BuddhaSixFour
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Posts posted by BuddhaSixFour
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Zero regrets about doing it for one decade. Zero regrets about not doing it for two.
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On 4/13/2017 at 7:40 AM, General Chang said:
Your personnelists are working day and night at the highest levels to solve this problem by any other means. Those personnelists are heroes in my book, and I believe they will be successful.
See, that's why you need to serve your country by separating and getting out of the way. There isn't anything personnelists can do because it isn't a beauracratic problem. It's a leadership problem. Commanders can fix it. Not you. Not AFPC. The more you try, the worse it will get.
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Med school. If planes were really your thing, you wouldn't have been premed.
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13 hours ago, Duck said:
Good suggestion but I tried that and got denied by WG/CC and AFPC and SAF/PC. Sq/CC approved though.
At my base the current guidance is they will disapprove all Separation/PC cases outside of 6 months.Sorry, man.
For what it's worth, it's an illustration of the problem I have with 10-year ADSCs, and anything longer the AF may consider. There is zero way to predict what life is going to deal you that far out. I see it as a bit of a moral imperative to provide some flexibility on the back half of it for that exact reason.
A hard and fast six-month limit is lazy ass senior leadership not trusting lazy ass middle leadership to make an informed decision about balancing personal needs and the needs of the Air Force.
Could be you're a slacker looking to shirk a commitment. I dunno. Not sure we've ever met. But your SQ/CC does know you, your story, and the state of your community's manning. If he/she supported it, well, consider yourself backed by a random poster on base ops.
Good luck.
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Could you just apply for Misc Sep and cite the family issues and your commitment to the Guard? I've seen that get approved for guys with 18 months left at separation time. May or may not work, but it's way less likely to burn anything down in the way out.
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Silicon Valley and Redmond are very good at what they do and have already spent uncounted billions on the problem over many years. I don't see a magic check to Lockheed or any other player suddenly showing the pros what's up. The best they would do would be a system that was secure by virtue of the fact it was worthless and didn't do anything so there was nothing on it of value. Imagine trying to use Governet Explorer on you govOS computer to look up a how-to for GoverPoint.
I'm sure lots of work goes into focusing on really important things that are limited in scope (key infrastructure, communications, etc). But a general purpose compute stack? I vote no.
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12 hours ago, General Chang said:
Too bad...these slots are huge leadership opportunities for those who earn them. Money in the airlines isn't everything. The Air Force provides leadership opportunities you'll never find on the outside.
As an IDE-select who passed on the opportunity, I have found this sentiment to be misleading. Good leadership is highly valued on both sides of the fence. The Air Force has more opportunities per capita, but puts very tight left and right bounds in place. That makes it a better place to learn leadership. The outside world has fewer opportunities, but can have many more degrees of freedom. That makes it a better place to execute leadership.
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38 minutes ago, General Chang said:
Finally, a 15- or 20-year ADSC for UPT will have limited effect on the morale of pilots currently in, and the AF will still not have difficulty finding people to sign-up to fly...the novelty of flying never diminishes amongst a population enamored with it.
And the current generation of senior leaders will sail off into retirement patting themselves on the back for having saved the Air Force.
Then somewhere between 2028 and 2030, a bunch of people who liked flying in their twenties start to have an inkling that there is more to life than the Air Force. Suddenly they come to the stark realization of just how long their prison sentence really is. They'll come to absolutely despise the Air Force, and they'll have another decade with nothing to do but poison the waters. And they will.
Or you can just fix the stupid things that piss people off. The current generation of leadership sails off into retirement rightly knowing that they left the Air Force a better place.
Then somewhere between 2028 and 2030, a bunch of people who liked flying in their twenties are still in love with flying, leading and delivering an uninterrupted ass kicking to our nation's enemies. They see the last 10 years as an opportunity that's good for them, good for their families, and good for their nation. They'll come to love the Air Force and spend that second decade nurturing a whole other generation in how to run a fantastic organization. And they will.
But you're right, Chang. Your way is better. Let's just do that.
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Disregard. I'm actually thinking of another user on here. No idea who Chang is.
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2 hours ago, General Chang said:
Guys, this is easy from the AF perspective...if we start having a significant long-term problem with retention, we'll stop-loss in the near term and move to 15-yr commitments long term. Take it to the bank. And before you pilots start whining on this forum, you knew this would be a possibility when you signed on the bottom line.
The more of your friends that take the bonus, the longer we can put off S.L. and expanded commitments.
Good god, man. Surely you jest.
Flying should, by all accounts, be just the most awesome job ever created. Tactical flying is just about as much fun as anything. The job pays well. You get to serve your country in a meaningful way. And airplanes... f**k yeah.
If the Air Force can only get people to do it by A) getting people too young to know better to sign an obscenely long contract, or B) by abusing the terms of the contract to keep people around, then senior leadership really needs to ask how they f***ed it up that bad and shake things up as much as necessary to fix it.
