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Oooooooooorrrrr... maybe he know what he’s talking about and is tired of the “sky is falling” self-fellating this board is famous for.

I do agree the sky is not falling, that all of us who have left and will continue to leave will usher no change in this Air Force. I accept that now, even though it doesn't make me happy to. The Air Force will chug on, it will find new bodies to fill its "slots" because either thankfully or not our nation so far has been blessed with those willing to step forward and take on that sacrifice. However; there is a cost for being so accepting of the sheer lunacy at the top. Those thinking for an instance that our endeavors in Afghanistan or Iraq/Syria will have any real positive effect on this world are either lying to themselves or simpletons. Or thinking that if we produce more pilots quicker with more VR and "innovation" that we will some how stem the flow of experience leaving the door, or that somehow that inexperience will reverse the trend of ever increasing fatal accidents is insane. So no the sky isn't falling but our service has been lowered that much more as a result of this inability to accept these truths. More will die needlessly flying aircraft that are maintained by ever increasingly stressed out mx shops, inexperienced pilots, aircraft that are vastly beyond their shelf life, and more. So while I accept that reality, I refuse to defend those reinforcing it as defensible or correct.

Buddy, the wheels came off this bus a long time ago. There's no turning this Titanic around. It gets even more ludicrous on our side of this mess. So first of all, AFRC volunteers for these nonner IAs, which is the original sin, but that's what happens when you promote Active Duty sycophant blue falcons to AFRC leadership in Washington. At any rate, it then realizes it can't do so legally, so it cooks up a new partial presidential mobilization authority in order to do so. Meanwhile on active duty land, our "mirror NAF" executes a flank and takes its own bodies, those the ARC members are supposed to replace-in-place during a wartime tasking in the first place, and manages to fence them out of those very COCOM rent-seeking nonner IAs. So the TRs end up doing the Active bubbas invol IAs, and the Active folks are fenced out from them while getting active duty points on "nights and weekends" too. How u like them apples? Nevermind that TR probably got out of Active Duty precisely to regain control of his life and away from those very dynamics. You literally cannot make this stuff up. And when you take the senior managers to task about the legality of our charter, and I quote the O-8: "you're dealing with outdated information, Major". Basically sit the F down, which I find myself doing a lot of these days.... To the ARC leadership, TFI (TFE is the actual name today BTW) was never the bug, it was the feature. This is a decade long decay and it has worked to morph the strategic reserves into the expeditionary reserve, and unsustainable abortion, that it is today. The Air Guard folks need to take some serious accounting of their situation. I know it's du jour to believe the Guard Bureau retains the kind of rebel without a cause atmosphere that shields people from the indignities of AFRC life, but those days are over. This IS coming to a Guard unit near you, as it has already to some, so plan accordingly.

I suppose I was the one who stabbed the hornets nest. I did not mean to do a thread derail of the aviation bonus. It was a response to Brabus. I wanted to provide a first hand account of a guard member who had a choice of UCMJ (due to a reserve commitment) or deploy. It sucked for them. They have a high paying civilian job and does not need the BS of the guard/reserve tasking. However, in order to avoid UCMJ action, they chose to accept the action. Again you always have a choice. I have read this forum since 200? It has provided great insight. Member's views allowed me to make an informed decision to join the guard. I just wanted to provide an example of first hand knowledge of a guard guy being told you will go or UCMJ action. hindsight2020 provided the correct term of why he had to go in the Bonus thread. Their situation might be unique with timing and it may never happen again. The point is it is a tool that leadership will use, and it is an acceptable tool. That might be hard for us in the guard to accept but the reality is we can task a guard guy because of his incurred commitment he is going. The other reality I tried to highlight is that when a tasking comes down leadership can either "shortfall" (don't know if that is still the term as my UDM days are very far behind me) the position or make a list. In my unit they made a list. They made it very clear to us that if you say "no you got to go" they also made it clear to us that they will help us transition to another unit/IMA/points no pay/whatever gig we could find. But if we said no we could not come back if the guy behind us on the list took the job. Our leadership knew everyone was in a sh!t position and they were prepared to help us out. The precedent is set. This board is great and it helped me leave AD. However the Guard is becoming AD-lite. I have my opinions as to why but no solid information.

