Pooter

@Smokin I'm curious how you can make these value judgements without having seen it. I'm also curious how giving Putin an interview is "platforming" him in any appreciable way when he's already the leader of the 3rd most powerful country on earth.

Another minor thing, but it annoys the absolute fuck out of me - my USAA cards lock whenever I travel and try to use them. You'd think a company literally made for people who travel a lot for work wouldn't shit the bed every time. Not being able to get cash because my debit card locked has been a genuine liability more than once. Especially at red flag..

I'm a visual learner so I would draw the entire airspace and then I would draw my sortie profile with radio calls, frequency changes, climbs, descents, pitch and power settings all on the map exactly where I needed to make them. This was my version of chair-flying. Example attached. After you debrief, draw a better more detailed picture for next time. Repeat.

Downvote all you want. The timing stinks to high heaven of political opportunism. If this dude cared so much about abortion policy he'd resign over it, he 100% knew about the policy when it was enacted. Assumes command anyway, only to resign months later, waiting just long enough for the election year to roll around, with the governors PR team in tow.

Good riddance. If you're going to make your airmens' travel for abortion/reproductive medical care the hill you die on, your priorities are clearly f-ed up. There is a time and place for the abortion debate and it is not denying your airmen the care they are entitled to by federal policy. The dude assumes command in June 2023.. 4 months AFTER the policy was already in effect.. then resigns over that same policy 6 months later. I'd bet my house this is a political move to gain local/state recognition as the guy who fought the libs. Hell, he's already got huckabee-sanders out there grandstanding for him. O-6 wing kings in the guard don't have much road left ahead of them, so a career pivot to politics makes perfect sense.

In an alternate reality, republicans could do the smart thing here and let the leftist state dominoes fall one by one rendering a trump candidacy meaningless because he's not on the ballot in half the country. Then, insert milquetoast right candidate, beat biden handily and be done with the trump disease forever. But they'll never do that. They'll fight it in the courts, drag trump back into the limelight, and his polling will take a nose dive as 51% of the country re-realizes how much of an insufferable tool he is.

The idea that you can objectively rank the quality of teams into a definitive top 25 list is the fatal conceit of college football and as long as it exists these arguments will continue. When it was a 2 team final people argued over who's ranked #2 vs #3. With the playoff we argue over whos #4 vs #5. With a 12 team super duper bracket we'll argue over who's #12 vs #13. The flaw in all of this is that teams fluctuate week to week wildly in quality of play. Alabama last week, top 4 team. Alabama the week they played auburn, not even in the top 25. Georgia absolutely dumpersting ole miss, best team in the country. Same Georgia barely pulls it out weeks later against GA tech. So I find all this talk about being able to definitively pick the best 4 teams to be quite silly. The only objective measure is your record, with strength of schedule and style points being used only in fringe cases or as a tie break. Honestly Georgia had a more dominant season than Alabama did up until the SEC championship. Now they're both one loss teams, with Alabama having a worse loss and worse season overall. But I don't see anyone advocating we throw out the bama Georgia game result in favor of a more wholistic view. So clearly the games do matter, just when it's convenient.

Love all the secrecy about the design of the B-21s ass end.. only to have it photographed in hi-def from all aspects in broad daylight the second it makes its first flight. Oh and surprise, it looks exactly like everyone thought it would. Makes the unveiling where they wheeled it 10 feet out of a hangar at dusk to transformers music seem especially stupid now.

I take all of this with a massive grain of salt. First of all, hypersonic capable missiles and aircraft have been around since the beginning of the space race, so we should clarify terms. Maneuvering hypersonic weapons that don't follow a ballistic trajectory is what we're really talking about. And even those aren't turning out to be the silver bullet everyone thought they were. Russias claimed "hypersonics" are basically just air launched ballistic missiles that are easy to, and have been intercepted. China's hypersonics, while a more compelling design, are very shiny but entirely unproven. Like most of the rest of their military. How many foxbat-esque supposed world beating weapon systems have to be exposed as dogshit before we start to understand that corrupt communist dictatorships massively inflate their military capes? Im not saying we should discount these threats, but perhaps the reason we're "behind" on paper is because we're trying to build something that's actually effective rather than a PR stunt.

Very confused AD crewdog here.. regardless of what union I eventually join, will I still get paid more and not have to write OPRs?

@Lord Ratner The moral high ground dissolves pretty quickly when you realize Netanyahu intentionally propped up Hamas across 4 administrations for the better part of 20 years, specifically to hinder Palestinian statehood & legitimacy. It's literally the same as when left denounces trump and his maga acolytes while secretly backing them in state and local elections to destabilize the Republican Party at large. Either they're an existential threat or they aren't. You don't get to call them an existential threat, secretly support them, and then get mad when it blows up in your face. None of this is to justify Hamas atrocities, or to deny that the Middle East is full of fundamentalist anti semite shitbags. But there's no doubt Israel played a part in bringing this to a boiling point.

Name a good 19AF commander in The last 10 years. I'll wait. If they aren't fucking people they shouldn't, they're busy ruining UPT, hunting down meme page admins, or witch hunting at the squadron level. Something's in the water down there at Randolph. Or maybe it's just the collective dumping ground for the community rejects from the rest of the Air Force.

