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I will not volunteer for a pay cut. I will not volunteer for scaling back any benefits. Because our political leaders don't have the guts to cut everywhere else. They're too busy emailing photos of their dicks to each other. And when they're not doing that, they're looking out for themselves. Out

I'd be perfectly willing to take a pay cut, loose some benefits, etc. if and only if Congress takes a chainsaw to the rest of the federal budget and eliminates stuff that we have no business paying for such as National Endowment for the Arts, PBS, Amtrak, farm subsidies, etc. and did a serious crackdown on Medicare and Social Security Disability fraud. Unfortunately, we servicemen and women will take it in the shorts while the taxpayers continue to be soaked for billions in Medicare fraud and wasteful stuff. I can stomach the sacrifice in my pay and benefits to reduce the deficit for the good of the country. Afterall, I'm ready to sacrifice my life if need be. What I can't stomach is having to make that sacrifice on top of all the hassles of military service while Congress continues to waste vast, vast sums of our tax money to ensure they get re-elected.

I have a theory. Hear me out on this one. Okay, let's say you have around 330,000 people in the Air Force. Enlisted-wise, there's about 140k in ops and maintenance. Officer-wise, you have 35k in ops and maintenance for a total of 175k people who are actually involved with actual airplanes, space, and missiles. The rest are support, which make up about 155k. So, look at it from the point of view a random support guy. Say you're just some random comm guy. You support EVERYONE on base, not just the flyers. So you're supporting the finance, personnel, medical, ops, maintenance, and so on and so forth. Ops is just another part of the base. Other than that, you have absolutely nothing to do with the actual operations going on. All you see when you come to work are random dudes in ABU's, and the people you work with. You might see a few dudes in bags at the clinic or something, but that's about it. You are completely separate from the OG/MXG and never see them unless you're at a Wing/CC call, and at that point the ops guys are a small minority. What I'm saying here is that if you're a support guy, ops is just another customer you have to support, you don't actually think "I exist because I'm here to support ops". So, if some of these guys don't give a shit about the mission, then it's because half of the Air Force has absolutely nothing to do with flying airplanes, they're just part of the logistical footprint that grows into a monster unto itself that must be supported by...support. Picture it this way, let's say hypothetically every aircraft requires 3 ops guys to operate it, 10 guys to maintain it, and 20 guys (mil+civ) to support them. Now say it's 10 aircraft, now you need 30 ops guys, 150 guys to maintain them, and 300 support. Now let's say it's 100 aircraft, you need 300 ops guys, 1700 guys to maintain it, and 4000 support guys. You see, as the total number of actual people grows, you need people to support them. Except those 4000 guys don't care that their efforts trickle down to those 100 aircraft. All they care is that there are 6000 assholes that they have to deal with. Well, now those support guys you added to support the new guys need support also. So it just piles higher and higher until support exists primarily to take care of support guys, and ops just kinda gets support somewhere along the way, which was the whole damn whole point of support existing in the first place. The MSG is basically just herding human cattle. The problem now is that since you have all these thousands of support people supporting each other in some kind of support circlejerk, you have to start pandering to them. So finance panders to support, personnel panders to support, medical panders to support, and so on, because they're the actual majority of people that must be supported, not ops. So, ops and mx guys turn into elitist support-hating assholes because they bear the responsibility of making sure the actual mission (the whole damn point of any of us putting a uniform on) is completed successfully, but only get the same support as every other jackass on base. Except every other jackass on base doesn't have to worry about the mission getting done. Except with mx, the majority are young enlisted guys who get shat on because they're enlisted, and think that's the way things are, and don't have the rank to get away with calling people on their BS. Ops is a different story, since it's (majority) a bunch of officers who are far less likely to take shit from people, and when they get shitty support, it's not because they're lower ranking, it's because the support is actually shitty. And that is why pilots are assholes. I'd rather be an asshole than a doormat, though.

Ok here is one issue with the scanner, CP finds out we have one and they assume we know everything thats going on, and they quit calling. Between phone calls, customers returning vehicles and the radio they can't always catch when a crew is down. We do do have a flying schedule and know when they "should" be on the ground. I have called CP myself and asked them *why* they did not call, the answer I get is: "don't you have a scanner, you should have heard them land." This is my issue, it's CP's *job* to call us. When crews don't get picked up or are late being picked up, who gets blamed? No worries though.