Kikuchiyo

I took the survey. I agree that it felt like there were a lot of questions that had little to nothing to do with attitudes toward fully autonomous commercial operations. I didn't like the Values portion and feel that you may not get any useful data from it. Since it's right at the beginning you may end up with people not completing the whole survey if they find the Values questions too annoying. You might have considered bouncing the survey off a couple of pilots beforehand to validate that you're getting answers to the questions that you're truly addressing in your project. Contrary to the tone of the responses you've received here, not all pilots are dicks. I'm willing to forgive your snarky comment and ignore the original insulting ("revolting") one in the interest of civility and academic pursuit. Good luck with your project.

That would explain why it was my understanding that it was "only" an ARC deal. And the reason there's no reference to it in the AD personnel regs. Thanks for the enlightenment.

"Sanctuary" is a Reserve Component (ARC = AFRC + ANG) thing. The Reserve Component and having a Reserve Commision are NOT one and the same. If an AFI refers to officers in the Reserve Compnent, it means the ARC, and does NOT mean AD officers holding a reserve commision. (edited per Tulsa's correction below) Sanctuary is covered in AFI 36-2131, ADMINISTRATION OF SANCTUARY IN THE AIR RESERVE COMPONENTS. Sanctuary does not apply to AD officers with the excepmtion of those ARC officers recalled to AD under certain specific programs like the Rated Officer Recall of 2009, among others You'd know if you were special enough to have it apply to you. The jist of sanctuary is to protect ARC officers from getting very close to earning a full 20 year retirement and then having their orders terminated in order to prevent them from earning the AD retirement. Remember, an ARC retirement means they do not collect a retirement check till they turn 60(?), but an AD retirement means they collect a check the very next month after retiring. Basically, if an ARC officer is given orders that will take him to a point where he will have earned over 18 years towards an AD retirement, he must be allowed to stay on AD oders until reaching 20. An example from the Rated Recall of 2009: Reservist Major X had just over 16 years towards an AD retirement (from previous AD service plus activations & deployments). He takes 2-year recall orders. Once he hits 18 years towards his AD retirement, the AF cannot terminate his orders, even thouugh they were cut to expire in two years, and must cut him extension orders under the Sanctuary rules out to 20 years. And I think (more research required), that Recut may have it backwards. I'm pretty sure that all officers are given Reserve commisions now, with Regular commisions coming at promotion to Major. I thought it was in the mid- or late-90's that they switched it to all Reserve commisions. I could be wrong about this part, though. //edited to eliminate my error, as pointed out and with reference provided by Tulsa below.

I love this MX mentality. A Mx guy said nearly these exact words to me once, so I asked him if he was in the US Air Force. He looked at me very much confused. I then reminded him that the MEL was in an AFI. If AFI's don't apply to MX, maybe they're not in the Air Force. It's his MEL, too, as much as it is "ours.". He made me show him the AFI and paragraph, then he went away. We canceled, and later I heard it was a MX cancel. And yet, the us-verus-them mentality persists

I've lived in N Chuck, Mt P, and Wet Ashley. Depends on what you want / need in a place. If you have to have the McMansion on 3/4 acre, then Summerville or Mt P. But be prepared for a 1-hour plus commute to the base sometimes depending on traffic. And in Summerville, you're just that much farther from the water and downtown. I've known guys that lived up there that never went downtown or to the beaches in their entire tour. Why be in CHS otherwise? I currently live in West Ashley literally 5 minutes to the Battery and downtown, and even in traffic never more than 20 minutes to the base. My realtor was awesome, and is herself an AF vet and her husband is a retired C-17 pilot now flying for an airline. PM for her name / email.

What is your source for this? At the most recent rated manning conference in DC, AF/A1PP, who is in charge of setting personnel policy, stated that non-continuation would not be used as a force shaping tool in coming boards. The AF is close enough to meeting it's end-strength goals that they only need to use volunteer and incentive programs instead.

Seriously though, talk to your assignments officer. One thing I see during the pilot assignment process is cool billets that end up being hard to fill. For instance NATO has short tours in Italy. Since most guys don't volunteer for a short tour, these billets end up getting filled by non-vols. And really, it's simply cause folks don't know about them. Talk to your AFPC rep and see what's out there.

Think of the MC-12 assignment as similar to an C-21 assignment. It's not a permanent career. If you do it straight out of UPT, you'll likely end up in the Recce community for good, but in a normal Recce MWS (e.g. RC-135, AWACS, J-Stars). Of course, that could change in the intervening 3 years until your next assignment.

