tac airlifter

Valid. For those on the fence as I was a few years ago: I took the money because I weighed the pros and cons of my first decade and decided I wanted more of what I'd done. However, they sent me to school and staff with no return path to the fight. Basically, I rolled the dice and lost. For now. If I could do it over, fully grasping that AD ultimately is a dice roll no matter your strats or checked boxes, I probably would still roll. Maybe you'll get lucky and land a cool job if you stay AD. Maybe your timing is good. But if you're a fence-sitter don't be deceived into thinking there is a "plan" other than feed human flesh into the assignment grinder and spread it wherever seems good at the moment to whoever happens to be spreading that day. Buyer beware; stay long enough and you'll roll snake eyes. On the other hand, if you have a combat itch that can only be scratched in AD, roll those dice and good luck to you!

Never had any issues with PACWIND......

That's not this discussion, I didn't say that, and no idea how he'd respond but SECDEF can't give money he doesn't have. I'm simply pointing out that if you want to solve problems, one of the first steps is separating facts from assumptions. Is it a fact that "falling on their sword" would accomplish nothing and be futile? How do you know that if it hasn't been done? as to your first question above: if I were a service chief looking for money and willing to be fired for speaking truth, I would "fall on my sword" over the issue of BRAC. There's your wasted billions.

That is an unproven assumption you are treating as fact.

Awesome post by you & beerman. Now that I'm on staff, I can see the truth of this situation from a perspective I didn't previously understand. However, I still don't get why we haven't seen a GO do as you state above. We are facing a crisis. Either our leaders disagree and think our force can continue stumbling through it, or they're unwilling to make the level of stink required to fix it. Either way: WTF? The worst part is these discussions aren't happening with any depth or introspection in my office..... only on an internet chat board.

https://www.airforcetimes.com/articles/3-special-operations-airmen-killed-in-plane-crash-while-training-in-new-mexico

Fair enough. I'm not there, thankfully. However, I've endured several mass punishments and never knew exactly why, how I was supposed to make it better, what the end state was, why I was responsible, etc.

Herc I understand the calculations of this commander. But since a line IP has no idea exactly what happened to precipitate his edict, how are the masses to make a connection? What is the average IP supposed to do differently to fix this? If leadership can't tell you how to fix it, then we are left to simply endure. That isn't leadership. Your point that this calculation is common in the AF, combined with my point that this behavior isn't actually leadership at all proves exactly why the AF is so completely fucked as an organization right now.

So the question was: where do you draw the line? Implied in the question was that past some threshold of events, mass punishments are acceptable. My reply was the threshold is not a number, but rather an obvious connection between cause & effect. Mass punishments don't work unless I can be convinced your fuck up is my fault. I guess your reply is there is no threshold? Anything goes WRT behavior so long as you fly a good mission? well, it's the Internet so, enjoy whatever opinion you'd like. However, in the real world there is a zero percent chance of that COA being adopted by anyone. BTW, re-read your own statement. What do you think a suspension is, if not proof that management has linked your personal failings to potential risk during a game? It's the sports equivalent of my third point.

Good question, and this is the only reason I come to the forum: to discuss ideas and improve myself. Not for the latest gossip at an AETC base. what would I do? 1. Make the rules clear: drinking until you get an ARI is unsat. 2. Explain why the rules relate to the mission, and aren't just rules for rules sake. ARIs mean you have shitty judgement. Shitty judgement means I don't want to sign orders with you as the A code because I can't trust you. Importantly, this logic won't work with every rule. "You can't wear a reflective belt, you can't hack a combat mission" is bullshit because there's no correlation between the two. However "you can't handle your liquor or know you own limits or plan a backup plan, therefore I can't trust your mission judgement" is completely plausible. 3. Once you do those two, which most commanders already are doing, crush violators. Explain in public what happened and why you gave that punishment. Thats it. I don't think this is cosmic. The vagueness surrounding details of mass punishments dilute their utility. People need an obvious connection between what happened and the consequences. It needs to make sense. For example "To all IPs: 5 IPs got hammered at drop night and, with the full knowledge of their peers, drove home. That's unsat and drinking is curtailed in my facilities on my time until I'm given your plan to take care of each other and prevent this threat to our mission." Totally valid. But this lacks detail required to connect cause and effect and is consequently being mocked. Mass punishment is almost never a good idea. The occasions are incredibly rare. The only way it could ever achieve the intended outcome is with clarity. I need a lot of details before I'm going to buy-in to the idea that what someone else did was my fault. Sure it's possible. Prove it first.

Every time a commander does something foolish, someone comes to their defense. I understand, humans aren't one dimensional. Everyone is a combination of good and bad qualities. However, we are also responsible for our actions and this is terrible leadership. I don't care that he went to bat for your bro, he's using mass punishment while exempting his peers. Foul.

Man, in retrospect the juice was really not worth the squeeze on that one. I wonder if the idiot who thought of TAMI21 understands how much long term chaos was wrought for such short term gain.

