pawnman

From what I've seen, flying hours is not the primary driver for people getting out. There is a ton of queep we could cut, in the name of saving money, that would also help the retention problem.

The question is, what is the Pentagon's plan to act on this information? Because what I'm seeing is that the Pentagon is pushing for promotions based on race, religion, and gender...doesn't that run counter to the idea of EO?

Whenever I've seen an attempt to mentor an airman outside my own organization, I've seen that airman complain about it to their boss, which eventually results in a SQ/CC to SQ/CC phone call, ending in disaster for the "mentor".

Well, that won't hurt retention at all. Take away the 20 year retirement and there goes the last of your experience between years 11-19.

I've got some ideas that cost us nothing in benefits and readiness. 1. Stop forcing commanders to spend the entire budget every year. The DoD claims they want us to save money, but then they reward the opposite behavior. If you really want us to save money, give us some sort of incentive (as simple as "you can keep any money you don't use this year"). 2. Some for the flying hour program. Untie base budgets from the flying hour program, then stop stigmatizing units that sell back flight hours. Even better, make the window for selling back flight hours larger so that units desperate for the hours can take them from units that are triple-turning their crews every day to burn through them. For example, the B-1 FTU usually has 8-12 students at any given time...that means we can fly every student with 4-6 lines a day. Yet we schedule 8 lines many days. Instructors need three flights a month to make RAP, they're flying 10+ times a month, and still expected to execute all their ground duties. We can probably afford to give some of those lines to another unit. 3. Stop deploying so many people. I think everyone who has been there can agree that there are far more people than required present at the Deid, and I'd hazard a guess the same is true of Dafra and Ali. Do I really need a 100+ person strong services squadron in a location where most of the services are provided by TCNs?

In our case, it was MAJCOM guidance. All part of the political theater for sequestration. Senior leadership was terrified of having hours left after begging congress for hours post-sequestration. When there are only so many jets and so many crews, the end result if that every crew has to max-perform the flight time.

Number 1, I guess we'll see. You clearly have a different perspective than I do. I get the culture change, and I sort of get the over-reaction...certainly gets the message out there. I'm not sure how it relates to drinking in the vault, after a night flight. You seem to have more faith it will shift back than I do. I haven't exactly seen a lot of AF policies become more relaxed in my time in the AF. The question is, how much damage will be done to squadron cohesion and camraderie before that happens? And when the beer light turns back on, how many people will be willing to stick around for it? Number 2 was an actual example of the 1-star WG/CC specifically calling out someone with colored trim on an otherwise all-black gym bag. Maybe senior leadership doesn't see it, but wing and group leadership ARE focusing on these things, not just the enlisted force. As for number 3, we received very specific guidance about not only burning our own flight hours, but all the flight hours for several other bases who couldn't make it happen. There's only so much proficiency and training that can be done when I'm flying around at max endurance so I can get another 0.1 for the man. Defensive maneuvering, low altitude training, even some of the weapons employment stuff goes out the window when I can't get above .72 Mach because I need every drop of fuel. But the bigger issue was that immediately after burning those hours, we stood down the squadron for about two weeks. It's very similar to the problem I've had since I was a 2LT with the way the Air Force buys big screen TVs and ostrich leather chairs in September, but we can't afford toner for the mission planning printers in March. Number 4, I doubt any airman or chief will say anything to a senior leader. I've seen the same tactic in the Deid that's now being deployed at home...they go after people their immediate boss outranks. Never seen the story about the guy who was removed as chief of OGV home-station because a SSgt didn't like his response to a uniform correction and went VFR-direct to the SSgt's LtCol SQ/CC for backup? We're not making this shit up, Liquid. It happens. Daily. Maybe not in your world, but just as we appreciate the perspective you bring, we're trying to highlight what gets heard down here at the bottom. What we are hearing is STS, 69, etc, are all sure-fire ways to get paperwork, and as a result, end your career. We're also hearing that sock color, gym bags, and the like are important, because that's what our wing leadership is enforcing. I feel like there is a very, very real disconnect between Gen Welsh telling me to stop doing things if they are stupid and how that is executed on the front lines.