Kayla, "You" means "ya'll." If he's deployed, and it's something you can do, go ahead and do it. Enrolling him in EFMP is something that shold be done ASAP regardless of who does it. He's probably on the vulnerable list for a 365 due to time in service and time since last short tour (if any). But once he returns from a regular deployment, he's protected for 1 yr from an Indeterminate TDY (iTDY) aka a 365. AFI 36-2110 Chapter 5. Assignment notifications for the Summer cycle will come out around March for RNTLDs between June and Sep.

Let me specifically address coming to Germany. Toro is right that there's a lot of capacity here at Ramstein. However, I manage all rated officer assignments here. We lose nearly 25% of assignments of rated guys to staff here at Ramstein due to the local facilities being unable or unwilling to handle their EFMP situations. The process is that the assigned base EFMP office determines if they can handle your case. If they can't, they have to check with the other local facilities - in our case Landstuhl (LRMC) Unfortunatey, Ramstein has only a clinic with no specialists, so their answer to the first question is almost always no. Then they ask LRMC, whose answer is usually that they're a little busy treating wounded coming out of downrange, and they don't have capacity for more AF dependents. The only realistic way to get the ruling changed is if your doctor changes the diagnosis or required treatment. Then you start the whole process over again. Lakenheath/Mildenhall, on the other hand, have a huge AF (vice Army) hospital, and they're not a transit point for the wounded. Their EFMP office is more likely to be able to handle special cases.

Line flying jobs are normally not loaded into the PRD. Commanders load vacancies for billets they want filled, but the line units work directly with AFPC to fill line billets. The PRD is there to allow you to tailor your ADP and express interest to your CC and AFPC AO. So the jobs you're seeing are the cats-and-dogs, odd jobs, and staff jobs that are outside of line unit manning. You can search by AFSC, but there's a lot of detail in the text, like what AFSCs are suitable substitutes, and the mandatory (M) and desired (D) quals. You can't search the text. The system is weak, but I don't think there's any money to improve it.

It means to stop using the AEF system and start assigning people full time like you would for a "normal" weapon system. ACC has been given a deadline of Q1 FY13 to transition to a "normal" manning structure for the MC-12. Won't happen by then, but they're on notice from CSAF and the other MAJCOMs that it's time to man their own airframe rather than have everyone else man their airframe for them. They've been using OCO funds to provide the manning, rather than POMing and spending normal manpower $ like any other MWS does. ACC only ever POM'ed for enough permanent party billets to provide a 2.5 crew ratio (plus the FTU.) But they keep saying they need a 5.0 deployed crew ratio, and they had planned to continue to use the AEF manning to make up the difference. The Rated Summit said they have to either fund those extra billets, get the ARC to provide them through an associate-type arrangement, or change their deployed crew ratio down to whatever they're willing or able to fund. Or some other possibility, but stop using AEF manning. It does not (necessarily) mean that just cause you deployed in the MC-12 once, are scheduled to, or have volunteered to do so, that you'll get tagged to non-vol PCS to Beale. There are more guys that have flown the MC-12 than there will be billets at Beale. Although, it might open up the possibility of getting hired into an ARC associate unit if they choose to go that route.

Correction to my previous post. ACC has stated that they will NOT take B-coursers straight to the Aggressors. They will instead start manning some of the billets with guys who went from the B-course straight to Korea. This reduces the number of billets at the Aggressor Sq's that require a fully experienced pilot, opening up some iron to finish absorbing the Korea guys. It's a compromise.

For those wondering about how this will affect them or the timelines to effect these changes. This will not affect the Summer VML. It will not be in place to affect anyone coming thru UPT right now. To put it in perspective, we spent an entire telecom 2 weeks ago discussing what office at HAF or which MAJCOM would be the OPR versus OCR on only about half these items. Staffing these to execution is going to take a while. Then getting POM funding, moving the iron, setting up units, changing manpower documents, etc. These aren't quick fixes. Even the A-10 crew ratios will take a year to execute, cause the affected commands need to find the manpower dollars and rated billets to put at the A-10 units. And only after that's happened can AFPC send people. The thing that could execute most quickly of all them (the speediest turtle is still a turtle) is the UPT grads-to-aggressor initiative. But, even that will require guys to leave those units, and those units to notify AFPC that they're ready to accept UPT grads. So, not the next several drops, anyway.