Best of all, your people are screaming the solutions at you. Just step back for a second, listen without brushing them of as malcontents, and realize that you do actually have the power to do 75% of what they're asking for, and that you can do it with precisely 0% negative impact to mission effectiveness.
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1 hour ago, TnkrToad said:
Clearly you haven't spent much time around academic types.
Calling anything pertaining to AU "academic" is an insult to professors of 17th century French poetry everywhere.
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A reasonable two-bedroom apartment with a parking spot in a good but not stellar part of the city. In some of the trendy spots, the box guy would still need a roommate to be that close to a hydrant.
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Obviously there's no universal Active Duty experience or AD service member. Some people will love it. Some will hate it. Got it.
My heartburn with an ADSC longer than the current one is that you're asking a 22-year old to go all-in on the bulk of their professional life without any reasonable understanding of what that entails or what the opportunity costs really are. Some will get lucky and love it. Good for them. But the others will be trapped for no reason other than its hard to predict who you'll be or what your life circumstances will be a decade down the road.
How is the Air Force supposed to build a leader/follower relationship built on trust when the AF's first move is to take adavantage of youthful naïveté and dream chasing for its own cynical ends?
I understand the investment it takes to build a pilot, and that you need a guaranteed return if you're going to put in that effort and resources, but there's an upper limit to what it's morally reasonable to ask someone to agree to with no way out and no recourse. At some point it becomes predatory. I really consider the 10-year ADSC as at the upper limit.
Hopefully it's just talk and we can get back to figuring out how to encourage quality people to stay rather than trapping them when they just don't know any better.
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We don't.
Agreed. My point is that's the real problem. Fix that (I know, easier said than done... trust me, I get it) and other options come into play for dealing with the retention issue, up to and including accepting high turnover.
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The real problem is retaining trained people, and this move wouldn't help that.
Creating enlisted pilots would strike me as ridiculously penny-wise and pound-foolish. We'd spend a whole bunch of time and money to train them, then they would simply get out at the end of their initial enlistments and take their skills to the commercial world. They'd be fools not to.
I'm an outsider to this whole thing, but it seems like its a problem with training capacity. It sounds like a grueling job. In the end, do what you can do to make it better, but sometimes you just have to plan for high-turnover rates. If you have sufficient training capacity, who cares if 70% of your hypothetical enlisted drone operators go to the civilian sector at the end of five years as long as the 30% remaining, plus whatever long-term officers you have are enough to teach the new guys, maintain institutional knowledge, and lead the unit? Fix the user interface (which by all accounts is abysmal) so the things are easier to learn, and work to boost your throughput. If they do the job well for five years then leave, figure out how to make them cheaper without sacrificing performance. Enlisted operators are a perfectly reasonable option for that type of solution.
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What would you say the highly transferable skill set is?
Corporate governance... HR, supply chain management, finance, securities law, recruiting, project management... we're talking about some highly talented people that do more than yell, "Go team!" all day.
You think the CEO deals with payroll and recruiting of unskilled labor?
Yes, I do. I think making payroll and recruiting labor are very much on the mind of many, many CEOs.
Are you implying that one cannot be a good leader without being a good pilot? That leaves quite a few career fields out of luck
Presumably we're talking about leading flying organizations, so yes. Stay on topic.
Wing commanders aren't really the ones tagged to be in the lead aircraft of a 50-ship bomber formation. That's the sq/cc job, right?
No, it isn't. Most SQ/CC's couldn't do that reasonably. That's the problem I'm trying to point out. I think that a SQ/CC should be capable of that, and a Group/CC or Wing/CC should be capable of at least flying in that bomber formation.
I'll bite. How does a combat sortie in a fighting falcon impart organizational leadership skills?
I have seen very little connection between leadership and flying. Admiration, respect, sure. But running an organization of hundreds is not in the same realm... At least that's what I think
When we're talking about a flying unit, they're not distinct, either. Yes, there are plenty of skills required to run a large organization that are distinct from flying, but I'm happy to expect both out of real leaders. Excellence in all we do, right? When all you've got to choose from is a crappy pilot whose a good organizational manager, and a great pilot who can't keep a project on track, by all means, choose the organizational manager to command. Just know that you're picking between the lesser of evils, not striving to build a robust fighting force. The goal should always be to find someone talented enough to do both. That's a leader.
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I don't know the right answer, but there is a reason civilian corporations hire CEOs and presidents from outside the company. Ford doesn't need the best design engineer or riveter at the helm. Leadership is a skill unto itself, and it cannot be nurtured or measured through other actions and skills.
I fundamentally disagree. A CEO can move from industry to industry because large portions of what big corporations do is independent of their field. It's not that a CEO possesses some sort of magical universal leadership skill. It's that they have a deep, highly transferable skill set in corporate management and happen to be good leaders to boot. They may not be the best riveter, but he/she better damn well know what riveters do, how to get that riveter paid, attract and train other good riveters, and manage the supply chain to provide them with rivets. Leadership without action or other skills means you are at best qualified to be the Vice President of your local Toast Masters Club.
