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Not discounting your detective work, but $50k seems like a cheap price to rig an election in the most powerful nation in the world. I would think they would have asked for millions, especially from someone who is a billionaire. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Stark would be best served if he remains anonymous rather than revealing himself. There is nothing to be gained by Stark becoming part of the solution: he made his points in his articles, an even offered proposed solutions. His job is done. And now leadership can get on with doing their f'n jobs with the issues identified. They shouldn't have needed an anonymous public input "from the trenches", but since they did, the least they could do is actually display some of that leadership skill and take action to fix the identified issues...like they should have been doing all this time anyway without proving Stark's hypotheses true. My favorite part of the article: If you look at the three (or is it four, now?) "Dear Boss" letters that have been made public in the last 40-ish years since Capt Keys' famous letter, you'll note that they ALL cover essentially the same territory and have the same types of complaint. So, how is it that Goldfein thinks that "we got better as a service" as a result of that letter? Is that what it means when people keep bringing up the same problems year after year, decade after decade? Good call, Fingers. Keep your skull down, Col Stark, and keep fighting the good fight.

@admdelta, YMMV, but I've gotten the impression that waivers up to 32 aren't considered as big of a deal, but you'll start to get fewer and fewer squadrons (especially fighters) seem that they want to mess with them over that age. At the end of the day, it's totally up to the squadron, so it's worth just applying anyway and let them tell you what they're willing to do. Worst they'll do is say no and you're out a little work of putting the application together, but at least you know for sure.

8 year olds, dude.

"Show me the man and I'll show you the crime." - Lavrentiy Beria, head of NKVD under Stalin Which is ironic given that this whole thing investigating Trump is supposed to be about Russian, well...something regarding the 2016 election. Yet not one person has been indicted for anything Russian. Shady lawyers got caught doing shady things and are going to jail. I'm not sad about them. But how would you fare under the eye of a prosecutor who has an open-ended remit to investigate you, everyone around you, everyone around them, and so on? If you're good with that, congratulations. I'm agin' it. But if you set up your own server and conducted years worth of government business including the trafficking of TS/SCI and above e-mails despite the specific law that says you can't operate that way, I also offer congratulations.

Keys visited Shaw as the ACC/CC when I was there, briefing for him was given in our mass brief room. I printed out 10 copies of his letter and was going to post them in the bathroom, I got told to shut up and color.

Words mean stuff.

Love this Fur Ball....keep it up for me....makes getting old easier....back to my wine.

If you want fighters, i'd discourage you from going this route. There aren't too many fighter units in AFRC, and once you have the AFRC slot, they wont let you switch over to guard. So think this one through. I was hired for last year's board and mainly went for heavies. Average scores for last year's board were in the mid to high 80s for PCSM and AFOQT-P. 80 hours, 3.2 GPA. Not terribly competitive. To answer your questions, no these are not unit slots, they are AFRC slots. You'd be knocking on doors with a paid pilot slot in hand. And no you don't need to be sponsored. Of the 8 cadets who got it last year none were sponsored beforehand. You can stay unsponsored until drop night at UPT, at which point you'll be thrown where AFRC needs you, not RegAF. So you could go to ENJJPT unsponsored in hopes of getting sponsorship from an FS but I wouldn't put everything down on it. With that said my buddy who was also one of the eight got hired by fort worth. Anything's possible but If I wanted fighters I wouldn't have done this board because it crosses off the vast majority of options since you can't go guard.

Perhaps he’ll be permitted to “take the black” and finish his time in AFPAK Hands.

I particularly liked the one about how they increased Flight Pay, when right now they aren't paying many of us the maximum amount allowed by law. Pretty disingenuous.

All pilot slots in the ANG/AFR are O4 positions so being an O4 doesn’t matter...your rank will match your billet. BUT, getting hired as an O1-O3 is likely easier than if you were an O4, depending on what you are trying to do. If you don’t have to go to UPT, being an O4 trying to get hired may not be a big deal. Or if you’re already hired, it probably doesn’t matter either. But rushing units (especiallly fighter, but any) hoping to send you to UPT as a promotable O3 or O4? I’d be shocked if you made it work. There is a guy at ENJJPT who is about to pin Maj, but I believe he was a WSO. I got out as an O3 (completely out of the IRR and everything) to stop my clock as I was still rushing units and didn’t want any more TIG/TIS than I had to. I was right on the cusp of O4 and I knew fighter units wouldn’t look at an army helo O4. Being a senior O3 was a tough enough sell. After I got hired and I got back in, my appointment order has me as an O3 in an O4 position grade with my (massive) break-in-service adjusted TFCSD and DOR. Hope that helps.

