Maybe she was trying to avoid process crimes like we’re seeing now with Flynn. Or maybe she was part of a crooked administration harassing political opponents.

Took the survey today. 1) They're targeting the wrong year group. They should be trying to convince mid to senior Capts that they want to stay past commitment, not change the minds of those with a foot out the door. 2) Current aviation bonus is too low. 3) "Tactical" and flying deployments. This means you're still up for that 179 to the CAOC. 4) Flying related jobs at all levels....including staff. They'll get around this by keeping you attached somewhere that you'll maybe fly once per quarter. 5) 4-5 years isn't long enough. If you want a 13 year Major, let him pick a base of choice and stay there until 20. That's homesteading. 6 & 7) Good 8) "Fly only" in zone to Lt Col would be 16 years which by my calculations is 2 years behind everyone else. Why penalize the guy who wants to fly by making him promote later? I only looked at the DOR chart for about a minute, so I might be wrong here. 9) Pilots who return to traditional track are still locked in for 20 years. Some good ideas here, but the biggest issue is that these "guarantees" are still dependent on big blue keeping its word. We all know where that leads.

https://secure.afa.org/Mitchell/reports/MP7_Predator_0811.pdf Worth the read if you’ve never seen it.

Keep in mind you are risking being non-vol’d to spend time in RPAs. I spent half of my commitment operating out of a shipping container. I was a UPT DG and upgraded to aircraft commander with min time. The manning draw to RPAs was just too great when I was up for my second assignment. Luckily manning was good last year and I made it back into the cockpit, but they are seeing their pilot numbers decrease and are looking at having to force guys to stay permanently. A lot of the 18X guys are coming to the end of their commitments and most are leaving for lucrative contracting jobs on the outside. If I had it to do all over again, I would go to the guard. My kids are older now and each move is harder on them, so this is my last assignment on active duty.

So if it’s nothing, why was the argument made that its release was a danger to national security? I think everything should be released, then maybe we can see why the FISA warrants were renewed multiple times. I think the very existence of a classified court is un-American.

I wonder if those charts are consistent unemployment numbers. We all know the Obama administration began reporting a more favorable unemployment rate leading up to his re-election to make the economy look better. This omitted those who had given up looking for work by removing them from the labor pool. Those numbers are still in use, so I wish we’d go back to the actual numbers. That’s another Obama legacy that could be undone to make our country better.

A report from the DNI who perjured himself before Congress when he said the US government was not collecting massive amounts of data on all Americans? Forgive me if I take anything with his name attached with a huge grain of salt.

Karma really doesn’t want the Air Force to be able to produce its way out of this retention crisis. Geez, maybe instead of the T-X, we should be looking for a JPATS replacement. Everyone flying them now, stay as safe as you can.

Obama signed enough spending into law to double our national debt during his tenure. He had a lot of GOP help from Congress in that. Unfortunately his bloating of bureaucracy and regulations stifled economic growth. This tax cut will help jump start the economy, and of the programs you mentioned getting slighted the only one the feds should be involved in should be defense. As we all know they can’t even get that right. If the feds would get their hands out of all the areas they have no business in, they’d spend a lot less of our money.

Anyone could see the disaster that Obamacare would become. For those that gained coverage, thousands also lost coverage or are being charged so much they can’t afford it. This includes my mom and many others in my family. It was passed on pure partisan lines, and yes so was the tax cut. But we all have seen the bonuses, increased wages, and billions in investment pouring back into our country because of it. I would expect no applause for a shitty law that destroyed our healthcare system, but to refuse to acknowledge economic growth that is in the news every day? Joe Wilson was a jackass, yes. I am not a Republican but a Conservative. Most of the GOP disgusts me, but it’s the closest we can get to enacting real conservative policies in our country. There were outbursts last night by the Dems as well, they just weren’t as blatant.

The many shots of the democrat party not acknowledging the good news happening in our country is quite telling. The Congressional Black Caucus not even clapping at the lowest black unemployment on record and many other instances of failing to support our country’s successes. It really makes you wonder who they are serving because to me it looks like they care about illegal immigrants more than they do their supposed constituents. I dislike the path to citizenship because I think anyone here illegally should never be allowed to vote. I also dislike the $1.5T infrastructure plan, because just like the stimulus it will add to the debt and will lead to wasteful/fraudulent spending. Other than that I thought it was pretty good.

Not sure if it’s authentic, but it sure sounds like something this jackass would say. He has a right to his opinion, but he’s paid by taxpayers to teach public school kids. Somehow I don’t think indoctrinating his students to have a terrible opinion of those serving on their behalf is a part of the approved curriculum. Then again, maybe it is in California.

The biggest difference I saw with the last shutdown was you didn’t have an asshole administration trying to make the shutdown as intrusive and painful as possible for the public. Fencing off open air monuments in 2013 was a real dick move, and I think it says a lot about the character of the last administration.

Wtf are we doing selling F-35s to Turkey?

If we would just get back to the Constitutional method of declaring war, the arguments for needing a draft lose steam. Right now we are engaged in de facto WW3 against militant Islam, but Congress and the general public have yet to realize that fact. Under an almost 20 year old AUMF, we now have troops and/or have taken action in Libya, Somalia, Niger, Djibouti, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. I’m sure I missed a few, and there seems to be no end in sight. The War Powers resolution limits troop commitments to 60 days without further approval from Congress. The 2001 AUMF specifically addressed those responsible for 9/11 and ‘associated forces.’ We’ve gone way beyond that in the last 16 years. If we started making law makers actually vote to send our kids into harms way like they should, they would have more to answer to their constituents for. While drafting Congressmen’s kids into the military may have more effect, at least making them go on the record about military action makes them take a stand and show leadership. We shouldn’t be fighting without a clear mission, a clear finish line, and then a clear exit strategy. If you’ve ready history about our involvement in Afghanistan, it illustrates how we just keep creating monsters unintentionally with short sighted goals. It kills me to see us making the same mistakes every 10 years. I don’t want my kids to have to suffer for that in the next few decades.