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I’m not sure why we don’t just erase all the reserved spots and just let the O-6s park curbside by the front door.

Hey I’m just glad to see that the B-52 program is so squared away that this guy can spend all of his time on scraping pennies worth of care package garbage from the dark corners of Al Udeid to help out the USG’s underpaid indentured workers.

The AF knows it’s about money. Every pilot at HAF has read the airline pay charts out of morbid curiosity and knows how much money is out there to be had. But the story they’ve sold to Congress (with our help) is that it isn’t about the money, it’s about additional duties. So Congress (and Enlisted dreamers) think “if money’s not the problem, and pilots just want to fly with no officery stuff, let’s bring black WOs and The Flying Sergeants.” Now the AF is chasing it’s own lies and using excuses like “we don’t have the data on how many guys are going to the airlines after they separate” or “the previous guys in charge underestimated airline hiring” to cover their asses. Which in itself is contradictory, of course. Edit: I’m not fixing it.

Seven years and a $100m study. Then you can purchase a mil-spec DJI Phantom from an NG shell company.

I think it’s a safe bet that the Space Force won’t actually be putting people into space.

Ah, no, the coverage is fine. I was referring to the relative ease of denying the signal with a jammer over a large area.

Not sure if serious...

Does a Space Force mean we get more satellites? If so, does that mean the military budget will increase by that much? Is there a reason the USAF is unable to use that same money to gain whatever capability the Space Force would bring? Seems like a USSF would just bring the same capes to the table (still can’t count on GPS!) while building a huge personnel bureaucracy.

It won’t. You can’t create a military branch with a Tweet.

The suit is definitely weird at first; you first fly with it on ride 8, and it feels like a brand new jet again. Like you’re in a cocoon and disconnected from the world. Then it becomes normal after a while and you don’t really think about it. The tolerance for this varies among U-2 guys. It seems proportional to your mass; some taller or wider guys complain a bit more about tired backs and shoulders. And some are totally ok, it differs from person to person. Go figure. The good thing about the suit is that it was designed to accommodate an 8-10 hour single seat flight as well as could be expected given the constraints. The methods for eating, drinking, pissing, and temperature control are pretty well sorted. I’d guess that the 6-9hr missions that some fighter guys are doing in the desert can be less comfortable. The worst part is being on the ground when it’s hot/humid. Cockpit starts to swelter pretty quick, and the suit air doesn’t get cooled on the ground. The U-2 doesn’t like being anywhere near the ground. It likes to go up. Once it’s going up, everything is as it should be.

Probably? When I was at Travis, it was queep only. Straight from the slides, the #1 Wg priority was OPR/EPR timeliness. The Wg/CC himself was editing 2Lt OPRs to get rid of white space, literally working through the night to do so. Every Sq had to submit full-up 1206s for every possible award (think Blacks In Government, Airman of the Week, Verne Orr’s Wife’s Award, etc). By the time I left, there were 18 quarterly awards categories in addition to the 69 bullshit stand-alone ones. Each was boarded at the OG, with nominees showing up in service dress to the board. Of course, it didn’t matter if the nominee personally kicked bin Laden in the balls, because the squadron with the best copywriter/secretary/chief editor (aka FltCC/Exec/SqCC) combo who were most in accordance with the mandated “Brown Bag” (yak) bullet writing style won anyway. Additionally, every Sq sent up weekly mandatory “Weekly Activity Report” bullets to be run up the flagpole. We’d send up deployment successes and one-off first time mission stuff, but the only things that ever made it out of the Wg were volunteerism bullets. I kid you not, in a Wg with “AMC’s Largest Ops Gp”, well over 95% of what they chose to report to the NAF was decidedly non-ops. They may as well call themselves the 60th Mission Support Wing. The only two Weapons Officers worked as the Wg Exec and Wg DS. There was no mission discussion anywhere; our Sq didn’t even have a room certified to discuss classified information. This was a place where the guys returning from AETC white jet tours were the voices of reason.

No one is arguing that we haven’t done good work. Lots of good guys alive; lots of bad guys dead. The argument is whether or not it was worth the financial cost or the loss in ability to wage/deter a war against a peer enemy.

And people can’t understand why some guys like the T-38A better.

If you think of it from an opportunity cost standpoint (the cost of the opportunity forgone), you’re essentially paying $1m to stay in the AF. Then it becomes absolutely about money.

Are they hiring?

A-model vs C-model is a false choice. The correct answer is the A-model with an extra radio and ForeFlight! But seriously, a little TOLD help would be nice.

Well, I’m not cool enough to know where my secret local organic free-trade hipster hardware store is. Luckily I noticed today that Amex has a special offer on Home Depot gift cards through June: $100 for 8k points. HD is usually 10k points, which is pretty good already; most of their other $100 cards run 14-20k points. Combine that with the military discount and/or the Memorial Day sale and you might walk away with some good stuff. That is, of course, if your dignity can take the hit!

Best comment: “Horton’s, here’s a poo!”

Do it, Huggy. Make Recce Great Again.

I see a difference between discounts that don’t affect anyone but the seller (Lowe’s, Epic Pass) and ones that allow me to gain an advantage over regular Joes (overhead bins and seat choice).

...I’m ok with this, yeah. Allowing Lowe’s to sell you something for $50 less is much different than cutting in front of weary travelers.

Yeah, there’s plenty. A lot of U-2 guys have extended their UPT ADSC by a few years to fly here. I don’t know any that wished they hadn’t, though that doesn’t mean they necessarily want to stay in the Air Force longer than one U-2 tour. Several are, however. At the same time, I don’t know why anyone would stay in the Air Force after working at a UPT base.

He’s not a USG civilian. He’s a civilian civilian.

From the testimony: “This budget boosts pipeline capacity, expands pilot training and addresses experience shortfalls, continues incentive pay and bonuses, improves administrative support at the squadron level, and funds flying hours to executable levels.” Continues, not increases. I refuse to believe that Air Force leadership doesn’t understand market capitalism. I also refuse to believe that they can’t see the immense cost savings involved in not having to train replacements to backfill departing pilots. I really think it’s as simple as bureaucratic pride and not wanting to cede organizational control and influence to the line pilot peons.

As much money as that looks like, it’s way less than training their replacements.