pawnman

I'm not sure he would have needed a full purge. Just a few strategic firings to send a message to the rest of the senior leadership.

We've put a few BUFF guys through already when they got hired for the B-1 reserve unit, and they all seemed to do fine. I think they'll be OK in the beginning at the ops squadron. Where the credibility thing will really come into question is this scheme for them to upgrade to instructor a year after graduating the FTU. Most pilots don't upgrade to IP until about three years in an ops squadron, most WSOs at two. AFGSC will have to re-write some portions of the 11-2B-1 for these guys to meet minimum hours/sorties/time to upgrade to AC, FLUG, and IP.

Assuming they've released all the dates, you should be able to find it on MyPers under "Officer Promotions". It will typically have a timeline for board date, accounting date, final date to get stuff into the selection folder. We can't tell you when the stuff will be due to your squadron or your wing...that is an answer that you will actually need to talk to the exec to get.

Three of the guys who got promoted from the 05 group at my base are leaving the Air Force less than a year after pinning on. I know at least one 06 guy with similar plans, and an 07 guy who just got his PRF back and already has applications in with airlines and a job at the reserve squadron.

When Gen Creech took over what was TACC at the time, he directed his staff to scrap at least half of the AFIs. He believed the AFIs were stifling innovation and creative problem-solving. Whenever one of his staff would protest, Gen Creech would tell them that he had faith in the judgement of his subordinate commanders. See, I did learn something useful from the online ACSC.

Weird...plenty of companies can succeed by hiring CEOs from outside the company, or even outside the industry, but there's no way the military can possibly make it work... Doesn't this also neatly circumvent the problem of the box-checking, risk-averse micro-managers getting picked up for these command slots? Might be nice to have some folks willing to take a risk because 1. they don't have 20+ years already invested and 2. they have a cushy fall-back position if they fail. We constantly piss and moan about the wrong people being placed in leadership positions, due to the incentives the Air Force puts into place. Is it so outlandish to think that people who have not been subjected to the same incentives their entire careers may come up with different solutions?

15 year mortgage FTW!

Maybe they should have documented some of the history, instead of threatening to wash a kid out for riding one of these admittedly ridiculous hoverboard contraptions.

I estimate the costs of implementing this system will quickly overwhelm any savings from BAH.

We had a chat about this with the B-52 FTU (I'm in the B-1 FTU). It seems so foreign to me that the B-1 FTU puts people through both the DSO and OSO training but the B-52 doesn't put guys through EWO training. There's a lot of questions with Strike Vista about whether radar navs are going to struggle with the defensive portion of the syllabus.

They do that when you pass the bar exam.

Not just RIFs, I bet. The 02 year group probably has a lot of folks that bailed on their own with VSP and/or just plain got out when their commitment ended, which should have been in 13 or 14 for most of the pilots in the year group.

Funny you should say that. I have a guy in my squadron who taught ACSC for three years, but because he wasn't a select to go to the school, couldn't get in-residence credit following the assignment.

Maybe we should start considering people for leadership positions based on things other than how fast they make Lt Col or Col.

We also had a similar thing uttered when they rolled out the Striker Vista program. Then I had to chat with the students about why getting a Q-3 on their initial check ride was a bad idea, even if it did protect them from flying the B-52 in the future.

We've got a briefing that we give to the B-course students, but it's tailored to the B-1 specifically. There's a lot of stuff in there about terrain clearance tasks vs critical tasks vs non-critical tasks, as well as the "time to die" charts for various dive recoveries.

Someone should tell San Francisco. http://weartv.com/news/local/potential-dangers-spark-concerns-for-blue-angel-flyover

Bingo. We wonder why we can't get any veterans elected when the veteran community itself is willing to dig into every facet of someone's service and call out anything they see as a discrepancy.

And why do so few of our officers get joint time? Seems like it would lead us back to that manning crisis that you keep insisting we don't have. If manning were healthy, we wouldn't have to send only the top 10% of our school graduates to joint assignments like it was some kind of reward.

Can't be that appealing if you need to offer $100,000 bonuses to get people to stay in them.

I believe that's exactly what is happening. I stand by my statement that this is a contributing factor for why there are so few veterans in congress...would any of you want to explain your entire career, only to have other veterans nit-pick every ribbon, medal, and patch?

And this is why we don't have more veterans in politics. We can't even get fellow service members to unite behind them, why would we expect the public to? I've got plenty of pictures in a flight suit wearing unauthorized patches, some from different MDSes (including one wearing the patch of the Canadian JTAC unit that came down to train with us). I can only imagine the vitriol if I were to run for public office. "Look at this jackass, pretending to be a JTAC. His record clearly states he was never a member of an ASOS. And it's a Canadian patch. Why would an American military member side with the Canadians?" No thanks.

12B is critical, eh? I'll hold my breath waiting for that bonus.

"hey, sir....I know we're in a budget crunch, so I just really wanted to apologize for the $20 million aircraft in the field over there."

I think it's six months because that's what we're planning for whatever bomber is picking up the AFCENT tasking while someone else stares across the ocean at some Asian dictators.