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Speaking of uniforms... FTA: "Take the mavericks in your service," he tells new officers, "the ones that wear rumpled uniforms and look like a bag of mud but whose ideas are so offsetting that they actually upset the people in the bureaucracy. One of your primary jobs is to take the risk and protect these people, because if they are not nurtured in your service, the enemy will bring their contrary ideas to you." --Gen James Mattis, USMC Linky

Taliban who downed helo killed in airstrike If you ain't Spectre...

I have a theory that sweeping uniform changes are a sign of hard times in the Air Force. HQ USAF has little control over our high dollar programs weapon systems programs, the AF's end strength, or where our troops are committed to globally. What HQ USAF does have control over is uniforms and PT tests. Look at the early / mid-1990s when the USAF had bases BRACed left and right. We'd gone from the pillar of the Persian Gulf War to settling into a never ending train of ONW/OSW deployments. What was the big issue at the time? That's right: a business-coat like service dress, service dress sleeve stripes and aircrew leather name-tags on BDUs. Now we're bitching about Friday shirts and morale patches. At the same time, the Air Force has dropped TA support from 100% tuition down to 75% and barely anybody noticed. Once upon a time, the DoD stood firm on the supportabiliy of 2 1/2 wars. Now, we're flumuxed by our couple of nation rebuilding efforts. Uniform changes are the AF's great chaff bundle. I liked my Friday shirt, but I've got much bigger issues to deal with.

I thought it was interesting. The Chief prefaced his answer with a statement that "If you're getting so much morale from a t-shirt that you're getting upset over the color of your shirt, then there's probably bigger problems at hand." I would agree with that. To be honest I felt like they didn't quite know how to answer the question so they sidestepped it and tried to trivialize the matter. They said the color of your t-shirt didn't matter so it was a non-issue, but that begs the question of why, if such a thing was trivial, we wasted brainmatter on writing a reg to get rid of it. I felt like they dodged the issue entirely. It might seem stupid for folks to see guys arguing about their shirt colors, but the fact that so many people are upset about it demonstrates that there is an issue here that needs to be addressed, and rather than looking at that issue, the response I got felt like it was a "you-guys-are-crying-about-not-having-colored-shirts-suck-it-up" deal. One of the Chiefs mentioned that it was important for us to be standardized and following the regs because, if we didn't, Airman Snuffy would see us breaking the rules with our colored shirts and think that if rules didn't apply to officers, they would emulate that in their own place. Which I found weird, because the colored shirts were never against the rules until they made them against the rules, so it didn't quite answer the question of why it was necessary to write them out of the regs. Someone brought it up as a heritage issue and they mentioned that heritage wasn't about the shirt color but it was an attitude and about history. When someone mentioned that morale shirts dated back to Vietnam (dunno how accurate his statements were since I don't know much about it yet) it was dismissed as not really heritage because heritage was something intangible we got from patriotism and work ethic. While I'm not knocking the idea that there are intangible character traits as part of Air Force heritage, I think there are definitely physical ones too that are being crushed. tl;dr version: I don't think they could answer that question honestly since they didn't know, so they defaulted to what the standard reason was, which is sort of feeding back into the strange rationalization for it and somehow making it seem acceptable, since it's almost a confirmation that getting rid of all this stuff is a good thing. I think they ended by suggesting that if we wanted the tangible stuff to be heritage we should donate to a base museum so it can be preserved for future generations. Which made me sad.

What if the A/C is running on full cold?

The patches are going to be a buck a piece plus postage. I'm trying to find out if the vendor will ship directly to you guys to make things a bit easier for me. Standby for more words.

Correct answer should have been: "Well, Chief, if they want to do it too, they can bust their ass through four years of college, working full time, and sweating out multiple board results so that they can get an aircrew slot, and then they can do it too." (Much more effective if you have a prior E saying it)

That's procedure. Loadmaster's Report - "IN THE BUNK WITH A FAT CHICK" (LM) After Takeoff Checklist - "COMPLETED" (PM)

To quote the new AFI: 6.5.1.2. Females. Appropriate undergarments are required to be worn with all uniform combinations. Wear bra and underpants with all uniforms... Really..."underpants"?

PSIF - Pumped Stick In Flare