Pooter

Fair enough. I guess for that kind of money you'll get some takers. I still don't see money as the root cause though. Air Force officer pay is a comfortable living. It's not competitive with the airlines obviously, but I know countless Air Force pilots who find military flying far more rewarding would happily ride it out to 20 if they could avoid 2 things: 1) being forced to move/deploy somewhere shitty 2) queep And number 1 continues to ratchet up in importance as you get older because eventually you have a family to worry about. Why do you think the guard has such great retention? Spoiler: it's not the money. 90% of guard pilots are making bank from the airlines anyway and they choose to come back and fly for pennies on the dollar for the Air Force. It's because they're insulated from being forced to move and from queep.

.. not that many people. I don't know a single one. I know dozens of commercial pilots. Maybe that appeals to a handful of people extremely motivated by combat ops in the Middle East but that is the exception not the rule. Long term retention on a mass scale in the conus is what I'm talking about. We're not losing experienced pilots in droves to the Middle East contractor mafia in any significant numbers.

Agreed, but Ive also never seen the topic brought up by military leaders in any congressional forum ever. The idea that locations impact retention is not in congressional calculus at all.

Pile on: the other side of the shithole locations coin is that the people living in nice places are terrified of being forced to PCS to a shithole, so they avoid signing onto anything that might impact control of their own destiny.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: base locations are the largest barrier to Air Force retention. Laughlin can't even retain geriatric sim instructors reliving their 80's glory days.. never mind young CFII candidates wanting to travel, make money, and maybe even have a social life. This will crash and burn just like countless other efforts have, because they continually fail to address the root cause. location location location I'd love to see a study done on the 7 day opt rate for active duty guys getting assignments to places like Laughlin, cannon, holloman etc... But I doubt we'll ever see that. It might actually make the Air Force confront a real cause for the retention issue: the Air Force has systematically closed bases in good locations, and no matter how cool the job, people do not want to live in shitholes.

Well maybe your memory is bad because the UCMJ is covered at the academy, rotc, and OTS.. of note the concept of lawful orders. You are also introduced to the possibility of random drug testing and prohibitions on otherwise perfectly legal substances like certain pre-workouts and hemp products. Presumably you also had to pass dodmerb and flight physicals at some point. Deployments and readiness requirements should also not be foreign concepts by the time you commission. No one is asking you to surrender all of your rights. But I do not buy the argument you commissioned under the impression that joining the military would have no impacts on your medical requirements.

"Back in the before times" certain workplaces still had health rules and you also had the god-given right as an American to not volunteer for the military or any other job with health requirements you don't like. As far as I know we haven't drafted anyone since Vietnam, so you voluntarily signed on to the host of rules the military imposes on its members above and beyond the civilian population. Exactly. I'm not aware of any time in recent military history where personal interpretations of cdc guidance, drinking buddies, or friends had any bearing on military medical requirements. Maybe clergy to a very tiny extent. Civilian world is a whole different discussion. But military members complaining about the rules they voluntarily subjected themselves to is hilarious stupidity.

@Lord Ratner shack. Drawing conclusions from our decades of economic tampering is about as logically sound as running a science experiment with zero control group. If you fuck with every variable you don't get to pretend to know causal relationships between those variables.

My issue here is that conservatives preach responsible family planning to avoid unwanted pregnancies while simultaneously trying to ban many of the tools that enable responsible family planning.

Well if life begins at conception (sperm fertilizing and egg) and you use birth control methods that.. make it impossible for the fertilized egg (which is definitely a full human) to attach to the uterine wall.. some states with particularly backwards trigger laws may soon consider you a murderer.

Guys I think I figured it out. Here's how you get consensus on the abortion issue. Conservatives ask yourself two questions: Q1: who predominantly is getting abortions? Answer: liberals Q2: what political affiliation would that baby likely have grown up to be? Answer: liberal So basically just pitch abortion as a super early stage voter suppression scheme. #abortthelibs

That's at least movement in the right direction.

I'm absolutely arguing in good faith. Im asking if we have considered the full ramifications of considering a 1 week zygote a full human life. Of course I agree miscarriages are usually natural and a part of life, and that they aren't intentional like abortions are. But if you say it's legally a full blown human, you don't just get to miscarry, say "oh well," and try again next time. A human being just lost their life so we need to figure out what happened and if there was negligence involved. Just like what would happen if you or I died. That's the problem with putting assertions like "life begins at conception" into law. It takes you to weird places really quickly. It's a nice thing to say to claim moral high ground and use to control people, but there is a fuck ton of baggage that comes along with that belief that hasn't been addressed at all. It also doesn't hold water when conservatives say "why are liberals so mad, repealing roe just gives the decision back to the states?" If you legit believe any abortion is murder, you shouldn't be okay with potentially legalized murder on a state by state basis.

