Pooter

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.

I would actually really like to see the system work, the way it would work against you or me if we stored classified docs in our bathrooms and then bragged about it on tape. Or next to an old corvette easily accessible to crackheads. You've built up this vague "system" boogeyman as a sort of foil to trump where any threat to him is just another unjustified attack that he needs to vanquish. Have there been unjustified attacks? Of course. But trump has also dug his own hole in very historic and spectacular fashion.

Exactly. One wonders the man-hours wasted in the halls of AFPC cooking up this latest crock of shit, that appeals to precisely no-one except those planning to stay in anyway.

And the craziest part is your BOP time hacks as soon as you sign the paper but the ADSC is tacked on the end after your UPT one expires.

This base of preference option looks sketchy at best and predatory at worst.

You're not wrong. But remember Russia is likely doing the same as far as FME for our stuff. I would be extremely surprised if Russia doesn't get their hands on a patriot/himars/name your system at some point, and the longer the war drags on the more that likelihood approaches 100%. There are lots of arguments for and against this war and I'm not getting into that but rather just want to point out FME goes both ways. And expecting Russia not to benefit as well when we're flooding Ukraine with western tech, with little to no oversight, would be very naive.

Agree on the polarization 100%. But I think the democrat base would pivot to support another candidate if Biden were to step aside. Sure the Dems are ideologically captured in some batshit positions but I don't see the same level of loyalty to an individual person like you do with the right base and trump. There are multiple good choices on the right who would easily beat Biden, but it'll never happen when you have 40% of the country ready to Thelma and Louise off the cliff with trump.

Fair enough, lots of polling and the reporting on such polls is click bait-ey. But I'm not sure how else you find out what people think if you don't ask them. Aggregating poll responses is one of the best ways to find out what Americans think as long as the errors are reasonably controlled for through sample size, demographic representation, and unbiased questions. CBS/Yougov are a reasonably accurate poll source (B+ according to fivethirtyeight.) So a poll showing trust for any politician over one's own friends/family/religious leader, is a deeply troubling result. You've got a huge portion of the Republican based captured basically beyond the point of no return. It will be very interesting to see how this plays out with most roads, unfortunately, leading to a democrat in the White House.

https://www.axios.com/2023/08/21/trump-republican-2024-voters-poll Respondents said they trust trump to tell them the truth more than family members or their religious leaders. 🤦🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️ This has moved past ideological capture and into full blown mental disorder.