Lawman

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.

Really dude? Welcome to the world outside the AF. We have close to 2200 pilots being paid 2/3 what their commission brethren make while flying more, doing menial duties like washing trucks, and receiving no aviation incentive bonus beyond flight pay. I present to you the aviation warrant officer corps. Yet we never have a problem filling slots. Hell we are firing 400 people in the next two years. 4 year adso for enlisted guys out of high school some 10 thousand dollar or such signing bonus and a what maybe 4 month tech school all while paying them enlisted pay/benefits, or a bunch of studs who take over a year or two to train not counting no flight stuff and cost over a million pulled out of UPT to go to drones when there is a fighter pilot shortage and draw major pay and bene's by the time they are allowed to leave.... Which one is costing more in the long run and from recruits from a more shallow pool? You guys act like your manning problem is predicated on one answer, "how do you keep captains and majors who have been given the blue dick and convince them into staying a little longer?" What you don't realize is there are thousands of guys who aren't trying to be fighter jocks that would love to do something besides just wrench on your birds or make up another tracker at personnel. The Army figured that out decades ago. It doesn't take college degrees or 4 years of eating with only one hand at the zoo to make somebody that can drive a drone from launch point Y to Orbit Z and steer a flir pod.

Hey I don't know why having an Online masters in Business Administration makes you a better tactical officer, but then again I don't see the, "big picture.".... I'm still trying to figure out why the AF thinks enlisted guys couldn't fly drones with supervision. Probably the same idiot that got rid of specialist ranks because "everybody is a leader" even if their are terrible at leadership but good at a tech trade.

Yes, but in order for the right hand to take advantage of what the left hand is holding the AF would have to bring back *gasp* Warrant Officers, and accept the fact that most of them don't have Bachelors degrees.

You laugh... We have about 400 former 58 pilots in the Army non selected for aircraft transitions. They are clinging to the dream they will get to go over to UAS and try and finish their 20 instead of getting the big green GFY for all their years of pulling the cart. Both my Squadrons new UAS warrants are former 58 pilots. Those guys are the lucky ones.

The Army is in no position to go throwing stones after the raw deal we are giving the 58 community.... I look at both pictures and just thank god I didn't go scouts on selection day. What we are doing to our own people with this rack stack secret OML nobody is allowed to talk about, and holding dudes in purgatory over follow on assignments while they fly their aircraft out to Davis-Montham and do rotations through Korea ... Absolutely disgusting.

I have the ability to control a grey eagle drone from the front seat but my ASE suite hasn't changed in the RF arena since 1991.... Lot of that going around.

Haing had HMD our whole life the difference in a subtle and recent change in technology is huge. The original IHADDS helmet on A-D apache are 90 grand a piece. Most of the money is the IR harness that he infrared SSDs use to track helmet position. Well now with the E model we get a totally magnetic system that until only recently (ie last 10 years) never existed in a usable state. Helmets are below 10 grand and the system it's self is cheaper and easier to maintain. JHMCS was looked at on the E upgrade but the mag system on the HGU-56 was cheaper. So I have no doubt the JSF helmet could be much cheaper if it wasn't for the fact a minor change takes 10 years in acquisitions.

The juice is not worth the squeeze on this one. For one ski jump ships are on a tonnage level significantly larger than the assault ships you would be modifying no to mention vessels like Varyag and Kuznetsov are capable of greater speed for operations allowing better wind over the deck. The other part of it is while the sea Flankers and Navalized Fulcrums along with the SU-25 have shown the ability to fly off a ski jump boat they do so without anywhere near the ordnance load and fuel their designs can use so it's like fighting with 60% of your combat power. Hornet is already at a TW deficient when compared to both those planes, I doubt it would be an improvement. The other issue is while the ski jump worked great for the invincible class ships made into Harrier Carriers for an assault ship it means giving up two parking spots on the deck if not more which is why we never incorporated it into our designs.

They do but they haven't ever operated jets off them... However it's the same boat the Spanish have, and they do plan to operate jets off of it. A lot of noise is being made that this isn't so much a cancellation as waiting for the Spanish to do the feasibility of getting it working off that boat before the Aussies bite in to it.

FAA can always get more restrictive. In this case I'd honestly support it. I've seen too much stupidity regarding MOAs and training routes. We in the U.S. enjoy many freedoms that general aviation pilots in other countries would only dream about (Night time VFR in Germany for example). We tend to go till there is a major issue that causes reaction much like how many countries have adopted prescribed procedures for operations at uncontrolled airports where we just passed out an advisory circular and called it good. That's the FAA saying fix the problem or we will fix it for you. Incidents like this in the future will eventually force rules to be made. Look at cities with bans on flying tours because of stupidity in the past. If the GA pilots (which having been one probably ought to be called amateur pilots just like radio operators) want to keep their freedoms of air navigation they best not try to but heads with mil and commercial ops. Both those entities have a lot more buying power as far as congressional and administrative action despite what AOPA thinks.