Lawman

But those issues are not exclusive to the F-35. The whole of development programs for the military over the last 25 years has been a game of political tie ins vs mission creep slowed development. Comanche, Armed Aerial Scout, the LCS, every one of those programs suffered as much or more than the 35 did from that problem. The only reason programs like the Super Hornet don't get the attention is they look like winners by comparison not because they were so well run. That doesn't have anything to do with what the jet can or will do operationally. Being built in 50 states or tied in with partner nations doesn't have anything with its ability to go against SA10/20 vs using our current aircraft. And that's my problem with these hatcheted articles that get broadcast on social media like chum for people who have no reference but want to demand cancellation of this program because it's the one in the spotlight.

Nobody DI except the fanboys on Facebook that think any mission against any ground target the A-10 beats all players because brrrrrrt. What I'm getting at is the combined population of F-35 critics, legacy airframe supporters, people who generally just hate military spending, etc.... They have all united about one thing, killing the F-35. Even today calls the cancel the whole program and walk away based off "cost savings." And as much as people want to show YouTube videos of the pentagon wars and bitch about the military industrial complex, the F-35 like the Bradley before it will be a successful weapons system conceived in a nightmare of bureaucracy. For those not directly familiar with it the Bradley turned into an absolute workhorse, and that movie makes a hell of a lot of flat put BS statements based off rumors or interpretations by non-SMEs/people with access.... Sounds kinda familiar doesn't it.

Yeah but you're missing the point. It's another headline to put on Facebook and give a million aviation experts a chance to comment on how the whole program is an abject failure and how we would be better off with A-10s doing deep interdiction into a peer threat IADS or flying 25 year old vipers for another 30 years into same.

Dude from my old unit tried swapping to a guard job at the 130 unit in the area and was pretty much told age waivers won't/can't happen under current policy/needs... If that has changed somebody please say so because I know about a half dozen Kiowa guys who won't get transitions but are to old to just apply for Green to Blue. Having more options than just helos would be a win for any of them about to start their job search.

This ridiculousness was all over the radio news segments near JBLM yesterday. Very much comes across as the individual demanding the system adapt to service their specific issue. It's the new rallying cry of the "oppressed" now that we have gotten pretty much past the same sex issue. Gotta give the hippies a new social reason to be upset with the DOD.

Don't forget, "If a reason is found it will be immediately called flawed and biased by that services secretary before proceeding ahead anyway."

Nobody is saying this is the end all be all but acting as if your model is the only way to run a program is not gonna move you anywhere but where you are now. Plus temper the experience working with TF Odin with the fact the Army has never done this mission. I'm sure if you guys started running an Assault Aviation Bn it would look like a sh!t show to the Army for years. Somebody could ask the 160th to critique working with CV-22s or HSC-85 and it would probably sound identical to your opinions on Odin. But here's my point on the out right dismissal of using non commissioned aviators or limited duty officers like Warrants.... How many times have people on here complained they were aviators second and just wanted the Air Force to let them be pilots. What if you could have that. What if you could literally never leave squadron level aviation until you were on top of or past 20 years? Would you always fly not like a Jr. Pilot no, but seriously no staff job somewhere at the pentagon, or a flunky joint job at the CAOC just staying in an aviation unit focused on the aviation mission and specializing in particular tasks (IP/Maintain/Safety/Tacops). The other big thing, what if you didn't need 4 years at the zoo to get here. That is how we get to keep people. This dismissal that it only works for the Army because there are no helicopter jobs. Well for one, there are even less UAS jobs available so where are all these highly qual'ed UAS guys gonna go. And that excuse really only passes muster if every pilot that punches out of the AF taking a job at United. Check people's LinkedIn profiles after they leave you, no way they are all pulling airliners despite way more opportunity for it. Think about the different flavor of suck you guys deal with and seriously ask yourself if you didn't have to deal with all that would you be punching at 12, because we can punch at 6 and we don't see the manpower drop off not even from the safety guys that can get OSHA jobs in a heart beat because the track gets them about every certification you could ever want. Also while limited, outside Helo contracting jobs pretty much start at 6 figures, so there is plenty of incentive to run to those when available.