Danny Noonin - To address your concerns over red air flying as experiencing, perhaps I misspoke to say that "they can learn to fly and fight there (as wingmen most of the assignment anyway) as well as they can in a regular squadron." You're absolutely right, they won't come out as bomb-dropping, NVG, blue-air 2FL's ready to "fight" in a regular squadron. My phrasing could have been better. Think of it more as akin to how the MAF uses C-21's (this is an analogy - not a perfect parallel). They season guys in C-21s where they get a lot of experience, but in a limited portfolio. They understand certain aspects of airlift, crew management, pax handling, etc, but not everything they'll need to be successful MAF fliers. No, they're not immediately ready to command a large crew in a C-17 with AR across the ocean to a multi-ship airdrop. But they're way ahead of a fresh UPT grad. A C-21 guy then becomes a copilot in a C-17, but upgrades significantly more quickly. (For those MAF guys reading this, I'm not going to go into the differences between direct-to-left seat, first pilots, and copilots. Suffice to say, they're not flying as a C-17 AC on their first trip, and it takes some amount of time before they take their OME.) Danny, the intent is similar. Use the iron that's currently not available to absorb. Take these guys into red-air sq's, get them experienced in some, but not all, aspects of flying fighters, and then send them ops-to-ops to bring them up to speed fully. Hope that helps clarify. Agreed. They know they will need to send Mx and other support folks, too. That part is being worked in parallel.

I was a member of the Fighter Pilot IPT that developed some of these proposals. Others came from HAF and other outside inputs, and all were agreed upon by the 4-stars at the Rated Summit on 22 Sep. The problem is BRAC and other programmatic decisions were made without considering the full impacts - cutting 2 FTU sq's at Luke, among others. UPT is producing full bore just to maintain the total number of pilots that we need to fill all the cockpits that we need for the foreseeable future (please don't get me started on what's foreseeable - we all know the AF's poor history of foreseeing.) We can make about enough T-38 grads as we need, but they all need to go to fighters. But there's not enough fighter FTU capacity and then not enough absorbable iron to experience them. So the solutions presented in the memo are a mix of increasing FTU capacity (converting F-15C aggressors to an FTU, etc,) and increasing absorption (higher crew ratios, putting guys into ARC units, etc). Doing all these, and re-scrubbing non-flying fighter pilot billets, should stabilize fighter manning. So, yes, as noted the A-10 crew ratio was reduced previously. That was one of those poorly made decisions where the impact was not considered fully. That decision was made by the FM guys, not the operators or the HAF offices responsible for aircrew training and manning. So, we went to the 4-stars to overturn it. FYI, USAFE did not reduce the crew ration on their A-10s when originally told to do so, which is why they're not an OCR on the memo directing the MAJCOMs to increase the crew ratio. MC-12: ACC has said repeatedly that they need a 5.0 crew ratio when the aircraft are deployed. But ACC only put enough billets at Beale to man the units at 2.5 (plus the FTU). That was a decision made purely by ACC, not AFPC and not HAF. The memo is asking the AF to look at Total Force (translated Reserve/ANG) solutions. Expect an Associate unit of MC-12 crews but without aircraft. Could be at Beale, but wouldn't have to be, since there's only enough aircraft at Beale for the FTU and all the operational birds are downrange anyway. The ARC associations in fighter units will likely be "pods" of 4 to 10 AD guys. UPT grads plus one AD experienced guy to cover mentoring, assignments, OPRs, and other qweep the ARC doesn't want to deal with (no slight intended, that's a quote from the ARC reps to the IPT). The size of the pods will depend on many factors including the size of the ARC unit, number of PAA, location, mission, MWS, and any further refinement of the plan. The intent is essentially to utilize the iron that is currently underflown and to harness the vast instructor and general flying experience of the ARC to help grow new fighter pilots. Item 3 will be interesting. They're going to allow some UPT grads straight into aggressor squadrons. They can learn to fly and fight there (as wingmen most of the assignment anyway) as well as they can in a regular squadron. And they won't deploy, so their skills won't be affected by the deployment cycle. Crossflows and recalls are not on the table right now. Crossflows are not being considered because, as previously noted, we already don't have enough FTU capacity to train the UPT T-38 grads. Recalls are out cause, as previously noted, we're RIF'ing guys. But who knows, all this will be OBE in 2 yrs, and anything could happen. These aren't perfect solutions. Will there be mistakes in these - yes. But we got ourselves into this pickle by letting the bean counters instead of the warfighters decide how many of what kinds of fighter units we needed. Hopefully in sum, they'll help.

See JFTR Chapter 5, Part D, Sections 6 or 7, depending on what circumstances you're separating under. There's a link from DTS to the travel reg's so you can download the JFTR Chapters 1-10. If you're being RIF'ed, and you had 8 years of continuous service, you qualify for HOS (Home of Selection). HOS can be any place in the US (note, not just CONUS), OR if you entered the military from outside the US, your HOR or PLEAD (PLace Entered AD). OR you can have it shipped anywhere, not to exceed a move to a CONUS location of your choice. Source JFTR Chapter 5, Part B, Section 8, aka U5130-A.

