pawnman

Sometimes, it speeds it up too much. The point is to make correct decisions, not just fast ones.

You missed the part when this new plan is supposed to include a way to keep retirement payouts at the same level, and not increase them by increasing base pay.

Merry Christmas, boys!

Part of the plan that is required includes no changes to retirement payouts...so no, you won't get extra money because BAH is now part of your salary. One idea I've seen floated (on the bro level, not from any officials) is moving towards what the civil service does with locality adjustments as part of your pay. Live in a low cost area, your locality adjustment might be 10% of your base pay. Move somewhere with a high cost of living, it could be 30% of your base pay. (Rough numbers).

My favorite part of the whole thing is that 8 years ago, they had a president who, standing in front to the smoking hole that used to be the Twin Towers, urged Americans not to retaliate against Muslim Americans. A president who spoke fluent Spanish and attempted to pass the most comprehensive and forgiving immigration reform in history...and democrats wouldn't support him. President Obama, on the other hand, has killed more people in more countries than Bush did, has deported more illegal immigrants than any president in history, and has presided over what is perceived as a huge upswing in racism. And somehow, Donald Trump is the one that is racist for wanting to stop the flow of illegal immigrants and to deport the ones that are here. All I see from the liberal side lately is a knee-jerk opposition to anything anyone in the Republican party says, whether it's actually good for the country or not. I haven't seen many well-reasoned opinions or arguments (and that goes for both sides, really).

Especially since they located the B-1 Reserve at Dyess. I know dozens of people who don't want to live in Abilene for the rest of their lives, but would have jumped at the chance to live in Rapid City permanently.

I just keep reminding myself that our functional at AFPC, in the webinar he hosted a few months ago, told us squadron manning was "AFPC's #1 priority", and of those squadrons, "FTUs are #1a, ahead of ops units". I'm still waiting to see that prioritization have any effect on the manning.

Har har, but the reality is I have a tougher time scheduling instructor WSOs than I do scheduling instructor pilots. Probably because of the shorter ADSCs, but also because there's only one place that makes new WSOs (Pensacola) vs the half-dozen bases that make new pilots.

I'm pretty sure declining a promotion doesn't get you out of your ADSC either.

I'm not sure why you think letting someone opt-out of the promotion system is a bad thing, especially when you follow it up with "up or out makes room for the younguns"...then make room for one more youngun by not promoting someone who has no desire to be promoted.

UPT grads won't solve my WSO problem. It also doesn't solve my FTU manning problem.

I wonder how long that will be sustainable. 11B and 12B are all undermanned across the board as well, and we've been sucking up the bulk of the 11F-coded deployments that don't involve flying aircraft. The rumor mill also says that AETC will be taking something like 70 11Bs for UPT because there are no fighter guys left. Across 5 bomber bases, that's 14 pilots per base. I can't imagine how we would get along losing 14 people to UPT in addition to the 365s we've been tasked to support.

Well, Reagan's opposition to Russia revolved around them being a communist country. To think that the US and Russia can't find common ground in things like fighting radical Islamic terrorism, or potentially hemming in a rising China, or any number of trade agreements, it ludicrous. Just because we were enemies in the Cold War doesn't mean we have to remain enemies forever.

5 B-1 WSOs? Thank God, we need them.

At least the Navy is willing to fire these guys instead of protecting their investment, no matter how bad the decision turned out to be.

That's not much bigger than the increment was for the '05 guys. ON the bright side, for those of us planning to make a career out of it, this really helps with the promotion rate to Lt Col.

In fairness, I would expect the Secretary of State to be in the room as well.

"If they don't like it, they can leave"...this is the same mentality that created the fighter pilot shortage.

One of my previous squadron commanders got an email while we were deployed that they didn't have a record of his bachelor's. He told me it was the third time they'd lost the documentation. On that specific iteration, he told them "I've been serving as an officer for 17 years, and I'm in command of a squadron. I think that's proof enough."

I honestly don't know how anyone who has dealt with the Med Group thinks government-run health care is a step in the right direction.

It makes it tough to believe them when they say things like "I understand the OPSTEMPO" or "I've been away from my family too". One wonders where the disparity comes from when most guys in the squadron have deployed 3-4 times to the desert, and your senior leaders at the O-6 level have one 3-month deployment to Guam in '06. It's not like our community ever stopped deploying...we were in constant combat rotations right up until the B-52s went to AUAB this year. What else do folks like this do that they aren't deploying or drawing that 365 card?

Most of my senior leadership already has less flying experience than line dudes in the squadron. I struggled to maintain my bearing when the OG/CC was introduced as a guest speaker "with over 100 combat hours".

1. Not really. The plan can't be worse than "Well, we have to do something...let's launch some airstrikes". And getting to watch our NATO allies bomb our Syrian allies instead of ISIS. 2. Not really. If we're going to be accused of going to war for oil at every turn, then let's take some fucking oil. Doesn't even have to be all of it...let's just make Iraq repay us for the reconstruction. 3. That bothers me a little. Mostly Saudi Arabia. But I think the threat is overblown. Much like concealed carrying a handgun, when a nation is packing a nuke, other nations deal with it in a different fashion than when they aren't. Look at how we dealt with Libya after they gave up their WMD program versus how we continue to deal with North Korea. 4. It's probably about time someone stands up to China in a real way. 5. I don't know about rude gestures, but one does wonder where we draw the line for acts of war. Apparently, taking sailors prisoner doesn't meet the threshold.

It's a good thing you guys are just fucking around out there, not training for actual combat.

I did the ACSC correspondence in about 4 months, on and off, mostly while pulling SOF shifts in the tower. While I agree it's dumb to make people do correspondence to be "competitive" for in residence, if you're planning to make it a career and you're not competitive, I would just bite the bullet and do the correspondence. There were some actual good nuggets buried in there amongst the BS.