Honestly not sure. And that's a great debate to have. I'm simply asking for some logical consistency. If a zygote is a fully fledged human, then abortion is clearly murder and a miscarriage is at the very least a horrible tragedy and at most manslaughter or murder as well. There are also very easy bipartisan ways to improve pre-natal care to make concrete improvements in miscarriage rates. Stopping both abortions and miscarriages should be important if you truly believe they are a full human life. But If the only child deaths you're concerned about are the ones that let you tell the dirty liberal sexual deviants what to do, maybe you're not actually concerned about child deaths. Another note on logical consistency: the people who say gun bans dont stop criminals from getting guns.. advocating for abortion bans 🤦🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️

I'm not assuming everyone believes the same as me. I'm applying existing laws and societal norms to the very absurd supposition that a 1 week old zygote should legally be considered an alive human being.

Except for the position, cgo, and jr cgo strats which are meaningless, the flight strats that are meaningless, the IDE push statements that are meaningless, the fact that through dumb shell games and timing up to 3-4 people can hold the same strat at once, the fact that every base writes OPRs a little differently, and the meaningless platitudes that make your average line flyer sound like a combo between John Boyd and Robin olds. Oh and you are stratted against captains that could potentially be 5 years younger than you. And we're told masters status is masked till O-6 boards.. oh wait never mind the wing king can see it and will push you accordingly. I'm not upset, I made the majors list and my line number is about where I expected. Ive been an exec and seen how the sausage is made, and I like to think I'm decent at reading the tea leaves. But for anyone outside the top 10% you have to sift through a literal mountain of shit to get an accurate picture of where you stand. This is one of many reasons the Air Force has retention issues. We spend 8 years sugarcoating and obfuscating people's performance and then wonder why they're surprised when their board results aren't what they expected.

I think what @Demonrat is trying to say is that legally defining a human being as existing at conception has some very big legal implications that even the most staunch pro lifers haven't fully thought out. For example: it begs the question, why aren't pro lifers also laser focused on miscarriages (which are nearly as prevalent as abortions?) By your own logic that's a fully fledged human being that lost their life, and a miscarriage should warrant an autopsy at least and possible criminal investigation if there was suspected negligence. If we could be saving potentially millions of lives per year, you'd expect them to be dumping money into pre-natal research, paid maternity leave, and free pre-natal healthcare for everyone. But none of that is happening. Instead they're more concerned with what Lena Dunham is up to.. and that makes the whole gambit seem very fake, and more like a bid for control to own the libs than a genuine concern for human life. TL;DR if it's a human life at conception, act like it in all aspects.. not just the politically convenient ones.

Its hilarious that the merit-based line number is literally the first clear data point you get in your career on where you stand in your peer group. 8 years in seems a tad late to be getting your first piece of real feedback.

Pile on: and I know the court's job isn't to take political fallout or public opinion into account when writing/timing their decisions, but Jesus Christ can we just get out of our own way for once? All you have to do is be less crazy than the people who think 5 year olds need hormone blockers, but fuck that let's alienate 70% of women in an election year. That'll work out great I'm sure

Hugely disagree. The self implosion was well in progress until our genius justices handed the left the ultimate weapon to salvage their midterm and 2024 chances. This is a watershed moment wrt the Supreme Court and will be viewed by a statistical majority of people as a regressive move. It's not like this is a new issue or the right's scotus majority was going away any time soon, so why now? The timing is absolutely suicidal.

Oh how short our memories are. A few months ago there was near universal lamenting on this very forum about how we entered Afghanistan without a clear justification, plan, or end state. And surprise! It ended in complete disaster. But don't worry we'll pin that squarely on Biden as if trump or literally anyone else had a more coherent exit strategy. A few short months later and people are chomping at the bit to insert themselves into a near peer potential nuclear confrontation over a country they just found on a map and just realized the blue and yellow flankers weren't also Russian ones. But I bet you understand decades of russian bitterness and resentment and have a perfect grasp of exactly how citizens of a totalitarian dictatorship are being brainwashed by their government. So let's go ahead and get super involved in the only place on earth that's a more reliable quagmire shitshow than the Middle East..

Funny point on the stop gap platforms because that's literally the situation global strike finds itself in with the b-1 and b-2. Both intended to replace the buff, both will be long retired before the buff, and both purchased in shamefully small numbers. Don't worry though the B-21 is gonna be different. We're gonna buy so many and it's totally on time, despite no one having seen one only a few years out from projected IOC dates at OPS BASES. Absolute clown show.

Short of a meeting with the OG or WG/CC I will blow off literally anything early in the morning if I debriefed until 0230 the night before, including a sim. You aren't getting training value out of a sim on 4 hours of sleep and if you aren't calling uncle on that to your scheduling shop/DO you're part of the problem. This is exhibit a why people get burned out and leave the Air Force. During normal home station ops there is absolutely no reason you shouldn't get 12 hrs at home at an absolute minimum every night. Pilot training schedulers somehow manage it every day because it's mandated in the syllabus, and I guarantee they have more flights and sims to schedule than anyone else.

Our acquisitions process is so broken I don't think it even matters what airframe they replace the e-3 with. Whichever way they go it'll be decades behind, billions over budget, and we'll order a quarter of the number we need.

Ok so hypothetically we big dick on Russia to teach "them a lesson" and then they retaliate by letting some nukes loose. What would that accomplish exactly? Are we in a better position than we started? Sometimes the thing you want to do and the thing that yields the best result are different. And right now the best result (for the US) is a strategically weakened but non-escalatory Russia.