Have you spent a day with an Army unit? Do you have any idea how miserable a non deployed unit with no mision equipment can be? You are literally the task bitch for everybody in your organization at that point. Are you going to argue quality of life of living at Ft Bliss deploying to Field Problems/NTC and doing road marches/ranges/PME in between vs being stuck at Cannon and working 12-14 hour days? When was the last time you put up a tent, or better yet burned sh!t. The Army is busy work with the occasional mission task stuck in for a break in the suck. Why would you deploy Air Force personnel as enlisted when they dont deploy to do the mission as officers. You seem to think its necessary to give the job to the Army in order to use enlisted. Im arguing that if you guys just accept that it does not take a 4 year degree in Journalism to fly an airplane you might be able to aquire personnel at a much lower cost. What difference would it make operationally for you and the guy next to you to come to work with E6 rank on instead of Cpt/Major. The historics are officers remain in fixed wing units in our service well past 20 on a regular basis all without much in the way of additional commands or achievements that can be achieved. You know what a CW5 with 20 years vs a CW5 with 30 is doing in a fixed wing unit? The same job just with more flight hours and respect. Do you seriously think these guys cant get hired? your talking about pilots with thousands of hours of total flight experience. Could have retired years ago, and still has a crappier qualifty of life than any comprable Air Force position (not to mention less pay). We opened up warrants from flight school assesion because fixed wing units were basically stealing high rank guys and we dont want to lose CW4/5 IP from a 64 to go fly C12s so he can enjoy the last years. Again maybe if you didnt create a culture where 60-90 guys are vieing for 1 command slot 20 years later they would be more willing to put up with the suck after year 8-12. If you knew when it was time to make a choice that there was say a 1 in 5 chance of owning a squadron vs a 1 in 30 would that change your mind to stick around? Thats what having a Warrant population allows us to do. No Im saying even if we were qualified on your particular versions and types of UAS platforms the idea would be thrown out because the Air Force historically views Warrants or enlisted operators as not real pilots. Look at what you do to warrants who go green - blue as far as flight school. Culturally you guys are unwilling for whatever reason to accept that there is another service with literally thousands of non commissioned officer pilots operating in it. It works because everybody in our service is not stuck on a single construct track of dipstick wingman day 1 pilot -> Flight Lead -> Squadron Commander and checking every box for that job on the way. We have 3 Commissioned officers in a company (equivilent to a flight).. and a dozen warrants. Those commissioned officers dont do jobs like IP or Maintenence they do command duties and staff assignments outside it. The Warrants form the functional cadre of making the unit work. Im an operations and survivability officer, and tomorrow Ill be one, and 4 years from now Ill be one. I dont have to try and check 40 boxes on my slow march to LtCol. I also dont need to try and worry about becoming an IP or a safety officer, because somebody else went into that track. Im also not gonna worry about spending 3 years on a joint assignment staff somewhere so I can get my next command oppertunity. Liquid posted exactly opposite this in another thread. Its only not up for consideration because you guys are stuck on the idea that everybody needs to be a leader, everybody wants to be a squadron commander, and everybody must be a commissioned officer to achieve that goal.

No kidding, but we don't have assets to replace you on the line. Remember you fought tooth and nail for this mission and the money to go with it. It's only after a decade of getting tired of being yelled at by another service you let us play. We have the opposite problem because we are swimming in personnel with no equipment. If it wasn't for the fact our systems are different and more importantly the Air Force doesn't want to view warrants as real pilots much less enlisted operators we could IA task to back fill your needs.

Well the bright side... At least we can get some real time combat SIGINT on them for once instead of the other way around...

