guineapigfury

I think it would aggravate the problem of risk aversion. If you start hiring CCs off the street you're reducing the number of slots for career officers. Now they're squabbling over an ever shrinking piece of the pie. The rational response is to micromanage your people so nothing ever goes wrong on your watch. Why develop your people, we'll just hire leaders from Facebook. YGBFSM. If you want to see how this concept would work out, look at the nonstop clown orgy that is the MQ-9 community. Good people flying the line with little to no hope of career advancement led by shiny penny outsiders without relevant experience ... it's going as well as the retention numbers indicate.

Let's take people with zero miltary experience and start them as Group Commanders, what could possibly go wrong? There is a much better fix mentioned in the article: filling these hard to fill spots with GS personnel. That solves the pay issue and mitigates the lack of military experience by keeping them out of uniform.

My decision to separate next year keeps getting easier.

Then there is hope. I can't tell you how happy this post makes me.

I'm the last guy to defend Big Blue, but the last bunch of UPT directs were told they could leave then allowed to do so. We'll see.

I started UPT 9 years ago, we had 32 IIRC, then 3 additions for phase 3 from Whiting. I think of those we graduated 26 on time. 2 Washouts, 1 Medical DQ, 2 washbacks, and the Qatari guy had to go home for his arranged marriage and rejoined a later class.

Behold the miracles of small sample size!

Can you burn some military leave en route? Also, sounds like your headed to Hollomam. If so, you can walk everywhere on base.

Wasn't this thread started as a possible "stolen valor" case? Since we've figured out that this dude is an actual veteran, exactly what the fuck are we going on about at this point. Are we quibbling over this dudes choice of patches in 10 year old photos as somehow deceptive? Really? I have a picture of me rocking a ThunderCats T-Shirt in my flightsuit as a 2Lt. I guess I better not run for office or I'll get called out as an imposter from Third Earth or Thundera.

The continuation info on mypers for Captain's passed over for Major is all about Major's passed over for Lt Colonel. Why am I not surprised?

I'll have a look in the morning.

Any word on continuation for Captains twice passed over for Major? I'm trying to get fired.

Note: If your follow-on training is scheduled for less than 20 weeks but goes over 20 weeks, you can get an extension on the OPR closeout date.

Option C is to promote officers in severly undermanned AFSCs to Major the same way we do Captain and 1Lt. That might help retention in the career fields that are truly hurting. Unfortunately that would foil the "get passed over so I can get out of my UPT ADSC early" technique.

I think the intent behind FAIPs is that flying squadrons need Lt's to do Lt stuff. Otherwise you have too many guys bunched at the same point in their career and dudes get left holding the bag come OPR closeout date. Also a 1Lt or new Captain might be able to better relate to the 2Lt's going through training.

Any "savings" will quickly get eaten up by the legion of GS types needed to verify the rents and mortgages of a million+ servicemembers.

I hate my job, but an extra 5k per month would get my consideration.

They're being told they'll get to go back to real flying.

The selection rate to Major is usually above 90%. Don't stress too much.

I don't have my escape all the way figured out. If I can't find a contractor or guard slot, I'll just take my GI bill and go figure something new out. Remaining on AD to fly drones for the next 10 years is not an option.

I was thinking we'd need your basic Air Force support, MSG and Med Group, not airfield stuff. "Joint" basing could work for RPAs, but only as tenant unit and enough top cover to keep the base owner firmly in their lane. That said, we have Air Force Bases on US soil in the Pacific, so that seems like the obvious choice. We run a separate squadron at Ellsworth, it only requires 1 building with enough rooms for briefing/debriefing, SOC, GCS and some normal offices. This concept is proven, we just need to do it. That said, NV and NM have stronger Senate delegations than HI and there are no relevant voters in Guam so we are ed.

Never flown RQ-4s, but that sounds about par for the course for RPAs. If the daywalkers could be bothered to fly 6-9 hours a week, the workload would decrease significantly for the line flyers. I know at my previous squadron last year they had essentially a 4th shift's worth of people above the line. Meanwhile all that's left to fly the line is 1 pilot per GCS plus an MCC. I'm so glad I'll be separating in a year.

If it costs money to fix a problem, spend the money. TINSTAAFL.

No, PTSD is rare but not unheard of. I've been flying MQ-9s since 2012 and I've seen 2 cases. Long term sleep deprivation is the actual culprit behind many of the RPA community's physical and mental health woes.

We already have perfectly serviceable bases in Hawaii and Guam. Those locations already have all the support stuff in place (medical, finance, etc) and there would be no SOFA issues. Find a couple buildings to plug some fixed facility GCS's into, some room for satellite dishes and away we go. We don't need to reinvent the wheel here. We'd have to get good at handovers to people who aren't the LRE, but that isn't that hard. Let every base work 2 shifts, not 3. Mids is what's literally breaking people.