Good luck with that. What you call breaking the system looks a lot like self sabotage and letting the left run away with the game. But to each their own. Can't wait for trump and the maga coalition, (who blew the budget out so badly only Biden is worse) to finally reign in our spending /s 🤦🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️

That's the problem with single issue voters, specifically in this case the hardcore religious right: they always miss the forest for the trees. RoevWade was a big win for them.. for now. What they fail to realize is the hardline pro life stance is deeply unpopular at the national level, and republicans paid for it big time in 2022 with the completely neutered "red wave." They'll continue to pay for it in 2024. So congrats you won on one issue.. at the expense of literally every other issue. Similar thing happening with the speaker fight too. Matt Gaetz didn't get 100% of what he wanted.. so let's nuke the whole thing and turn the party into a disjointed laughing stock as we move into 2024. Sounds like an amazing strategy.

@pbar good points I don't think you're going to get a reduction in government unless you vote libertarian. Trump blew the budget out too. @Lord Ratner I think you're more right than I am. They are too mad. To the point that they're so blinded they can't see the dude they're supporting out of spite will just set them back more. It'll be interesting to see how much consistent losing it takes for the trumpians to bail on him. But I suspect the limit does not exist, because every defeat just martyrs him more in their eyes.

Sad part is this will change precisely nothing with his fans. There isn't a scandal or conviction or statement or act he could commit that would shake their support for him. It is full cult of personality level commitment that is entirely separated from policy, morality, and reality itself. Over half of the Republican Party is in a hostage situation because they're either too stupid or too prideful to adjust course or admit they were taken advantage of. But one thing is for sure: this crap turns off moderate republicans and independents like a big dog. So, much in the same way that trump lost republicans the senate through his idiotic meddling in Georgia, he will ensure another Biden term. And when Biden predictably expires, we'll all know exactly who to thank for president Kamala.

I think because the accusations fit perfectly with what we know his behavior and demeanor to be.

Probably why the crash pad market is booming there. Also I wouldn't want to stay in a hotel either for a long term TDY. I want somewhere with a kitchen so I can buy and cook my own food. Hot tubs and pool tables and PlayStations are nice but a kitchen is the #1 quality of life thing I look for on any TDY longer than about a month.

I think about how mismanaged, undermanned, and underfunded we are and then times that by about 5 and it starts to make sense.

Why not? The man has literally zero brain to mouth filter. He will call anyone and everyone a loser, disloyal, lying, cheating, crooked, bird brain etc.. when it suits him and for any reason, or even without a reason. Juvenile name calling is one of his few core competencies.

Maybe you could pitch staying at a crash pad in the context of Agile Combat Employment and sell it like the dispersed basing of aircraft. When war with China kicks off isn't the Red Shit Dumpster River Inn full of upgrading MAF pilots exactly what they're going to be aiming the hypersonics at? Why put all your eggs in one basket when you can diversify.. and have hot tubs

The point is not: "what F-35 tasks can we accomplish in the T-6?" The point is: "how do we set a strong enough foundation we don't have to waste time/money doing remedial T-6 things in an F-35"

You won't find me or anyone else here arguing that reps in your actual MWS aren't the gold standard. Of course they are. But we live in a world of limited budgets, limited airframes, sims blocked out 24/7 and the dreaded FHP. My point is cost difference in operating a UPT aircraft versus a major weapon system is so much that saving even a single sortie in the MWS world is totally worth the trade off. We can't afford the opportunity cost of not training things at the lowest level possible. Let's take low level as an example since it's frequently on the UPT syllabus chopping block. If you get good exposure to clock-to map-to-ground/timing/chart reading in UPT maybe it takes you one less C-130 b course ride to get comfortable. Then maybe you can move on to NVGs and airdrop quicker. Maybe you get more time practice something else you suck at more because you made MIF early in low level. The passing the buck down the line to the next unit has got to stop. In my community the classic example is copilot AR qual. The buck gets passed from the b-course to the ops squadrons (probably because the b-course was cleaning up UPT deficiencies.) Then the ops squadrons have to deploy with non CMR aircrew and scheduling has to do backflips to get every copilot with an instructor. I know it's hard to quantify what we're losing, but when we gut the fundamentals it has cascading effects down the line. I'm pretty sure If you get enough timeline obsessed big brain AETC types in a room they could convince themselves landings can be taught only in the sim.

Probably the easiest way to answer this question is to ask, does it absolutely have to be learned in the MWS? Basically is it so tactically-specific that training in a lower cost airframe is impossible? If the answer is no, it should probably be taught in the cheaper airframe.

If there's one thing the Air Force pilot pipeline managers constantly forget and have to re-learn, it's that teaching skills at the lowest possible level in the cheapest airframe always pays dividends. Passing the buck to b-courses to teach fundamentals that should have been learned in IFS/UPT/IFF is 100% of the time a giant waste of money. The temptation to green up slides over doing the things that actually make sense is going to run our service into the ground. Whenever this comes up I like to tell people some napkin math I did a few years back: I used more JP8 in my first 8 sorties in my MWS than I did in 3 years/1100 hrs in the T-6.