Majestik Møøse

There’s a principle in car racing called “mechanical sympathy”. If you don’t have to lean hard on it to get a result, don’t. You’ll reap the rewards at the micro level and eventually at the acquisition level.

Not same guy, but for $400k married filing jointly with standard deduction and max trad 401k AGI deduction would be about a 18% effective fed tax rate. Maybe other tax reduction vehicles.

Tip: you can delete everything in these links after the “?” and it’ll still work. The fbclid (Instagram uses igshid, others use similar) ties the link you share back to your Facebook account, which is how you and the link clicker will eventually be suggested as friends, among other things.

The key to satisfaction in any job is work-life balance. You’ll go through periods in military flying where you get a lot of satisfaction from doing it all. You’ll want to double turn every day while instructing tactics, advising test/acquisitions projects, honchoing real/LFE deployments and spend all night in the bar talking about it afterwards. More more more. The key is to figure out how to keep that mental energy to a sustainable pace before you fall off a cliff without realizing it. Plenty of pilots surge 100% for years and suddenly burn out. Can happen in any job, try not to do that. If there’s so much going on that you can’t enjoy flying a military jet, you’re probably doing too much.

China needs oil a lot more than they need a rock with angry Taiwanese on it. WW3 was always going to start over Middle East oil. CENTCOM with Chinese characteristics.

We’re gonna need about 3000 fighters, 690 tankers, and 69B pounds of fuel flowing nonstop, so in no reasonable world should we be trading working airplanes for fictional ones just yet

An interesting statement considering that WW2 happened.

Or the Herc…

Because you don’t have to go to college first.

Weird way to say the Army can’t defend itself against quadcopters. They’ll respond the same way they always have, by shooting more Patriots at sky debris which will result in the death of friendly aircraft. The lesson that the US Army should be taking from Ukraine is that a poorly equipped but motivated army can defend itself in flat, featureless territory against an army 5x the size if that larger force is unable wield air power to attack strategic centers of gravity.

I know a guy that couldn’t enlist in the USAF because his ASVAB was too low. So he joined the Army and they made him a Tower Controller, then they sent him to flight school and he’s flying C-12s now. So there’s that.

Low alt this time

But you don’t ever pay for it, because the nature of AF moves means no one will ever be held accountable for decisions that provide a short-term benefit with worse long-term outcomes. Big decisions on acquisitions and personnel don’t come home to roost until the people who devised and approved them are several assignments in the future. There’s no personal or institutional financial penalty because the budget always goes up and the bad decision makers always get a defense gig afterwards.

Barksdale is 22,000 acres, mostly woods. A golf course is 100 acres. Something tells me this isn’t about space.

If I were fighting an enemy that had gone all-in on high-end low volume $500M silver bullets with standoff weapons, I think I’d just pay some insurgent groups a couple $B to go start fires on the other 5 continents. The idea that we should only have assets that can fly west of Taiwan is ludicrous.

A lot of us still fly like this, albeit with ForeFlight strapped to the leg.

Intel defaults to doom and gloom baseball cards. Some of them seem to get enjoyment from telling scary stories to the pilots.

That’s a net gain of a 14x14 mile square for the world’s 4th largest military after a year of force on force conflict. It boggles the mind how wrong we were about their abilities before the war started.

Probably aided by Trump consistently disparaging POWs, WIA, and KIA as losers.

Turn reversal at 6:45 was definitely fun

…I’d guess the left but when pressed would doubt myself.

Crossville, TN sure is getting taken for quite the ride. https://www.crossville-chronicle.com/news/local_news/dean-guest-speaker-at-fg-community-church-flag-day-event/article_7b695aea-0095-11ee-844b-4fa21924db71.html https://www.crossville-chronicle.com/news/glade_sun/salute-to-the-flag-retired-colonel-won-t-stop-honoring-my-country/article_dfd42a28-1044-11ee-981c-dba997986bc0.html

I should say - to be 100% truthy - I’ve worked with some great O-6s. But they were in the minority, and at some point almost all of them said something that made me think twice. Never let your guard down. The really good O-6s we’re the ones that shielded you from bullshit so you could remain of pure heart and mind and give them the best information possible.

Exactly the same experience. Reminded me heavily of the board room scene from Margin Call (which by the way is an outstanding movie heavily inspired by the Lehman Brothers collapse): the big boss at the head of the table engaged directly with the analyst who’s telling him “there’s a big problem that’s going to tank us all”, while the middle managers in between just want him to be quiet because they all want to hide mistakes or don’t really know what’s going on. Or a little bit of both. “You’re talking to me, Mr. Sullivan.”

Bobs lie to their bosses about how things are going. The Russians did it leading up to the Ukraine invasion and I’ve seen it amongst our own O-6s+ in real time. The Full Bird Reset (where they fall in line with the orders of their superiors with the renewed loyalty of an E-1) is a real phenomenon and I swear they can’t see that they’re doing it. Policies, Guidance, Ways Forward, already decided COAs - written by a non-expert AO/staffer and approved with a nod from a 4-star - could be completely out to lunch but if there’s even a perception that an O-6+ is pushing back they’re done career-wise. Read about Xi’s Thoughts where everyone in the Chinese government is required to understand and think the same way as Xi…can anyone see echoes of that mentality in our own failed endeavors? The good news is that we’re different, because that lockstep mentality doesn’t exist at most of the Capt-Maj aircrew level. There are enough of them that they can air their informed opinions and grievances when things aren’t looking quite right, but still remain relatively anonymous. And sometimes that trickles up, skipping echelons when the wise GOs wander down to the slums to get a feel for things. Which is their duty, IMO. Don’t ever lie to your boss.