Majestik Møøse

War is Boring are such fools. Flying Nightmare, GMAFB.

Peanut Gallery observations from 6-9 years ago: “Seems like totally shutting off fighter drops to UPT for a couple of years may have compounding effects down the road.” “Wow running a simultaneous RIF/VSP/TERA seems like a bit of an extreme way to downsize, especially since the airlines are hiring again.” “OK, so I understand why the Air Force hates the MC-12 - being an effective & cheap COTS solution and all - but I think they’re jumping the gun by giving them all to the Army before we’re done with Afghanistan.” “Huh, we’re drawing down Afghanistan again? Last time we backburnered that the Taliban took full advantage and gained a lot of ground.” “It’s pretty obvious that everyone in the Battle Royals hates ISIS, but I bet we’ll have big problems when all of our bedfellows want to kill each other after ISIS is gone.” “We can get rid of the A-10 because the US is planning on buying 2,400 F-35s? Just like we were going to buy 132 B-2s and 750 Raptors?”

Who gets the cash?

Are you at Travis? This sounds like Travis. File a complaint with the 18AF IG. Or just send this to JQP. Maybe your Sq/CC could say “unable, here’s a laundry list of real-world reasons” and cc the world.

Is this the DRAM thing? Several years ago Travis AFB declared that every flying squadron wasn’t allowed to pour beer in the bar unless everyone was trained to recognize when somebody was drunk. Seemed to us at the time to be an obvious plot to get people to drink in their shitty combined club. The OG recognized the bullshit ploy, but was made to enforce it anyway. He held a special CC call and told us the bad news. Then, after watching a 5min video used for training Applebee’s waitresses, he declared the entire OG to be “DRAM OK”, pulled back the curtain to reveal a bunch of kegs and solo cups, and gave us the rest of the day off. A great piece of theater, and the only cool thing he ever did.

I think they do that because of the seriousness of losing COMSEC, but all it does is squarely place blame on the airman when it’s misplaced. It does nothing to actually prevent loss of control. The time filling out that form would be better spent looking each person in the eye and saying, “if you lose one of these books, you’ll get an Art 15 and everyone in the Air Force will have to get new books. Don’t fuck this up.”

Don’t forget how great a civilian mobility guy is. And a civilian to open and close the vault. Add in a training, scheduling, front office, and stan/eval guy and that’s how a flying squadron can be utterly transformed by adding just 6 people. Hopefully the era of the pilot-bureaucrat is waning.

Sounds like breach of contract to me. Return to sender.

“Reassigned.” Firing is something that real (non-gov) civilians do, and over peanuts at that.

“...component failures or degradations were identified as affecting the topline performance of OBOGS oxygen pressure, flow, and content, resulting in various disruptions that negatively impacted the human-machine interface.” This is an excellent example of Officialese, an English-based language designed to increase the speaker’s perceived professionalism and authority on a subject. The intent is that a listener will either be too lost in the complexity of the words to coherently respond or the excessive verbosity will cause boredom and withdrawal. Simply saying, “the OBOGSs were failing and making pilots hypoxic,” is too easily understood and would invite too many follow up questions. Greater sentence complexity = hard to decipher theme and harder to devise timely counter arguments. Fortunately for all fans of brevity, the statement above became illegal in the Plain Writing Act of 2010.

This seems like an extraordinary amount of risk for a training organization to accept, especially in the modern risk-averse environment. That high of an ALR indicates that the Air Force really believes that increasing pilot production is the most important solution to its pilot shortage crisis.

If I were a Russian or Chinese paid troll or bot programmer, I’d be rolling in with everything I’ve got on military leadership. How I know when I win: US military leaders begin publicly attacking their own with claims of bullying, microaggressions, and unintentional biases. The possible unintended silver lining for us: the weak-minded leaders will remove each other via Twitter while the IDGAF types like Mattis will be more likely to survive.