Regarding aviation pay...there is no change to the gate months. The addition allows fliers in those specific positions to continue aviation pay even if not gate complete. Para 3.3.b covers the rest of us in OFDA creditable positions (flying positions / API coded). Sent from my iPhone using Baseops Network mobile app

At least they FINALLY fixed the technician pay and are adding locality AND special salary rate to Department of the Air Force Pilots in the GS-11 through 15 grades.

Yeah I can't speak for Guard 11F units. I don't doubt you may be correct on the scorecard for Guard 11Fs currently flying and invol IAs. I thought @EvilEagle had already provided examples of his own unit (non-TFI?) where they send the backshop people to them, instead of the flyers. So by that metric alone you already have data that non-TFI fighter ANG has already bought into the bad deal. I think we're mixing apples and cantaloupes here though, at least on the AFRC side, which is what I can speak for. The Bama situation as you state, wasn't an invol IA from my understanding. We're talking about invol mob IAs here. The loss management policy (the euphemism that AFRC uses for what essentially is a de facto STOP LOSS policy) was pretty clear on the COAs. Nobody has the ability to 1288 out of an invol IA who didn't have it approved BEFORE the IA tasker got assigned. So the "deploy or 1288" conversation wouldn't be an option here. Again, generally those ultimatums are done in the context of a primary duty, combat coded in-AFSC deployment, or even yearly participation requirement discussions (we lost 4 this month alone to that btw; I think closer to 7 for the year). IOW, you have to have a separation date or retirement date approved in the system BEFORE they drop the IA tasker on the unit, otherwise they will not honor it. If you're tagged, you will be given whatever amount of days the regs state past the return date of the IA in order to separate/retire. So even if you drop paper as a result of the tag, you're still going. That's what absolutely spooked the herd here 2 years ago, and leadership had to start the Baghdad Bob routine ever since on the topic... fwiw, we're currently sending an O-5 active flyer IP to fill a AFE flt/cc job normally filled by an AD O-3. Nevermind a duty position effectively run by an E-6. Nobody in that IA to date has ever had AFE background, or even secondary AFSC from a prior-E life or the sort. The continued O-4 leaving the position LOL'd when they did the initial handshake phone convo. Even he couldn't believe they would be so brazen as to put an ARC O-5 flyer in an CGO nonner job. To quote the propaganda arm though: "It's not science fiction.....it's what we do every day." To be fair to the system, this was an 11th hour volunteer, who at the end of the tour will have an AD retirement in the bag as a TR. Getting it a good two years ahead of schedule, and can go back to his topped out WB FO gig. To finish the fairy tale there is to miss the real point. That being that, those guys are gone. There's no more, otherwise we wouldn't be running around with revolving "open until filled" AGR vacancies. When, not if, they get to the first true invol, this place will collapse overnight. Leadership is playing a dangerous game of chicken with its human property, when what they should have been doing two years ago is telling AFRC leadership to sack up, push back on the COCOM and turn this AD pork barrel graft off before our own squadrons start popping red in those god damned slides as manning combat ineffective. Everybody acts like that's an idle threat and merely the sport kvetching of supposed perennial malcontents (ask me how I know). But the second this hits the pavement it's "all hands on deck" again and "more with less" rah rah speeches at the beginning of the year. Meanwhile the support functions are still shit and riddled with OCP-wearing apathy, people are preemptively getting out, SG keeps pickling guys off and acting like they're doing the Country a favor, and ENRON mark-to-market accounting run amok still shows manning green on the slides at the Wing. There's zero integrity in this entire dynamic. BWTHDIK, they're probably right...

