Pooter

@Lord Ratner The moral high ground dissolves pretty quickly when you realize Netanyahu intentionally propped up Hamas across 4 administrations for the better part of 20 years, specifically to hinder Palestinian statehood & legitimacy. It's literally the same as when left denounces trump and his maga acolytes while secretly backing them in state and local elections to destabilize the Republican Party at large. Either they're an existential threat or they aren't. You don't get to call them an existential threat, secretly support them, and then get mad when it blows up in your face. None of this is to justify Hamas atrocities, or to deny that the Middle East is full of fundamentalist anti semite shitbags. But there's no doubt Israel played a part in bringing this to a boiling point.

Name a good 19AF commander in The last 10 years. I'll wait. If they aren't fucking people they shouldn't, they're busy ruining UPT, hunting down meme page admins, or witch hunting at the squadron level. Something's in the water down there at Randolph. Or maybe it's just the collective dumping ground for the community rejects from the rest of the Air Force.

Good luck with that. What you call breaking the system looks a lot like self sabotage and letting the left run away with the game. But to each their own. Can't wait for trump and the maga coalition, (who blew the budget out so badly only Biden is worse) to finally reign in our spending /s 🤦🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️

That's the problem with single issue voters, specifically in this case the hardcore religious right: they always miss the forest for the trees. RoevWade was a big win for them.. for now. What they fail to realize is the hardline pro life stance is deeply unpopular at the national level, and republicans paid for it big time in 2022 with the completely neutered "red wave." They'll continue to pay for it in 2024. So congrats you won on one issue.. at the expense of literally every other issue. Similar thing happening with the speaker fight too. Matt Gaetz didn't get 100% of what he wanted.. so let's nuke the whole thing and turn the party into a disjointed laughing stock as we move into 2024. Sounds like an amazing strategy.

@pbar good points I don't think you're going to get a reduction in government unless you vote libertarian. Trump blew the budget out too. @Lord Ratner I think you're more right than I am. They are too mad. To the point that they're so blinded they can't see the dude they're supporting out of spite will just set them back more. It'll be interesting to see how much consistent losing it takes for the trumpians to bail on him. But I suspect the limit does not exist, because every defeat just martyrs him more in their eyes.

Sad part is this will change precisely nothing with his fans. There isn't a scandal or conviction or statement or act he could commit that would shake their support for him. It is full cult of personality level commitment that is entirely separated from policy, morality, and reality itself. Over half of the Republican Party is in a hostage situation because they're either too stupid or too prideful to adjust course or admit they were taken advantage of. But one thing is for sure: this crap turns off moderate republicans and independents like a big dog. So, much in the same way that trump lost republicans the senate through his idiotic meddling in Georgia, he will ensure another Biden term. And when Biden predictably expires, we'll all know exactly who to thank for president Kamala.

I think because the accusations fit perfectly with what we know his behavior and demeanor to be.

Probably why the crash pad market is booming there. Also I wouldn't want to stay in a hotel either for a long term TDY. I want somewhere with a kitchen so I can buy and cook my own food. Hot tubs and pool tables and PlayStations are nice but a kitchen is the #1 quality of life thing I look for on any TDY longer than about a month.

I think about how mismanaged, undermanned, and underfunded we are and then times that by about 5 and it starts to make sense.

Why not? The man has literally zero brain to mouth filter. He will call anyone and everyone a loser, disloyal, lying, cheating, crooked, bird brain etc.. when it suits him and for any reason, or even without a reason. Juvenile name calling is one of his few core competencies.

Maybe you could pitch staying at a crash pad in the context of Agile Combat Employment and sell it like the dispersed basing of aircraft. When war with China kicks off isn't the Red Shit Dumpster River Inn full of upgrading MAF pilots exactly what they're going to be aiming the hypersonics at? Why put all your eggs in one basket when you can diversify.. and have hot tubs

The point is not: "what F-35 tasks can we accomplish in the T-6?" The point is: "how do we set a strong enough foundation we don't have to waste time/money doing remedial T-6 things in an F-35"

You won't find me or anyone else here arguing that reps in your actual MWS aren't the gold standard. Of course they are. But we live in a world of limited budgets, limited airframes, sims blocked out 24/7 and the dreaded FHP. My point is cost difference in operating a UPT aircraft versus a major weapon system is so much that saving even a single sortie in the MWS world is totally worth the trade off. We can't afford the opportunity cost of not training things at the lowest level possible. Let's take low level as an example since it's frequently on the UPT syllabus chopping block. If you get good exposure to clock-to map-to-ground/timing/chart reading in UPT maybe it takes you one less C-130 b course ride to get comfortable. Then maybe you can move on to NVGs and airdrop quicker. Maybe you get more time practice something else you suck at more because you made MIF early in low level. The passing the buck down the line to the next unit has got to stop. In my community the classic example is copilot AR qual. The buck gets passed from the b-course to the ops squadrons (probably because the b-course was cleaning up UPT deficiencies.) Then the ops squadrons have to deploy with non CMR aircrew and scheduling has to do backflips to get every copilot with an instructor. I know it's hard to quantify what we're losing, but when we gut the fundamentals it has cascading effects down the line. I'm pretty sure If you get enough timeline obsessed big brain AETC types in a room they could convince themselves landings can be taught only in the sim.