All valid, but the AF still believes in the PCSM, and they’re giving pilot jobs to people with scores that are at least 10% lower than last year and possibly 40% lower (depending on how the score was reworked) than ten years ago. So our plan is to replace CMR instructors with a bunch of inexperienced useless new guys that are measurably dumber by the USAF’s own expensively-determined scoring system. Edit: also, to continue my recurring theme of the stupidity of not paying a pilot bonus closer to market rates, the UPT training costs alone for those 400 extra bottom-dwelling pilot candidates will be more than the yearly costs of a $100k bonus for all the experienced eligibles. And they haven’t even been to FTU yet.

52 PCSM. Fucking great. Somebody send this shit to the HASC/SASC and let them know this is the AF’s plan because they refuse to spend a few pennies on bonuses. “We need a $69B white jet to train UPT studs with radars and datalinks. Also, the studs will be mildly retarded.”

Good news, the U-2 has been solving its own problems at the Squadron level for some time. We just hired a P-3 guy, in fact. https://www.beale.af.mil/Library/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/279960/u-2-pilot-application/

They sent the guy who has the same decision making power as our CSAF. Both left the meeting with takeaways for their bosses.

What he’s saying is that the female nav who was “responsible” for signing off on the nukes is a fast burner while her former squadron and group commmanders were fired on the spot. None of the hate and scapegoating that rained down from on high hit her, even though she was the one and only person in the OG who looked in the little “nukes=yes” window and concluded, “yep, everything looks kosher, lets fucking roll out.” Or at least that’s what I heard, but I’m not a BUFF guy.

Oh, ok then. “2.0 MWS IP”. I got the significant digits wrong, thanks.

Gen Goldfien, You’re doing a great job. You understand what’s important and have the most combat street cred of any CSAF in the last 20 years. That said, if you let combat capability worth $Billions walk out the door to save $300m annually in bonus money, you’ll destroy our Air Force. None of these slides talk about the cost of a $100k bonus (a pittance) vs the exponentially increased costs of continual experienced pilot backfill production. The bottom line - if you don’t pay us more, you will continue to spend $Billions to solve the airlines’ pilot production problems. You’re making them money. Most of us see staying in the Air Force as the equivalent of paying $Millions in opportunity costs to continue serving. It’s hard to look at the wife and kids and tell them that we’re forgoing all that money and QOL to keep going on adventures. Army vets in Congress pushing back? Joint Staff complaining? They don’t understand the problem. Tell it like it is. Sincerely, A 2x MWS IP

A WIC-level discussion on the HDG bug, awesome. Oh well, here goes. When I was flying the KC-10 I felt like I was the only guy who wasn’t trying to constantly center the heading bug. On oceanic crossings, fucking with the heading knob had the very real possibility of inadvertently entering Hdg Hold or Hdg Sel, both of which will easily cause a GNE over a 600 nm leg. I know a guy that did just that and got schwacked. Watched a copilot do the same thing. To turn it faster than “click click click”, you have to push it in a little. A little farther than that is GNE mode. Sweet. I say if your OCD says you must bug some heading, choose the most appropriate divert field. Gives you the ability to instantly be headed in the right direction while forcing you to keep tabs on your divert options.

Lots of money, and rank based on qualifications? Lt=wingman or copilot, Capt=flight lead or AC, Major=instructor. Lt Cols are the bosses, everyone gets pay raises based on TIG. Sounds good to me. DOPMA may get in the way.

What's a "flying-only" dude? Show at brief time, fly a CT line and go home? Is he also able to solve tactical problems? Does he have to fill out gradesheets or Form 8s?

Don't send garbage. Dime store off-brand toothpaste, 1990s romance novels and the like. If you wouldn't use it yourself, don't bother. Suggestions: Good toilet paper David sunflower seeds Jerky Sage cotton socks Decks of cards Mouth/hair/body wash Loofas AA/AAA Batteries Hot sauce (no Tabasco) Packs of gum Basically all the shit you have to buy in the BX. Come to think of it, they're probably already intercepting this stuff en route, which is why we never see this stuff.

Draftees making your food, knowing your SSN, guarding your base, fixing your jet. No thanks, I want the guys doing those things to be happy.

Mandatory service works in Israel and Finland, but we're different. It's a leftover requirement for them because they needed it for survival in the 20th Century. It'd be really hard for them to institute it now. The vast majority of a population would have see a dire need for mandatory service for it to become law, so effectively it wouldn't be any different from volunteering anyway.