In my opinion, I live right by Tacoma Narrows, fly in that exact area very often and I listened to whatever available ATC recordings are out. I don't think that shooting the guy down would of made anything better, if not made things worse. I haven't seen too many Airplanes shot down midair but I am assuming there is little to no control of where they end up. Maybe a headline reading "Air Force needlessly shot down passenger jet killing hundreds on the ground". Then we would hear arguments of people saying "the guy was co-operating for what seemed to be the Majority of the time. He said he didn't want to hurt anyone and was pretty obedient when it came to direction changes to avoid flying over populated area's". I feel like if he had attempted to land at McChord that things would of ended up way worse. He could of attempted to land the Tacoma Narrows Airport and most likely would of avoided most houses. I am not sure where this "we should of shot him down" intensity is from. When I was a Loadmaster our reaction to Hijackers is not to immediately shoot them.

The guy crashed into Ketron Island. It’s the outer report point for departure out of Gray Army Airfield to the North. If moved a little over a mile south he would have come down in the middle of North Fort JBLM, which is filled with barracks. A mile another direction, Anderson Island. Half a mile or so East and he’s coming down in the middle of Washington University in Tacoma. That area he decided to have an impromptu airshow, that’s the stretch between the Nisqually outflow into the sound (Lacey) and Point Defiance (Tacoma). You go up to 35 seconds in just about any direction from where he was overwater at 100 knots over that thin stretch of water and you’re over houses. He was fine up to a point, and then he was needlessly endangering any of tens of thousands of people. The first “hey look what I can do” should have been it. This wasn’t a guy tooling around while ATC deconflicts traffic needing to be talked down anymore after that. And I’ll caveat this too for the sake of not ever getting full picture. If the Eagles were getting ready with the wheels turning to roll on this guy and we just aren’t advertising it since the outcome made it moot hey cool, I get that. But if this is somehow a “good outcome” for any other reason to us than dumb luck I think we really need to rethink what our expectations of good outcome are and publicly state them, because trough Grace of really luck alone we didn’t have this guy kill a bunch of people in his quest to end it spectacularly. And remember even if he hadn’t been doing his best Bob Hoover impressions, he was also running out of fuel without a lot of water to stay over while he did it. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Or to upload a YouTube video, or like certain things on Facebook, or giving a conservative talk on a college campus. Identity politics are a dangerous game festering on one side of the aisle, and it backfired. I think SS is right, the (D)s short term political gain is coming home to roost.

Liberal morality. That’s funny.

Get high, get fast, do some good work. Go downtown, drop some bombs, kill all the assholes. Land, drink some whiskeys, tell stories at the bar and go home drunk to a wife who hates your lifestyle and thinks you are too old to still act like a degenerate child. Pass out, wake up and do it all again. Caveat: not for everyone.

CRM is not limited to heavies - it fully exists in the fighter world, you're just working with guys in another jet (single seat world). Flight hours are less overall, but flight hours are also not "equal" either...1 hr in a C-17 is not a direct comparison to 1 hr in a F-16; there's a reason fighter guys are getting hired by airlines at the bare minimum requirements, so I wouldn't personally be extremely concerned with "total hours" if airlines are eventually your desire. The guard fighters GENERALLY do 2-3 month deployments, unlike AD's 6 month standard. QOL in good; the flying/mission is phenomenal - do you want to fly at 100' AGL and 50K in the same sortie, blow assholes up, shoot missiles, fly in all corners of the world, go on awesome TDYs, etc? It's a great lifetstyle, but not for all...it's competitive, can be more stressful (good and bad), etc. If you enjoyed sports in high school/college, the camaraderie and competition, then you'll probably like it. If you though those guys were assholes and don't feel comfortable with competition amongst your peers, or think being 33 yrs old and still studying for several hours on a day you're not flying is bullshit, then it may not be for you.

I was a snacko once as a Lt Col, and I was the best goddamn snacko that squadron ever saw.

Watching all my ultra left college friends on Facebook heads explode has been somewhat enjoyable. It's like karma finally decided to hit them in the mouth for the months on end of smug and conceited dictation they've been doing to everybody about how racist/sexist/unintelligent they are for supporting anyone they didn't. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk