Danny Noonin

Oh for fucks sake Cap. Who gives a shit. It's a memory aid. Sounds like a pretty decent one as well since it pretty much covers everything. Call it AMRAAM for all I care. Just look at your jet once in a while and make sure it's still working right. This seems to get the job done.

Slick, do me a favor. Stop posting in this thread unless you have a legitimate question. Your other posts are completely non value added. The derail is not all your fault, but it certainly revolves around you.

Says the dude with 60+ posts in this thread

Subjective, not objective.

What questions do you have? Careful. OPRs are not feedback to your people. Feedback forms and discussions are for that. OPRs are written for an outside audience (boards,etc) and are not written to be read literally. They are written in code. If you want to convey that someone is an "average officer" and literally use those words, the message you actually sent was that he is a dirtbag. So be careful when you say "lie on an OPR". You should strive to send an honest message. That does not mean you write literal truth on the form.

Another problem with the form. One line bullets that must fill the space to within 2-3 characters force all kinds of absurd abbreviations and acronyms to try and get max info into minimum space. Paragraph format for key areas would allow plain English, full explanations of key accomplishments. Some folks have done really good things that are quite frankly impossible to communicate adequately in one line.

HAF already put their fingers in the strat pie a couple years ago with the A1 guidance memo that worked its way into the reg in Jan (emphasis on peer group labeling, etc). But that was semi worthless. Strats have gotten out of hand because everyone believes the only way to say someone is a good dude is through a strat, when we both know there are useful strats (#x/x CGOs in sqdn) and there are worthless strats that seem forced (#x/3 wingmen in my flight). Not every strat is the same obviously, but to the masses in the cheap seats who only hear "must have strat to be good" they take that too far and create the BS ones because they don't know any better. The root cause is the OPR form itself. It is not an evaluation. It is a list of things you did followed by a push line. And the push line is an art where it should be a science. Since, minus the push lines, the "list of things you did" OPR makes it difficult to sort the 30th percentile from the 70th percentile we have found ourselves in the over-reliance on square filling to sort the lists. Which very few would agree is the right way to do business. The evaluation form should emphasize actual evaluation...subjective assessments on job performance, leadership qualities, communication skills, etc. maybe a small section on "stuff you did" but a focus on actual evaluation. I know subjective assessments scare people because they might not be "fair", but quite frankly its what we have now just in a different format. And there really is no way to evaluate some of the things that are truly important (leadership qualities) against truly objective criteria. Each officer should also get graded on major subject areas with a numerical grade. To avoid the EPR everyone gets a 5 debacle, those grades should be tied to a unit commander (or div chief, etc) and entered into a database. Upon meeting a board, those scores get compared to that commanders career long "grade point average" and presented to the board along with that average. If you got 4s but his average was a 3.5, you did okay. If you got 4s but his average is 4.8, then you are below average. If everyone gets a five, then that cc screwed his true top performers. Built in stratification, difficult to BS the system, no more challenge determining the 30% from the 60%, much less need to resort to square filling to rack n'stack. But that's too different, so we'll keep doing the same old thing and just complain about how inadequate it is.

Disagree. It should be informative--to Slick, if he lets it be. Slick has good intentions but he has misplaced confidence in his own limited experience level. He has chosen to over represent his own leadership while condescendingly lecturing those with vastly more experience than he has. On this forum, that type of behavior is met with a correction. Just as it would be in any squadron. He doesn't get a pass because he's on the Internet. He has over 60 posts in this thread but has asked only a handful of actual questions. Given that he's never written a PRF or met a promotion board before in his life, I find it more than a bit curious that he has such supreme confidence in his understanding of how things work that he can condescend about anything to anyone on this particular topic. So a little mentoring is appropriate.

Slick for fucks sake cut it out. I've never seen a captain so self righteously drop tales if his supervisory prowess like you do. How many posts now have you casually thrown in the fact that you're a supervisor? Enough SOS stories and enough talk of your own "leadership" techniques. Aren't you a shop chief? Get over yourself.