I would also say that flying... particularly in combat as part of a team... is better leadership development than most things. There is, however, a separate issue of learning to navigate the Air Force bureaucracy. Unfortunately, that's a fundamental skill required for serving effectively at higher ranks. Don't conflate leadership and rank.
I do agree with you that there is a point where flying talent matters less, but I think the line should be higher than you put it. Through the Wing/CC, leaders need to be reasonably proficient and at least solidly above average as aircrew (pilots, navs, whatever). I have no desire to pretend to be the leader of a unit I can't take into combat... period. " Good luck, boys! I signed your high-risk ORM and I'll write some mean Single Mission Air Medals for you if... er... when you get back!" said Robin Olds never.
But starting at the DO-level, I see how quickly everything else drowns out flying and how after a few years, our "leaders" just aren't proficient enough to do it any more. They make the reasonable and responsible decision to let go of flying except during training lines with high illumination and an instructor at the controls. It is not their fault. It is how we've chosen to make things work. It is, however, bullshit.
"You don't need to be a good pilot to be a good leader," is a lie a shitty pilot once told to keep their career on track. Unfortunately, someone who didn't understand the difference between "leader" and "administrative wonk" believed them. Now, we've forgotten what we've lost.
We will remember someday.
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It sounds like there are a lot of deployed staff positions that are just a waste of everyone's lives and could just be eliminated. But some of them are probably justifiable as necessary *if* a contingency kicked off even if they're a total life suck otherwise.
For those, I propose BSF's trademarked "Deploy from Home" concept. For the first two weeks of your 180-day PowerPoint extravaganza, you deploy, drop your bags off, and learn what your job would be if you ever had to do it. Then, rather than having your life wasted with busy work, you fly home, use the magic of the Internet to stay plugged in, and go about your normal life on a 12-hour mandatory recall. We wouldn't even need to move your bags. Just drop you on any available flight. At the end of your tour, if nothing happens, your stuff gets shipped back to you. Yeah, it would kill your leave plans for 6 months, but the deployment was going to do that anyways.
Would it work for every job? No. Could it work for a lot? Probably. Just a thought.
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A self-reliant spouse is incredibly helpful, and consider part of your flight pay to be "not there to fix it myself, call a repair guy" penalty money.
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Dear Senior AF Leader Who Finds Themselves At Al Udeid For a Few Days,
Please decline your DV billet and demand that you be put in a random CC billet. After waking up in the middle of the night to balls of mold pelting your face and throwing out your towel and uniforms, because the mold stink won't come out, give the order to burn the CC to the ground. Having stayed in both, I can honestly say sleeping in a tent less than a hundred yards downwind of the Kandahar pooh pond was preferable. Fermenting sh&t might stink, but it doesn't breed in your lungs.
Sincerely,
BSF
P.S. - They have these things called "dehumidifying air conditioners." I'm not even sure where we came by non-dehumidifying ones. It's a pretty standard feature. If new buildings are a bridge too far, just replace the A/C units as they fail due to mold injestion. You were going to buy a new one anyways.
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I've had a lot of fun at exercises where I slept in the hangar and ate MREs. If it's good enough for the grunts of the world, I'm fine with it. If your exercise is joint, plan to check your attitude at the door or you're going to make a really sh@tty impression.
As to the question, $50k for five years would be more tempting. $50k to 20 years would be much harder to ignore. Throw in some free MREs...
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Nob Hill north of Central Ave if square footage and school quality aren't big deals. The convenience is unbeatable, easy access to the whole city, and I like the older houses. It's fine that everyone from base has this weird idea that crime is worse or that it's all hipsters and hippies, because I'm $450/mo under BAH and can ride my bicycle to work in half the time it takes to drive from Rio Rancho.
That being said, the foothills and the NE Heights have several good neighborhoods. If you need 5 bedrooms, RR is the way to go. If you want a lot of land, go east mountains, but an O-3/O-4 can afford an acre or two near the river in the North Valley or Corrales if you want kind of a cool combination of rural-but-still-urban.
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Lastly, must ALL AF CV-22A pilots attend the Helo pipeline?
Right now, most initial quals do not come from Rucker.
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"My friend" if you're suggesting is me is not...I'm not one to stir a pot that way. But I can attest to his pain as many other reservists (and probably everyone else) can with vouchers.
So you posted it online for the world to see in order to not stir the pot?
The "Dear Boss"-style letter should be left to those with experience, credibility, and literary talent. Probably not your buddy.
1,000 Retired Pilots Can Be Recalled to Active Duty
in General Discussion
Posted
Here's what I think just went down.
AF: "We have this massive problem! We can't fix it!"
Mattis: "Of course you can, it's called leadership. Get some."
AF: "But it's a bigger problem than that! <insert AF talking points b.s.>"
Mattis/Trump: "Okay, if it's such a critical problem, here's a tool that can fix it overnight. Recall 1,000 pilots, voluntary or not."
AF: "But we can't do that!"
Mattis/Trump: "Then I guess it's not such a big f**king problem then. STFU and do your jobs."