And they have a long track record of stellar decision making.

What exactly did Flynn do? I've been too busy to read anything in depth about it.

TRIGGER WARNING: below is an opinion piece from foxnews, please no one shit their pants. Or do so, you're not in my house so IDGAF. Seriously though, its the best piece I've seen on the subject of leaks in this WH, and possibly an area where liberals and conservatives can find some common philosophical ground. I like that the blame for our current situation is shared equally between past administrations, and the real culprit isn't R or D ideology, it is the nature of mankind. Those are all ideas I agree with, and think he makes a compelling case for our collective concern. Andrew Napolitano: The chickens have come home to roost By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano Published February 23, 2017 http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/02/23/andrew-napolitano-chickens-have-come-home-to-roost.html Napolitano: A warning to President Trump Last week, The Wall Street Journal revealed that members of the intelligence community -- part of the deep state, the unseen government within the government that does not change with elections -- now have acquired so much data on everyone in America that they can selectively reveal it to reward their friends and harm their foes. Their principal foe today is the president of the United States. Liberty is rarely lost overnight. The wall of tyranny often begins with benign building blocks of safety -- each one lying on top of a predecessor -- eventually collectively constituting an impediment to the exercise of free choices by free people, often not even recognized until it is too late. Here is the back story. In the pre-Revolutionary era, British courts in London secretly issued general warrants to British government agents in America. The warrants were not based on any probable cause of crime or individual articulable suspicion; they did not name the person or thing to be seized or identify the place to be searched. They authorized agents to search where they wished and seize what they found. The use of general warrants was so offensive to our Colonial ancestors that it whipped up more serious opposition to British rule and support for the revolutionaries than the "no taxation without representation" argument did. And when it came time for Americans to write the Constitution, they prohibited general warrants in the Fourth Amendment, the whole purpose of which was to guarantee the right to be left alone by forcing the government to focus on bad guys and prohibit it from engaging in fishing expeditions. But the fishing expeditions would come. In 1978, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was intended to rein in the government spying on Americans that had been unleashed by the Nixon administration. FISA established a secret court and permitted it to issue warrants authorizing spying on agents of foreign governments when physically present in the United States. People born in foreign countries who are here for benevolent or benign or even evil purposes have the same constitutional protections as those of us born here. That’s because the critical parts of the Constitution that insulate human freedom from the government’s reach protect “persons,” not just citizens. But FISA ignored that. And FISA was easy for the government to justify. It was a pullback from Richard Nixon’s lawlessness. It required the feds to seek a warrant from federal judges. The targets were not Americans. Never mind, the argument went, that FISA has no requirement of showing any probable cause of crime or even articulable suspicion on the part of the foreign target; this will keep us safe. Besides, the government insisted, it can’t be used against Americans. That argument was bought by presidents, members of Congress and nearly all federal courts that examined it. We don’t know whether the authors of this scheme really wanted federal spies to be able to spy on anyone at will, but that is where we are today. Through secret courts whose judges cannot keep records of their own decisions and secret permissions by select committees of Congress whose members cannot tell their constituents or other members of Congress what they have learned in secret, FISA has morphed so as to authorize spying down a slippery slope of targets, from foreign agents to all foreigners to anyone who communicates with foreigners to anyone capable of communicating with them. The surveillance state regime today permits America’s 60,000 military and civilian domestic spies to access in real time all the landline and mobile telephone calls and all the desktop and mobile device keystrokes and all the digital data created and used by anyone in the United States. The targets today are not just ordinary Americans; they are justices on the Supreme Court, military brass in the Pentagon, agents in the FBI, local police in cities and towns, and the man in the Oval Office. The British system that arguably impelled our secession in 1776 is now here on steroids. Enter the outsider as president. Donald Trump has condemned the spying and leaking, as he is a victim of it. While he was president-elect, the spies told him they knew of his alleged misbehaviors -- vehemently denied -- in a Moscow hotel room. Last week, his White House staff was shaken by what the spies did with what they learned from a former Trump aide. Trump’s former national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, himself a former military spy, spoke to the Russian ambassador to the United States in December via telephone in Trump Tower. It was a benign conversation. He knew it was being monitored, as he is a former monitor of such communications. But he mistakenly thought that those who were monitoring him were patriots as he is. They were not. They violated federal law by revealing in part what Flynn had said, and they did so in a manner to embarrass and infuriate Trump. Why would they do this? Perhaps because they feared Flynn's being in the White House, since he knows the power and depth of the deep state. Perhaps to send a message to Trump because he once compared American spies to Nazis. Perhaps because they believe that their judgment of the foreign dangers America faces is superior to the president’s. Perhaps because they hate and fear the outsider in the White House. The chickens have come home to roost. In our misguided efforts to keep the country safe, we have neglected to keep it free. We have enabled a deep state to become powerful enough to control a powerful president. We have placed so much data and so much power in the hands of unelected, unaccountable, opaque spies that they can use it as they see fit -- even to the point of committing federal felonies. Now some have boasted that they can manipulate and thus control the president of the United States by selectively revealing and concealing what they know about anyone, including the president himself. This is a perilous state of affairs, brought about by the maniacal passion for surveillance spawned under George W. Bush and perfected under Barack Obama -- all with utter indifference to the widespread constitutional violations and permanent destruction of personal liberties. This is not the government the Framers gave us. But it is one far more dangerous to human freedom than the one from which they seceded in 1776. Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel.