Can't do that. Read the reg champ posted. Why is this do difficult?

Interesting. I'm not even remotely spun up and wasn't ripping on you. You might want to note that your "yes or no" question had already been directly answered with a "no" in the very post that you quoted plus an explanation of why--- PRFs do not have to be verbatim from your OPRs, but can't introduce new facts (i.e. ORI grade) regardless of how true or what newspaper it's confirmed by. You can combine things (e.g. total combat sorties by adding up numbers from multiple OPRs.). You can change acronyms to plain English as you suggested, etc. Those don't introduce new facts.

Dude stop. You squadrons ORI rating is not going to make any difference in the world to your promotion. You are getting spun up over nothing important. You cant just have people "vouch" for it. It isn't in your record. You can't use it. The only facts that can go on a PRF that weren't already in your record are things that have occurred since your last OPR closed out. You dont have to believe me. you can read the reg for yourself. Its in there. Typically you would write a bullet using the facts in question onto a draft OPR form and submit with the PRF coord, but maybe you've seen someone do it differently.

No. PRFs summarize your record. If its not in your record (OPRs, training reports, medals) you are SOL. You cannot introduce new facts into evidence on the PRF regardless of how true. Only caveat is for things that happened since your most recent OPR closed out.

Geek

Interesting. I always thought Germany was a busier town.

None of it or all of it...depending on how you read the question.

A little mentoring for you...saying the first part above means you have no credibility to say the second part.

Yes, but I won't post much of it. The details are N/A anyway now. The reserve bonus is a different document than the guard bonus. They've generally been the same parameters/criteria but his year the reserves tried something very different which ended up denied at the end game pretty recently. So last I talked to them they were still trying to figure out what to do. My own opinion is that it would be very difficult to get another (more traditional) bonus through coord and approved in time to execute this FY. But that's only my guess.

Ran into issues at OSD. I wouldn't hold my breath for this year.

Holy shit dude, you are in for a very rude awakening on the other side of the fence if this is your real attitude. You guys think you're unappreciated and "just a number" in the AF, just wait. As others have said, apply to everyone hiring and take the first job offered to you. You never know if it will be the last one offered to you. Don't ever ever ever get cocky about your resume or your chances to get hired. Sorry but they just don't care what your reason is. It's a business and a numbers game to them. There are hundreds if not more applications for every interview they grant. They can afford to be picky for whatever reasons they choose to include the increased risk of losing a pilot to another company. Maybe a few years from now they won't be able to afford to be so picky but they can right now. Having said that, a type is not a kiss of death outside of SWA by any means especially since SWA isn't and won't be hiring in big numbers for a long while. I'm just saying it has been an unhelpful thing to have on your certificate in the past.

Airlines were/are concerned that they would hire guys and pay for training only to have them leave for a SWA job later. The 737 type is a dead giveaway that guys want to be at SWA because its not cheap and only one airline on earth gives a shit about it, so dudes generally don't pay for that casually. The SWA issue was a big one for a while as the legacy guys were under concessionary contracts and dudes were bolting for SWA's better pay and apparent growth. I'm not convinced The SWA issue would be a giant deal anymore as the industry sine wave has changed with respect to contracts, profits and growth. There is one constant in the airline industry: the "place to be" now almost never ends up being the best place to be 10 years later. Having said all of that. the 737 type issue has--in the past--been a real issue getting hired at legacies.