Because senior leadership fires them when they oppose stupid ideas. This whole witch-hunt isn't really serving the purpose it is intended to. You know what I think will happen? I think you will succeed beyond your wildest dreams in making the Air Force a purely professional organization, like any civilian company. When I worked for civilian companies (I joined the Air Force late, through OTS), I did not hang out with my co-workers. I did not mentor them, they did not mentor me. If I had a problem at home, I didn't say a word about it to my co-workers. None of my civilian co-workers, aside from my immediate boss, knew my wife was pregnant (and my boss only knew because I needed a day off for one of her medical appointments). You say you want us to be super-professional...ask yourself if this is really the Air Force you want to build. Next time you see hand-wringing over fighter pilot retention, ask yourself why so many people are so eager to quit a job that most Americans would love to do for free, despite a 6-figure retention bonus. Why is morale so low? Well, you've got a whole group of people here that are telling you exactly why morale is so low. Shall I enumerate them for you? 1. One size fits all policies. Or, as I've said before, "If you can't do something smart, do something visible". The Wilkerson case and the Smith case generated some bad press for us in front of congress. The result is that we've done these sweeping inspections and destroyed a lot of heritage in the process, not because it will solve the problem but in the name of showing civilian leadership that we've done SOMETHING. How successful has it been, I wonder? Are reports of sexual assault up, or down, since the purges? 2. In line with number 1, senior leaders have destroyed any ability for SQ/CC and below to lead. When you impose these types of policies at the highest levels and tell every subordinate commander to get on-board, you aren't exactly leaving a lot of room left for leadership. It's not just the purges, although that's a big part of it. It's WG/CCs calling people out on the color of their socks or their gym bags at the gym. It's fostering a culture where everyone is equal, everyone should call everyone out, that destroys any CGOs ability to lead and command respect from the enlisted force...because the enlisted force is now cleared hot to call out officers on any infraction, no matter how small. I used to see this as a problem with shirts in the deployed location, but in appears senior leadership likes the model so much we've brought it home. 3. Unrelated to SAPR, but the level of queep just continues to grow as we do more and more useless things in the name of "training". We also seem to have no real long-term plan when it comes to things like RAP, flying hours, budgets. I get that some of that is driven by the lack of a budget from our civilian leadership...but I spent September flying 8.0s every other day to "burn" our flight hours, only to be stood down for three weeks in October because we didn't have flight hours. Really? 4. Finally, the purges and the high-profile cases are creating a Cold War-era attitude of distrust, where the people who work and fight together are now constantly suspicious of one another for fear that a wayward joke or misplaced word will end their career with an accusation of sexual harassment, real or not. I know what the company line is, but from a crew dog perspective, we all know that if you are even accused of sexual assault or sexual harassment, your career is over, no matter what the investigation concludes. This is not an environment conducive to the open communication that senior leadership keeps telling us we need for mission accomplishment, suicide prevention, DUI prevention, keeping someone from becoming and active shooter...every interaction where I talk about my problems now leaves me vulnerable to my colleagues, so I'm better off just keeping my problems to myself. You are right about changing the culture, I'm just not sure you're going to get the culture you want.

So apparently related to the health-and-welfare crusade...have any other squadrons/wings banned alcohol in the debrief yet? We just got a new policy that says, essentially, no alcohol on duty, period, and debriefing is still on duty. Also no alcohol in the vault, period...so mission planning is a lot more boring now.