Technically I don't know if ADSC is the correct verbiage. The dude is my crew position. He came off AD to us. Somewhere in that transfer he incurred a commitment to the Guard. In a previous post I had mentioned that "if leadership had to make a list.. . . " well they did for our crew position. One drill they brought us in one by one and asked if we would volunteer. We were told if we said no then we needed to separate, that the TAG did not care about our units ability to maintain the magical C rating. I was number 4 on the list. It would have gone to the sixth guy on the list because the five of us ahead of him told leadership if they gave it to us we would bounce. Mind you there are only nine guys qualified to go. I guess they need an instructor to hold the 9mil at the back of the hajis head when they are on approach so he doesn't pull the whole it is Allaha's will The guy I mentioned said he was going to bounce. Except someone did some research and found out he had to go because of some kind of commitment to the guard. I don't know if he palace chased, I had known him on AD so I am pretty sure he had completed his ADSC. That's all I know. It is a crap deal. the guys that get tagged with it, if they go, have three months of Army and advanced beatings. Then they are on the ground for 180, they can be extended, you are in Kabul wondering if Mohamed 1 or Mohamed 2 is going to come in and shoot up the class that day. Oh and you have an AD commander, one of my buddies who did it from another Guard unit, said the CC loved room inspections. So there is that.

Say you're tagged as an Afghan Air Advisor. You go. You make the best of it and give it your best effort. You even build friendships with good people. Then this is the result: https://www.stripes.com/news/assassins-threaten-multibillion-dollar-us-efforts-to-keep-afghan-airmen-flying-1.552494 Worth it?

Not entirely true. C130 units are getting tagged with Afghan Air Advisor. We sent three people. Our leadership lucked out that they were volunteers, two of them anyway, one had an ADSC so they voluntold him. It's not just a 179. You have to learn Army, so that is another couple of months. Had leadership had to make a list and start asking -those who said no would have been shown the door. My estimate is we would have lost 20-30% of instructors across each crew position. I'm in a guard unit.

His Twitter isn’t for anybody but his base who wouldn’t care and want to hear what they want to hear anyway, and the idiot critics who are so obsessed with everything they can’t accept about the guy that they can’t figure that part out. People actually trying to have some sort of high brow philosophical discussion on how he’s “unfit for office” and bringing evidence to the court of discussion being “well he lied about crowd size.” Seriously that’s dumber than his constant bragging and bullshit. He’s what we get for being so TMZ. This a country that votes more to select who is gonna win a reality karaoke show on TV than for the leader of the country. Guess what, it doesn’t care enough to change the channel because Trumps Twitter. Get some better ammo or get a better candidate for 2020, because otherwise this guy wins again while the Democratic Party splinters it’s self into a dozen pieces trying to find the hardest route to an easy victory by deliberately making it more difficult for themselves.

There are a lot of 179 non-flying jobs that are bullshit and useless - we've all seen jobs that can take an A1C 15 min per week to accomplish, but the AF deploys two Capts to fill the position for 179. Almost worse is the ineptitude of how they fill certain positions, e.g. deploying an F-35 guy to BAF to do the SE job that could be done by a SE guy who flies any of the 5+ airframes that fly out of there on a regular basis (same example, but OSS/DO...seen both). They're so retarded they made a flying deployed job into a non-flying deployed job. Shit like that is what pisses people off and needs to be stopped. 365s aside, bullshit like this pushes people to make the sensible decision to skip bonuses and/or punch at first opportunity. Deploy us to do our primary job and contribute to the war in a meaningful way, but don't lie to our face and tell us powerpointing or filling out TPS reports once a week is a worthwhile contribution in anyone's book outside of the hardcore koolaid drinkers who have long since lost any ability to rationally think.

F-4G flew well into the F-15 era, and was damn good at its job. It was never replaced because the AF decided that LO would solve all problems, and we didn't need EA anymore. I think most would agree that was a bad decision. Do you want to start an A-A fight with the F-35 loadout? You're right, F-35 is more than LO, F-15X is also much more than just a new F-15C. There are significant limitations to F-35 and putting all our eggs into that basket isn't perfect. Would I love to have 400 F-22s, yes. Would I love to have the F-35 able to solve all problems, yes. I disagree with your notion that there is no scenario in which I'd rather be in an F-15X than an F-35, but that is as far as I'm willing to go down that discussion. When it comes to cost, the difference in purchase cost is negligible. This is all about sustainment. The F-35 is expensive as hell, the F-15X is cheap by comparison. Does anyone really think we're going to buy 1,763 F-35s? We need some cheaper aircraft with a lot of capability, F-15X is one way to work towards that future.