Aviation is 40% of the Armys operational budget and only getting bigger. Remind me again how we arent a major muscle movement? The transtion to Full Spectrum CABs is only 3 years old hense us only having so many platforms for the fight but the Idea that we arent leveraging this force and just taking the idea its a small niche is ludicrous. It is personnel non intensive compared to an Infantry brigade but dollars to dollars I can have something like 5 ground Brigades for the cost of a single CAB. Inspite of that we arent having a problem willing personnel with units we are having a problem getting them aircraft to use because PM shadow and PM grey eagle can only produce so many airplanes so fast. Hense why I currently have 60 enlisted operators training on a grand total of 3 air vehicles in my Squadron. You seem to confusing direct support tactical units with the more strategic function you guys do thanks to Goldwater-Nichols. We arent allowed to own stuff like Global Hawk/Reaper and only recently were allowed to join the world of Predator. And "Doing exactly squat" doesnt take into account the number of home station training requirements we are doing for warfighters spooling up for Combat. I have yet to see the Air Force TDY a predator detachment to Yakima or Polk so they Brigade can actually excercise OSRVT training prior to deploying with the system. When you say "manpower intensive" you make it sound like I need 3 pilots to do what you do with 2. If the Air Force maintains the strategic initiative and stays on the construct of producing orbits for the JFC there is not an additional footprint of troops required, you are merely changing 2 Cpts for a E6 and a CW2. The same number. Again we arent talking about a mission change. You are not suddenly restricted to living and breathing for only one GFC who doesnt let the asset out of his sight. Whats cheaper to the warfighter is it takes 52 weeks for the Army to train a UAV operator and no officer producing school to get them. It takes you 52 weeks just to get a guy wings, then send him through an advanced WMS, then tell him sorry bout your luck bro and send his butt to Cannon for an indeterminate amount of time. Maybe thats why despite not having a 10-12 year ADSO we dont have the personnel problems you do. We didnt force a guy to go through 4-5 years of school, 2 years of being treated like an idiot who just kept telling themselves it'll be worth it, and then reward that suffering with a parking lot in the middle of nowhere and a box to sit in 12 hours a day while working on their masters degree so they can stay competative and maybe someday get to go back to a manned platform. You spend nearly 3 times the length of training flying aircraft which much higher cost per hour while paying a guy something like 2-3x what we do for the same end result a guy sitting at a computer looking at a video feed. Do you really think somehow enlisted pilots with a 6-8 year turnover are gonna be more expensive than paying somebody to suffer all the way to Major to do the same thing? Same is true with Warrants. Are we qualified to go to other jobs, sure .... but most of us dont have Bachelors degrees (Im one fo the weird exceptions). So you gotta factor that in, we dont have to pay a guy back for school or absorb the cost of the Academy to get him to flight school. Having somebody spend 4 years as a generator mechanic or crew chief is far cheaper and more cost effective than paying for 4 years at a nationally recognized higher learning institute. Because flow to Fixed wing only now has opened up to flight school graduates. Its a community that has for the longest time been the reward for dealing with a decade of previous suck. Remember thanks to the warrant model most of our pilots show up to the game with 4-6 years enlisted time before they ever see flight school. The commission guys are different but population wise they are limited in scope. So you have a group of people with 10-14 years total from the day they show up flying to the day they can leave with a paycheck every month. Its a lot easier to suffer 12 years of the suck (dont even pretend to have anything like our shitty QOL). And once they do 12 years they are typically in such a protected status of progression that they hang out a while longer. Go to an Army fixed wing unit some time, they are top heavy as hell despite having more than enough hours and time to go to an airline job. Why? because they saw for however many years in the "real Army" how crappy life can be, and they have seniority to give themselves a far better quality of life than they would have starting over at some regional or low end airline. RLOs (the regular Os) ... get treated like adults far earlier in their careers than happens in the Air Force. This is because they are evaluated on the ground leadership model and have to have commands and staff time so much earlier to remain promotable. Think about it, whens the last time you guys sat around and though about which midgrade captain should be in command of 60-200 people. But their peers on the ground side do exactly that so having them hold off till Major or LtCol to be in command means they wont ever make Maj/LtCol. And because of having a warrant population there is a much smaller number of excess Cpts and Majors around so its not like 30 guys competing with each other for 1-3 slots in the other services. Im in a unit of 500 people... we have 24 aircraft, 3 O4s and 1 O5. How many O5s would a same size Air Force unit have?