At least one civilian author is disgusted with the recent "bikini photo sting" http://www.jqpublic-blog.com/?p=558

Well, what I wouldn't do is water down important issues with knee-jerk reactions like removing family photos, magazines sold on base, and pictures of females brought in by AF leadership (cheerleaders on a USO tour, for example). It's not just a matter of whether it makes us better warfighters or not. Hell, you want to pull that argument, let's ban people from having families, since it makes them reluctant to work long hours, nights, and weekends. My biggest problem with this is that we have an actual, serious issue with sexual assaults, and our response has been to classify everything as a sexual assault. It would be like the police attempting to catch a serial killer by arresting every jay-walker. When leadership spouts this idea that a magazine with swimwear (sold at the BX, no less), or a picture of a wife in a bikini, or a Maxim, are the same as a rape, you are only serving to dilute the seriousness and severity of the real offenses. Instead of looking for real ways to solve our actual problems, we bring in briefers who tell me I'm committing sexual assault if my wife has a drink or two before we go to bed for the evening. Do you really think I'm going to listen to the rest of what that guy has to say? I'll also leave you with this article about the recent "bikini photo sting operation". http://www.jqpublic-blog.com/?p=558

Of course, standing down fighter and bomber units was also supposed to wake politicians up to the impacts of sequestration...the result was a total government shutdown. So, don't hold out a lot of hope in the politicians to fix it.

I'll remember that next time I'm the mission lead. "Our notional package is 2 F-16CMs, one piloted by a woman, the other by a Pacific Islander. We've got a 4-ship of F-15Cs, pilots are a Hispanic woman, an African American, an Asian American, and the youngest wingman is a white guy, don't expect too much out of him..."

Next up, paperwork if you don't follow through well enough on contrived exercises. http://www.acc.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123368616

So is this why AFPC is so unconcerned over the coming exodus from AMC? Fewer airplanes require fewer pilots...so the spreadsheets still look green!

Nah, my wingman probably got out 6 months before me. Anyone who wants to make a change will be passed over in favor of people who think the system works great.

Had a crew bust the border overseas with the DO onboard. DO sat the other members of the crew down while continuing to fly. ALO'd two of them in the following VML.

Well, tough to say since we have one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world. No wonder so many major corporations refuse to repatriate foreign profits or move their HQ overseas.

Perhaps. I think where many disagree isn't that people below the top 1% should be able to earn more, it's that the way to make it more equitable isn't to strip wealth away from people who have earned it and their families so you can satisfy some desire to be "fair".

As an evaluator, all of these sound like downgrades at most. I don't know that I would ever Q-3 someone for not charging an iPad, forgetting a ring, or not reading a checklist word-for-word as long as they did the checklist...but then, I'm not an AMC guy, or a giant douche.

Destroyed a bunch of the trees in the house I own up there, and all over the city. Thousands of cattle and horses are dead after the storm, hundreds of thousands of birds. It was bad...but judging from the pictures my neighbors were nice enough to send of the house, a good chunk of it has already melted.

BONE FTU is back to flying, with the direction to fly "only what is necessary to accomplish training". Last month, the goal was to squeeze in a couple extra tenths of an hour every sortie, now we're trying to save every tenth. The contract academics guys still aren't back to work, though...we've got a class that has done no training for about two weeks now.

"'Again, I’m still working out the finer details, but this I know: Civilian Lauren has bangs. She likes to wear nice, tailored clothing and high heels. 'She likes to speak her mind, even when people around disagree. She’s feisty, emotional, sometimes irritable (especially when she’s hungry or tired), and a bit moody. But overall, I think she’s pretty cool." Apparently, Civilian Lauren also speaks in the third-person.

Because AU feels that would diminish their in-res program? Seriously, I didn't learn anything from the curriculum. It was a good chance to mix with officers from other AFSCs...that novelty wore off sometime around week 2. The rest was a paid vacation.

Bingo. Politicians are way more likely to use the military now that it is so much smaller. Where once everyone knew someone in the military, we're now living in an era where, unless you live in a town near a military base, it's unlikely that you personally know people who have served overseas in the last ten years. Since so few people have a personal stake in the military, and since it is no longer seen as a sacrifice but as a personal choice to join, we don't have the same clout we once did. It's not all that recent a phenomenon...look at the post-Desert Storm drawdowns for an example of how this will play out post-Afghanistan.