Probably the easiest way to answer this question is to ask, does it absolutely have to be learned in the MWS? Basically is it so tactically-specific that training in a lower cost airframe is impossible? If the answer is no, it should probably be taught in the cheaper airframe.

If there's one thing the Air Force pilot pipeline managers constantly forget and have to re-learn, it's that teaching skills at the lowest possible level in the cheapest airframe always pays dividends. Passing the buck to b-courses to teach fundamentals that should have been learned in IFS/UPT/IFF is 100% of the time a giant waste of money. The temptation to green up slides over doing the things that actually make sense is going to run our service into the ground. Whenever this comes up I like to tell people some napkin math I did a few years back: I used more JP8 in my first 8 sorties in my MWS than I did in 3 years/1100 hrs in the T-6.

Yeah copy not a nice option but neither is losing your entire military aged male demographic to a war of attrition. I feel like people are looking for a good option when all that exists are bad or less bad options.

Also I learned today that @Sim does trust CDC findings, but only when (he thinks) they line up with what he already believes. Next week on Magnificent Displays of Critical Thinking: a soccer player collapsed in Greece, do we all have myocarditis?!

Dude it's this kind of crap that totally undermines your position. 1. slaynews.com wow a real bastion of reputable journalism there. Totally not clickbait garbage at the bottom of an OAN page 2. article links to a CDC study and then wholesale misrepresents what the study says. Which you would know if you had clicked the link and read the source material. What the CDC study actually says: a new variant of covid has a higher potential to infect people who've had the shot or who have ever had a covid infection. So no, it isn't a question of vaxxed vs unvaxxed. It's higher for anyone who has had any immune response to anything covid related before be that a shot or a previous variant.. which is as near as makes no difference the entire US population. I love how we're the ones that are supposed to eat crow while you guys conduct a bi-weekly circle jerk to whatever bias-confirming dumpster clickbait you can find.

My bad, I thought people were mad about the mandates.. reference the conversation above ☝️☝️ and dozens pages before it. Which is why I brought up other medical things the military mandates that people don't think twice about. Hence the political lightning rod comment. It's funny, the prevailing attitude in the military was, until very recently, to shut up, complete your readiness requirements no matter how stupid, go hack the mission, and load up on go pills/rip it's/no gos/coffee/cigs/dip to get the job done, crush beers afterward, all while knowing full well basically everything the military asks you to do is bad for you. Is this a healthy outlook? Nope. But you can't say it wasn't common. But then all of that magically did a 180 with COVID. Do we think that's because everyone in the military simultaneously had an epiphany that their body is a temple? Or is it because COVID turned into a culture war, and then we do what we always do and revert back to two warring tribes. One tribe is double masking alone in their cars to show how health conscious they are while the other ignores even the most basic precautions to own the libs.

3 years into the covid debate and I'm still waiting for the mass outrage over yearly flu shots, anthrax boosters, malaria pills for places that barely have malaria, and countless other onerous military medical requirements everyone just blindly accepts. Oh I forgot, none of those are political lightning rods so no one cares.

This attitude, or the idea of holding your nose and voting for the lesser of two evils, is exactly why we have two dominating dumpster fire political parties. The tribal nature of our politics runs so deep people will literally vote for a guy they hate, as long as they have the right letter next to their name.

3rd party all the way no matter if you're in a swing state or not. It's the only way we escape this broken two-party race to either extreme

Well that's weird, because China's manufacturing quality is also known to be shit, but the moment they got their hands on sensitive F-35 tech data they made the most credible adversary threat aircraft basically out of nowhere.. up to that point only having borrowed Russian designs for decades. Russia also still makes superior jet engines to China so I don't buy that Russia just doesn't have the machining tolerances to do stealth.

Philosophical FME question: who stands to gain more? Us or Russia? Or to put it another way, the more technologically advanced military or the less advanced military? First off, I'm pretty unconcerned with low dollar high volume items like NVGs or body armor. Nights 1-10 aren't going to be decided by those things. I'm concerned about high end strategic weapons we are giving to Ukraine with little or no control over what happens to them. The second a patriot launcher gets abandoned in a field, we have a big f-ing problem. So with that in mind, I'd posit Russia stands to gain more. Because it gives them an opportunity to counter, but most importantly: COPY our best stuff. This is how China leapfrogged Russia in 5th gen fighter development. They just copied the F-22/35 after hacking defense contractors. Finding out that Russia's new stuff is hot garbage gives everyone a nice warm fuzzy, but it doesn't provide nearly the same exploitation opportunity that Russia will get if they capture some tech a generation or two more advanced than their own.

Taking the bonus is quite literally the opposite of having options. I wouldn't be complaining if the money was even remotely competitive or if the BOP option didn't read like a predatory scam.