You guys act like there isn't a working example of the enlisted UAV construct operating at full capacity and not facing manpower shortages... And we are doing it without 10 year ADSO's. It's not the UAV side we are having trouble filling it's the junior officer/Warrant pilot side because after 3-6 deployments and "dwell time" that features half your home time at Irwin or Rucker people are taking the punch out early at Cpt/CW3... Meanwhile you can't force guys out of fixed wing because it's not the Army an there is literally no upper limit to promotion since the community flow is so well managed compared to helo's.

Except for the part where you have to wait 90 days.... You know because that makes me a danger to others.... 86 and counting.

Mediterranean port for operations of the Black Sea Fleet once they get though the Dardanelles.... Long standing arms deals of their highest end equipment (SA-15 for example).... Generally just liking to take the opposite stand point and stick it in America/NATOs craw for the last 60 years, especially after we spent a decade telling them what to do in Chechnya.... Lots of reasons.

There is no hard limit on days of permitted TLA allowed under the JFTR. That doesn't stop housing offices everywhere from threatening service members into housing that is unsuitable or claiming"if you don't fake this you have to pay till something else is available." Usually they have as you said some obscure SOP which requires some level of memo to get an exception to policy. Unfortunately they are often way to successful in scaring some young E5/O1 into towing the party line and spending 3 years cramming his family into a 900 square foot closet 40 minutes from post which is charging him 3x the OHA they would charge a German/Korean/etc because they know your rank and what your entitled too.

It's funny but a lot of this stuff seems to be exactly counter to the Army's "big picture" over the last 5-8 years." - HRC is fighting homesteading because "we need you to get experience across the Army." Commanders Army wide have been turning of IPCOTs. When I got to Germany there were guys who had been there for 14 years, now you can only stay for 3. That's not a cheap place to move somebody. - Warrants which are by definition trade and tech experts have basically turned into a 3/5s CPT. On the ground technical side they are even acting as company commanders which is not their intent. - Up and Out has been all the rage because we need to find a "fair" way to cull our ranks and whether or not somebody got PME or some other mystery metric has been the only acceptable way to determine this.

Stopped carrying my P7. Replaced it with an M&P shield in 9mm. It's a night and day difference in weight and comfort.

Not a problem I've had with AMEX, but USAA credit cards have tried pulling the "only on title ten orders" game with me. Essentially had to "prove" I was on active duty. That's another thing I like about the AMEX card, none of my other institutions give me anywhere near the level of customer service. They only needed a couple pieces of info like what meps I signed up at and they tracked it all down themselves. Chase and USAA etc, I've gotta go get memos and old ORBs and find a fax machine because," we can't accept email sir."

The plus side, they could attach bonuses to shitty assignments/IA billets to offer something more for taking the crap deal. Give them something more than, "just do 2 years a crap location X and I'll put a note in here about how you helped us out for HRC to ignore on your next PCS cycle."

I'd be interested in seeing a side by side comparison on take home. Like some combination of years/rank base combined with the career field bonus and then a variable of performance.

This seriously makes me wonder. There was a fight going on with trying to start a new BRAC and the big justification being we own some thousands of unused buildings and storage areas and such. How much square footage of a foot print do the Air Forces UAV operations seriously eat? I can't imagine you guys would need anywhere near the amount of prepared airfield/hanger space as some of the conventional aviation assets. And if it's the case that a little airfield and a lot of parking lot for containers with the requisite buildings and office space are all you would need, how can we not find space for that somewhere that doesn't suck what little morale you have left. Honestly I'd be curious if you couldn't justify farming out the burden on to Reserve or big guard bases and just funneling some active duty money towards their facilities maintenance in return.