Great article Prozac. Its quite shameful that CSAF has decided trying to fuck my career options and undo safety legislation is a more palatable option than fixing the easy & dumb reasons folks get out. I'm not even interested in the airlines, it's just bad leadership, and unconscionable.

which will come first: commercial passenger aircraft with 1 or 0 pilots, or passenger aircraft with an autonomous stewardess function? I understand the discussion is centered on pilots, because we're awesome, but there are other potentially autonomous functions that would be cheaper to develop and less risky to implement. We still have baggage handlers driving baggage carts and real people waving wands when aircraft are pushed back. Concur that automation is growing and will continue to grow, but we're a loooong ways from pilotless passenger planes.

Pcloa, thanks for the interesting post. To avoid upsetting ihtfp's delicate sensibilities about what should go where in an Internet forum, I'll decline replying. But if you'd like to continue on PM I'm game, cheers.

PM me if you care for my opinion so I don't derail this anymore. Copy your article link, there's a wealth of differing opinions out there which I've spent the past 18 months digging into for various schools. Short version: all the folks saying we can't kill our way to victory haven't actually tried. History says kinetic works if we define victory as preventing their power projection ability to threaten us instead of using COIN to change their religious opinions, which is a fruitless waste.

New HK rifle for those of you, like me, who are hoping this comes to the US: http://www.hkpro.com/forum/attachments/hk-long-gun-talk/92018d1486814102-hk433-new-assault-rifle-hk-1486443851166785.pdf I like the 416 but it's heavy. I was uninterested in the MR 556 though, just too expensive. If they can make a 433 available for under 2.5k it'll compete with the SCAR and high end piston ARs market & I think it'll sell well.

Can of worms challenge accepted. For your first paragraph, i think you're wrong. Everyone can be defeated and history is full of examples. We haven't been trying to win, despite the best efforts and sacrifices of those who are forward, and that unfortunate fact drives all the toxicity and festering discontent you correctly identify within our organization. for your second point, I don't understand you at all: the "plus one" is the threat you earlier say we can't defeat. So are you saying that if DOD wants to remain ready for future threats by VEOs it needs to reconsider its objectives and admit it cannot defeat VEOs? I agree with your overall sentiment that the military has been losing for 15 years and is on a path to continue losing. That drives bizarre internal dynamics that make people hate life and want to leave. We disagree in that my prescription is a return to the ruthless pursuit of victory and nothing else.

on second thought, given Russian aggression in Korea we should probably start that war! Anymore troops on the peninsula and it might capsize......

Here is the question I've asked every GO I could the past few years, provided the forum was amenable to such discussions. I've racked up several blank stares and uncomfortable shrugs, followed by platitudes about my generations hard work. Nothing substantive. Anyway, lastest iteration pasted below (I modify it slightly depending on venue, but the core is the same): "Recently General Thomas, commander of US special operations command, expressed his assessment that the United States is "losing across the board" in our worldwide campaign against al Qaeda and the Islamic state. Currently, the preponderance of our nations kinetic activity against these groups is prosecuted by the US Air Force. We are fighting, but we aren't winning. In your opinion, why?"

The US would absolutely lose our most likely fight with Russia (Kaliningrad). It can't be debated here, so let's agree to disagree. But I'm curious, have you attended any wargames on the myriad potential scenarios? Is it possible there might be something here you don't know? Rhetorical only. let me ask you this instead: everything you wrote above is even more true about Iran. Did you disagree with Obama and vociferously elucidate the errors of his policies WRT paying them billions which they've funneled to terrorists? Do you think Russia is more likely to foment regional conflagration than Iran? And what's your take on the Obama led Russian reset? Was he foolish for trying to start a new relationship, or did you give him the benefit of the doubt? From my perspective, I don't know what Trump is doing. He's definitely not following the standard playbook of graduated response starting with verbal chastisement; and saying he respects Putin seems weird to me. But you know what? We've been following expert advice my whole professional career and we're worse off now than 15 years ago. I listen everyday to PHDs blabber on about how we just need to try the same IR policies, and when I inquire why none of those policies seems to work in the real world their answers are unsatisfactory. Trump is trying something totally new. Looks crazy. I'll withhold judgement, the experts have all been wrong thus far. Besides, Trump called the super bowl almost perfectly when everyone around me thought he was nuts. That counts for something!