It's not as automated as you think. Leaving a field blank, incorrect formatting, or even filling in contradictory requests will not flag it or cause it to be rejected. It's just a form, and only humans read it. The guys at AFPC actually print it out, staple it to your SURF along with any emails from you or your CC, and work assignments from their stacks of papers. Don't worry so much about what you're putting in the boxes and fields, and put what you really want them to know in the comments.

Fair enough. The info I had was more from the guys that use it for DT panels than from the assignments guys. Both do use your ADP, but to slightly different ends. For the assignment officers, having that info can serve as a mini-bio highlighting any special quals, skills, or courses that make you different. I've seen them use the ADP that way at an assignment match, but didn't know they had specifically asked for it. They also have and use your SURF, obviously, but if they asked for it, then they must be using it. I'll bring it up to Lude when I see him later this month and ask for his thoughts. But both DT advisers that I know, and the O-6s that sit on the DTs, have specifically briefed not to list a bio on your ADP. The USAFE/A1 stated just the other day, the DT doesn't really care what YOU say, they care what your rater and Senior Rater write about you. But he did caveat that by saying that what you write on an ADP can certainly affect specific assignment actions. So, like Whitman said, it's about knowing your audience. If you're updating an ADP for a DT that you're meeting, then write to that. Then once you've got your vector, update your ADP again for the assignment team based on your vector and true preferences.

I work assignments for USAFE and work closely with the ACC & AMC DT advisers. Everyone at AFPC and the DTs says to leave off Quals, bio, or other resume type info. They have all your OPRs, and your SURF is on top of the record. No need to waste your and their time repeating what they already have. Just FWIW. Otherwise all good advise.

F-16 drivers and Huey guys are particularly vulnerable because of the requirements of several of the 365 taskings. AFPC takes the requirements for the tasking, and then filters the database of all officers to eliminate those that don't meet the basic requirements: rank, AFSC, etc. Then they filter out those with a DEROS or DOS, or who won't have 12 months TOS, or any special flags in their record. Then they sort by number of short tours, STRD, and ODSD in that order. So when they need an F-16 Capt or Maj to go 365 to fly with the Paki's, the guy with 0 short tours in Korea floats right to the top. But there's not a lot of 365's that require, say, a C-5 guy. So those guys get hit with the "any rated" ones. But then there's lots of people qualified to fill those, so you get hidden deep under the pile of old Maj's and Lt Col's regardless of their MWS that haven't ever gone remote or gotten enough TDY days to get a short tour. If you aren't sure how vulnerable you are, check out the iTDY site on aefonline and look over the taskings that are out there.

300 days for a short tour has to be OCONUS TDY. From Table 3.4: "If Airman performed TDY ... from a OS long tour location to any other OS location ... And served ... 300 days or more in a consecutive 18 month period ... Then ... give Airman credit for a completed short tour and award a new STRD to equal date of return from last TDY." (Ellipses represent breaks in the table, not lost information.) Each MAJCOM has a Rated Manager who is your very own "personnelist in a flight suit." In USAFE's case, he's also a rated recallee. If you have questions about exactly this kind of stuff, or deployments, assignments, and rated manning, contact him directly. Most of them work in your MAJCOM A1, except USAFE & PACAF which have theirs in the A3.

You can go thru the normal methods of contacting your AO at AFPC. It won't tick them off, but it will slow them down if everyone does. It's like being in line at the store when there's not enough checkers, they can only go so fast.

Bomber community assignments are way behind, cause your only assignments officer is deployed. One of the other guys is trying to pick up the slack, but he's got his own community to handle while also covering the duties of another deployed guy in a different branch, too. Sound familiar?

He started at Ramstein, simply cause he lives here already. Started by talking about why he asked the question, and why specifically he asked fighter pilots. It all started with a slide he got at Corona showing the severe undermanning of fighters in the next several years. He pointed out that he cares what MAF guys think, too, but since MAF manning is healthy, he wanted to find out first from the CAF what their thoughts were. He got about 200 responses. Only about 50 were from Fighter guys, and another 50 from MAF guys, all from both within and outside USAFE. He also got 50 from retiress, and another 40 from spouses, parents, even fiancees. He is personally reading them all. He divided the issues that the replies addressed into about 7 categories, I didn't write them all down. He put quotes from some of the replies on screen, and then put up his thoughts and where he and the AF are going on the issues. Honestly, there wasn't anything earth-shattering here. PME, Masters, deployments, assignments, morale, etc. The usual gripes, and honestly, the usual answers from leadership. With one big exception. He said it twice, including in his closing remarks, "Your priority is to be the best aviator, not do PME or get a Masters." How will he express that to the Wg, Gp, Sq leadership? But it's what he wants us doing, it's his priority, and we'll see if that translates to the field.