Good discussion all around I respect what you're saying and agree with it for the most part. I think were into semantics. What you call polishing a turd is what I call having a positive attitude and making the best of things. As in bitching vs whining, i see those as different things. A turd is still a turd and can't be shined into granite. When CCs at any level try to sell to some young pup that that 179 with three weeks notice than means he'll miss the birth of his first kid is really a great deal because he'll be able to get X kind of stink on his resume, that's polishing a turd to me. It's not a good deal and everyone knows it. It might be a great professional experience for a guy in the end, but it's a fucking turd. I've seen that crap. That kid didn't give a shit about his résumé at that point and that CC was full of crap. Other obvious example: a CC with 3,000 hours telling some poor kid who dreamed of flying his whole life and had his wings for just a year that he'll never fly a manned airplane again (TAMI) and what an awesome deal that really was. Any bullshit pep talk in cases like that are disingenuous at best and take away all credibility for that cc. Sometimes you have to call a spade a spade instead of being a spin meister. Dudes respect honesty out of their leaders. Don't you? Spin is rarely totally honest and everyone can see through that crap. That does not mean that CCs can't lead by positive attitude and point out the opportunities and the unconsidered bright sides of bad deals. But that doesn't make them stop being a bad deal to a guy who just got the news. Being unhappy about a deal does not necessarily make one toxic and doesn't mean that guy won't bloom and excel where he's planted and/or eventually love what he originally thought was a turd. Am I making sense? Positive attitude but no bullshit. That's what dudes need.

I'm not convinced you are truly listening yet. I believe that you think you're listening but your response to me (and to others in general) has basically been to try and pick apart what is said and pull out examples of why the don't apply to you. It wasn't about you. I don't know you. Maybe they really don't apply to you. But I'm guessing there's not a commander on earth who thinks they apply to him either. And I bet all of them can cherry pick examples to support their opinion of themselves, too. Food for thought. I'm not going to rebut your rebuttal, but for one point: bitching is not toxic. Whining is toxic. Copy, I'm making up my own dictionary and maybe I'm lawyering the words, but whining is bitching without solutions. I WANT young dudes to bitch because that implies they propose solutions. I want them to identify problems big and small and I WANT them to think of solutions for all of them. It's not toxic, its heathy. Most of the time, they'll completely miss the big picture with their proposed solutions and that's fine. They'll figure it out as time goes on and their experience broadens. They'll figure it out when they feel comfortable enough to have those discussions openly with their ADOs, DOs, CCs, OGs, wing kings, etc who can offer them a different perspective based on their own experiences (assuming they spend the time to associate with their guys in informal settings). It's how they learn. It's how young officers grow and develop. It's how folks learn to see a picture bigger than they previously considered. It's fucking required to be a force that isn't satisfied with mediocrity and treading water. I'm not convinced we truly are that force anymore. There is not a championship team on earth who says "yeah, we have this all figured out". The good ones all point out what they need to work on before the next game--even after a win. But the blue kool aid brigade insists that everything is fine. Nothing to see here. Just keep patting ourselves on the back and whatever you do, don't bitch--it's cancer. But that's not a winning formula. That's a path to self-serving mediocrity, yes men, group think and irrelevance. Sometimes the emperor really does not have any clothes. And it's not toxic to say so. It's solemn duty. It's the only way we get better. I say all of that yet fully acknowledge its a fine line between constructive bitching and toxic whining. I get that. Like I said, probably semantics. As for "acknowledging things", nice try. Either that whole post sailed right by you or you really are that aloof. You can do better than that. But then again I could be wrong. I was wrong once before.

Also a crime in the UCMJ if convicted. But in this case its past the statute of limitations. So again, he hasn't been convicted of a crime and you can't withhold benefits because you think he's a dirtbag. I would certainly hope so. I honestly believe Lt Gen Franklin looked at the evidence and believed there was reasonable doubt. I honestly believe that he felt he was doing the right thing. And I honestly believe it had nothing to do with the fact that the accused was a pilot or a Lt Col.

Was the TSgt's conviction upheld by the convening authority? Wikerson's was not. Therefore he is legally not guilty of a crime. So on what grounds do you think his retirement should be withheld? There is a system a laws at play and you can't just withhold benefits because you think a guy is a dirtbag. Same theory whether TSgt or Lt Col.