ruckerstud

Palace Front, you can apply when you establish a DOS, ensures you dont have a break in service and gets you 180 days of extended health care. That is how you handle the break in service without the DD 214

I'd like the list too pls

Along the lines of up or out going away, is anyone hearing anything about why this board is at the CJCS? Is it like the last Majors board where they are promoting a bunch of APZ guys. One the upside, at least I can laugh that I will be gettting my notification for the next board and my results from this board the same week.

Since it has been brought up, has anyone heard any rumors about the current LTC board regarding promotion rates? I have heard that it will be a 91% promotion rate, but don't know if that includes APZ like the majors board did, or it will be 91% for IPZ and the standard 3% for APZ. Either way, I have a plan, but would like be able to figure out what I am doing for the next 4 to 5 years without waiting on AFPC or HAF A1s timeline.

The issue is in part Cannon/Holloman, but there are bigger issues, otherwise Holloman would be like Minot where folks who like small towns and to hunt and fish would homestead there. The bigger issues the Air Force needs to fix is that even 6 years after the TAMI/a 10,000% growth in the number of CAPs, a dude who has flown the line for that whole time doesn't have a realistic chance of being a CC of an ops squadron let alone ever commanding a wing they are part of, because leadership is still bringing in dudes from other communities to get them command. The other issue is that after 4-8 years of shift work, there is no light at the end of the tunnel in terms of being able to go to a staff gig/not deployed ops tempo. Holloman while monday through friday still routinely has show times ranging from 0200 to 2000 on any given day, meaning seeing your kids gets tricky. The last issue is that at the HAF level, and I am still not sure how this happens, the A3 has decided to let the A2/some Army dude do whatever he wants with RPA dudes. Having to listen to some intel dude tell you how to fly for one day is annoying, debriefing the issue for 6 years and not getting anywhere while living with folks being more interested in flying your plane for you than getting results will break down a person. While having the choice to go to some more desirable locations might mitigate some of this, you still have to deal with these issues for somewhere between half your day and half your waking hours, so maybe the AF wants to put some energy into these issues, rather than the politics of keeping bases by giving them RPA missions.

If we are going to pull officers out of the kill chain when we are employing weapons, or just have them supervise a la GCI, then why are we paying officers to fly our airlift and tanker assets? In WWII we had enlisted pilots, and the Army who flies more aircraft than either the Air Force or the Navy (yes they are helos, but you still have to train their pilots) takes 18 year olds out of high school and trains them to be manned pilots. We should be able to run an enlisted man through UPT and have him fly a C-17 or C-130 or KC-10 with minimal issues. And before the good idea fairy steps out, having Warrants in the AF is a truly horrible idea because you then take all the tactical experience that everyone on this board seems to think is what will make some the next Billy Mitchell and cap them as a DO and you have guys who are gunning to be Generals both on staff and in every echelon of leadership about SQ/CC.

Do dudes who get DFCs get this much static? The only DFCs I have heard in the last couple of years were for rescue guys who ended up flying two or three helos (after the others were shot up bad enough to not be airworthy) into a fight to get some army guys out. But what they didn't do was personally get shot/burned/die/etc. So, because they didn't have as much risk or pay as high a price as a dude who got a purple heart or a lot of the guys who get BSMs w/ a V, should their DFCs be worth less that those medals?

I'm going to have to disagree with you that Hagel will agree with Panetta on this. From a political perspective, it is pretty hard to not listen to a bunch of veterans who are missing limbs (the military order of the purple heart) who say you are slapping them in the face. It is even harder when you can't say what this medal would awarded for because most of the drone things that it would be awarded for (DFC level work from the wording) are classified. The merits of this medal are something different, but at the SECDEF level, it is a completely different discussion

I have a question about PRF writing while we are on the topic. I have heard there is this magical strated prf. Does whomever the senior rate is actually put my 1 of X on some dude's PRF, or is there some sercet code like the rest of the push line?

I am going to have disagree with Boxhead, they are going to get let go sometime around October of this year (which by the way is after my August pick for the Boxhead office stop-loss pool). I only say October because everyone who has been around the RPA business know "it will get better in 6 months", so in 6 months, we should have the bodies to start letting folks go.

Just wear your 23rd FTS patches for academics, don't wear any patches in the field. You will get your GCS patches when you get to your unit, or if you can have someone from your unit who is going through sim refresher at KIKR bring you some, then you can get them there. I think I wore a different patch combinate each of the months I was at Kirtland.