FLEA

Never been a UPT instructor but I always hated UPTs system and felt anything could be better. The more and more I recollect on my experience there, the AF never taught me to fly. They handed me a book, a disk full of CDs and a syllabus and I taught myself how to fly, after which my progress was graded by an "instructor." (This is not a knock on IPs, they are great Men and Women who do the best with the tools they are allowed.) My understanding is UPT NEXT uses new technology in the VR and sim spaces to increase repetitions before students get in the plane. Working off my perception of how UPT was, it makes sense that if you give the students better tools to teach themselves you will get a better product.

What does vacation time off look like in the airlines? I realize the money is good but the military actually gives a very generous leave package. Travel is my passion and I'm worried about having the money but not the ability to go anywhere. Yes, I realize airline dudes work less days but my understanding is many days off are "reserve" and they are a bit tied down to go anywhere/plan anything. Am I wrong in that remark?

Is your SATO civilians? If so , maybe get TMO to add to your commercial travel memorandum , directing travel from your PDS. They may just be a little afraid to do something on their own without more cya. Of TMO is the problem you might need to go up the chain. The problem is many of the Airmen in TMO have never been overseas and don't realize the rubber stamp conus rules don't always apply. Even when it's written in governing guidance you can do something, many will go back to their OJT training "TSgt so-and-so told me never to do this." I had a similar issue once trying to get the extended allowance going to Korea by having my HHG surface freighted vs accompanied baggage. Had the JTR and AFI ready and still needed to get to a MSgt at TMO to get it worked out.

One more thing. If it does come up make sure you have a good narrative to take responsibility for it and show how you grew from the experience. People make mistakes and occasdional bad judgements. You aren't too stupid because you at least went out with friends you know would take care of you. Have a good plan to say how you've reduced drinking, make smarter plans before you go out and are generally a better person now. A board will want to hear this and although a meps doctor is making a medical decision he will probably be less concerned if you can convey this was clearly a 1-off and not a chronic problem. I'm not even sure your board would know even if your meps doctor knew. The few interviews I did to boards in the AF, I was told by the medical team they could not share details to the hiring officer due to HIPPA, they could only make a recommendation.

er skin Just curious, were the flight envelopes (airspeeds) similar for the Scorpion and the Turbo Props on the low end? I can definitely see a tactical advantage to being able to maintain and hold slower airspeeds for extended periods of time in that role.

I'm split on the subject because I think depth and breadth have their appropriate place, but I do see the limfacs of both. I think the common theme is you can't have a cookie cutter solution to building a leader. Maybe if we gave people more control to design their own careers with what skills they thought would be important through a competitive assignment system we would see some broader experience diversity that nurtures the innovative (+5 pts/buzzword) thinking we are trying to grow.

Realise not being command sponsored has serious drawbacks at some bases. Base clinic may not see your dependents and they may have to go off the economy for health care. Doesn't sound like you need childcare yet but CDCs often require command sponsorship as well as DOD schools. You will need to investigate the immigration laws and stipulations for whatever country you're going to as well. For instance, in Korea your spouse must leave the country every 90 days without a SOFA visa. There are DOD regs that also cover double dipping so be careful about plans to collect OHA and BAH. I believe if your spouse stays more than 90 days with you, her residence needs to be updated to mirror yours and she will lose stateside BAH. In Korea at least, I have heard them nail people on this in the past. Don't want to tell you what to do just do your homework before you make the decision. Also, I agree that 1 year of building a line number might not be worth it. Is it a non flying overseas? You will probably never get the access to travel ever again like you will get OCONUS. There is something to be said for just hopping in a car and driving to the Amalfi coast for the weekend or grabbing $125 tickets to Thailand for a week.

I like how Cheney said we don't "talk about it", not that we don't "practicc" it. Goes back to socialD's post. "Why am I being fired?"

So the current line of thinking is that ethics scholars are going this direction and actually questioning civilian immunity entirely. Basically, modern theorist question how separate military and civilian institutions really are. Would POTUS as commander in chief be a valid target? Most of us agree its ok to schwack a Taliban bomb maker with an MQ-9 on his way home from work. How many people agree that it would be ok to schwack a civilian Raytheon employee on his way home from the hellfire assembly? So like I said in the last 20 years a lot of this has shifted but by and large it was hugely taboo in the 80s-90s.

So I'm going to make some conjecture here but I'm willing to bet he was actually fired for openly stating on national TV that the US had plans to assassinate a foreign head of state which is commonly interpreted as perfidy under IHL and the Hague conventions. This was an extremely sensitive subject at the time, as was bombing of Gadaffi in Libya. Assassinating a foreign head of state is also a violation of executive order #11095. I just learned about this recently in an ethics course I took but the US was so concerned about how the world would look at the targeted killings of Ghadaffi and Hussein that they struggled to find nearby military targets to justify the strikes. The situation was illuminate further when one of the C2 compounds we thought Saddam was in was actually a bunker protecting his and other high ranking families, and had no actual members of government or the military in it. I wont debate the morality of it here but I was surprised to learn the taboo against assassination was really really strong all the way up until about the year 2000, and only recently, has it started to shift.