And that's just it, yeah it's a cultural hill to climb. But, it's not like it hasn't been demonstrated and is working somewhere else. It wasn't that long ago where you only let real full up pilots fly drones or better yet wanted pointy nose types to fly armed drones because some C-17 or AWACS guy firing ordnance was just so culturally not ok. Now you have specific career track drone pilots coming into this but your still trying to generate guys over a period of years to grow and meanwhile cutting into your force of no kidding jet pilots. That's like the braves pulling a center fielder an sending him down to the minors to fill up their farm teams roster. And I'm not saying that to insult drone guys as less of a pilot I'm saying the AF invested far more dollars in making CPT shmuckatelle an F-16 or C-5 pilot why does he need to be in a conex at Cannon for any other reason than the AF won't explore routes outside the flight trained officers only route. Enlisted guys with special training... Warrants... There are options outside of "use pilots to back fill drones." And I'm not saying it won't be without growing pains. The Navy tried aviation warrants for 60 squadrons because the progression of career got so narrow at the top they needed to lower the number of junior officers rather than give half of them the guillotine at year 11. It wasn't the concept of operation that killed the idea it was the few guys they sent through on the trial run stepped on their dicks and ruined it for everybody.

Except they are not equals. That Major doing the same job as say the 2Lt sitting next to him is getting more money isn't he? It's not because he is more drone pilot it's because he is more officer and more use to the AF. You get the same effect with warrants. We don't have command authority, we aren't investing staff courses of 6 months or more to breed them into commanders, none of us are going to pentagon positions. If you were asking some E5 to do the exact duties and responsibilities as some Cpt or Major then yes he would have a reason to bitch, but he won't be asked to do that so your point on equality for all is moot. What next line up all the airmen in your formation and decide whose job justifies higher base pay. "Hey Fred... All you do is paperwork so your base pay shouldn't equal Tom's." The other part of that is you don't need a population of officers only in drones. The only people that seem to think that is the Air Force. Involved in the process of employing them sure, but acting like your MQ-1 and our MQ-1 are so different is just trying to inflate egos. They are both slinging Hellfires and performing targeting. Differences is ours are being piloted by enlisted operators with an aviation officer overseeing the operations. Yours... Get washed an worked on by enlisted dudes but don't let them touch the thing if it's flying. You can't tell me somehow Army enlisted dudes can learn to fly a UAS and the AF guys can't.

You've also gotta factor that currently the drone market supply on the civil side is in it's initial growth. It's kinda like how airlines are taking massive waves of guys when only a few years ago dudes were bar tending waiting on a right seat. And it's still way easier to replace a guy that only took 12 months to produce and cost X number of dollars than to put a dude through an officer producing source and then full up flight school even if you do keep him twice as long. And nothing says your beholden to a 4 year ADSO or that it can't be adjusted like flight ADSO where it's tech complete and not initial entry. Point is so long as the AF is on the path that the only way to get drone operators is to steal rated full up pilots and torture them with a job they didn't join to do it's only making it harder on it's self.

Oh c'mon dude nobody is coming out of high school to fly airplanes or drones for 6 figure salaries. That's the thing lost here. The military by and large is the highest paying "feeder" into the civilian aviation world. Yes I could make 6 figures as a helo pilot for Erickson, but I've gotta get 2500 hours to even sit down at the interview. Drones and airlines are the same. 1500 hours to get looked at by a regional and make waiter money. Nobody is sitting on their ass out of highschool thinking "hmmm... 60k to be an airmen or I could go work for these contractor dudes and make 3x that." Everybody is screaming about drone pilot shortages. Well when your only source of restock is from 4 year degree commissioned officers who have to spend 2+ years in training to even show up to the job yeah your gonna have issues filling rapid losses. Your 2 years away from effecting any kind of change to man power on your current system because you want to pay as you said fair/competitive wages to what they would make on the outside. Except remember these are entry level guys the day they show up. Nobody on the outside will touch them until that adso is finished. The other option is something like the Army model. Realize that a lot of guys are sitting at 6-8 years and E6 going "no F'ing way I do this a day longer." But suddenly you make them warrants and give them a different job with x number years of adso and the next time they make that call they are so close to the pay check of the month club they think, "4 more years for a pension.... Ok start the suck." That's what the Army has been doing forever. And the coast guard does it to us with the DCA program. You've got enlisted guys crewing bombers and gunships, shouldn't they be paid more than some jack ass who sits 10-1600 m-thur closed Friday for training in CE? Of course, but you don't seem to have a problem filling those spots. Hell look at the Navy with nuke guys. That job pays 6 figures the day they leave the Navy with a graduate degree paid for by the Navy but dudes still stay for their 20 weird as that is.