Good article. Those are absolutely questions we need as a country to better address. I would add we need to rethink how we will handle terrorist and terrorism operations in the future. Specifically in regards to combatant status determination and operational approach. The most recent academic studies are showing the strategy of HVI wack-a-mole, shows little evidence to effectiveness. The most glaring evidence, that we've been doing it for 18 years and nothing has changed. Civil policing models have proved far more effective at routing non-state terror groups in other countries though. There's often that idea that the military is a political tool. It might be a hammer, and we are flattening nails when we need a crow bar to pull them out.

In RPAs we just invited our Es and even named some of them. I promise you there is nothing in a fighter pilot song book a loadmaster hasn't asked permission for from his wife at least once. I mean that as a compliment.

I never took the T-6 naming as a serious naming but more like an introduction or indoctrination into the culture. Alcohol was apart of ours but none of the names actually stuck. It wasn't nearly as outrageous or as fun as the naming I had been to later in the CAF. But it was a great dip into being AF aircrew.

What are your all's thoughts on the military publicizing this in wide dispersion? I've heard in scenarios like this the tendency to blame the aircrew is deeply frustrating and hard on families. A report going out to publicly let everyone know their loved ones did everything right has to be somewhat vindicating. As a former C-130 dude myself this is absolutely terrifying. The recreation video reminds me of the wing box failure video on the fire fighting C-130 several years back. So quick and instant, no time to react or do anything to save it.

Reminds me of the AC-130 crew that hit the doctor's without borders hospital. There are still facts of that case that make me uneasy.

Whole situation (Niger ambush) is an ethical knot of responsibility. At stake, is the fact that staffs continue to issue tasks to subordinate units without adequate time to prepare a quality representation of facts. The higher leadership wants to blame a Captain for misrepresenting a situation when the Captain argues he did the damn best he could for a tight suspense and limited resources. To top this, SOCOM as a whole has been negatively portrayed in the media far too much recently and I think Mattis is looking to take some heads for the organizational culture that seems to be faltering.

Funny thing is if you talk to the ASOSs most of their Airmen can't even pass the new PT test. I do see some benefits though. People will practice what they test on. Given the science correlating muscular strength to fat loss and overall health putting a deadlift on was a good move. Is it dangerous? To the idiot yes. But you can make the argument that the military was already insufficiently giving training on physical fitness. Everything I knew about exercise I gained from sports. I saw tons of dudes who never did anything athletic and really had no idea how to meet a baseline fitness. So many people that think you have to run ungodly mileage to stay lean and pass test and that is just not true.

I became a COR with my most recent job and its honestly awful. Your contractor is only accountable to his company and has a moral obligation to pad their bottom line. Meanwhile you have a moral obligation to the government to insure fraud waste and abuse arent being comitted. Its an art form, to go be a dick and tell them something isnt going to fly but then bro it up enough to get them to inprove work on another project. At least in my expereince the PWS is never specific enough to get the quality of work the AF is accustomed to. Now I have worked with great contractors in the past but not in an oversight roll. So now im just curious if it was really great or the commander was able to hide the uglier bits from us at the line level to promote good working relationships.

Apologies, not sensitive about it. Just that when you claim to be a combat aviator and throw a term like "play fighting" to describe a mission set your credibility is in question. But play fighting sounds like something the mother of a snowflake drama student would use to describe his weekend LARP club, and I think we are all above that. "Henry, are you done with your play-fighting? Its time to come in for dinner!" For what its worth I'll agree the CAA's don't really seem to have a lot going right now outside of guchi vacation deployments and cool training opportunities. But there was an era (thinking Nam, Loas, Cambodia, Cuba, Thailand) in which that shit was really important and extremely kinetic.

"play fighting?" Dude are you a proffesional? The CAA mission set and execution model is built on the exact same structures as an ODA. Work by with and through partner forces to accomplish US security objectives. If you want to argue theyve been short combat the last decade due to a lack of missions ill buy that but throwing terms like "play fighting" sounds utterly ridiculous. Do B-52s "play fight" because we havent actually dropped a nuke in 70 years? Its a mission set and a capability that they maintain readiness on and we have used extensivly in the past, regardless if we are actively using it today.

I don't have a problem with trying to make assigents work but I have seen couples throw the join spouse card to leverage some really good deals and that is honestly infuriating sometimes. Doing overseas to overseas or getting a release to switch to a more desirable air frame. I want military couples to be together as much as possible though, so there doesn't seem to be a good answer to that.

What's VLPAD? I'm AD, I'm just curious. Never heard this term.

Just curious what direction are people getting from their senior raters regarding when to do in correspondence? More specifically, is it still being used as a discriminator for school looks?

For whatever its worth I often tell people the single biggest mistake i made in UPT was not giving helos any serious consideration at track select. There was something about the culture at UPT at the time that just implied you would want a jet. Not sure I would have gone that direction but I'm dissapointed in myself for not considering it more. I do remember though, on career day, the C-130 dude and the C-17 dude got in a dick measuring contest. I think the C-17 argued they could land shorter than a 130 but the 130 said they flew low level lower than the C-17. Rucker instructor gets up there next, scratches his neck, looks around, and says "well I don't know what all this pissing match is, but I will tell you we can fly lower and land shorter than both C-17s and C-130s." Whole room got a chuckle and that dude got mad cred for dropping bombs.

Does the 4-5 hours of testing include a flight? If so that would be pretty in line with most insurance checkouts through an FBO. If not, then screw that BS.