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New SECAF online Town Hall Meeting today 1530EST


panchbarnes

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Check the NSS and NDS.

Thanks for the tip (STS).

The force management effort online townhall discussions made more sense after reading the attached documents (not NSS and NDS) from defense.gov.

http://www.defense.gov/pubs/

Key points:

In FY 2014, the Department continued to shift to a smaller, leaner force that is agile, flexible, and ready to deploy quickly. In keeping with the 2012 defense strategic guidance, DoD is no longer sizing U.S. forces for prolonged, large-scale stability operations.

Full-Spectrum Training Supported

Even with flat and declining defense budgets, the military is pressing ahead with its transition from a counterinsurgency-focused force to a force ready and capable of operating across a full range of operations. The service budgets all fund a return to full-spectrum training and preparation for missions beyond current operations in Afghanistan:

• The Army is preparing for a rotational presence in multiple regions and has begun training in "decisive action" scenarios and transitioning to training in combined arms warfare;

• The Marine Corps is returning to a sea-going posture, its traditional role in between major land wars;

• The Navy is investing in ship maintenance and measures to alleviate the stress on personnel from prolonged and extended deployments required by current operations;

• The Air Force is re-focusing on high-end capabilities required to confront advanced air forces and air defense systems of other nations.

The Department continues its work to understand and quantify readiness activities as we move into a post-conflict environment with increasing budgetary pressures. Specifically, the Defense Budget Priorities and Choices—Fiscal Year 2014 9

Department is developing metrics by which we can better measure readiness levels to help identify critical readiness deficiencies. The planned improvements to readiness have been put at risk with the implementation of the FY 2013 sequester. The Department will continue to assess these impacts to better understand how sequestration will affect readiness in the future.

To meet the needs of the 2012 Defense Strategic Guidance, the U.S. military is building forces to fulfill two primary demands:

Rotational presence: forces that can routinely operate away from the United States, engage friends, and deter bad actors.

Contingency availability: forces that are prepared to respond to a crisis or counter an adversary that is escalating their activities. The military must be able to surge forces to protect U.S. interests, allies and partners, and the nation.

DoD_Readiness_Fact_Sheet_FINAL.pdf

DefenseBudgetPrioritiesChoicesFiscalYear2014.pdf

Edited by PanchBarnes
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Latest news I saw was OTS board this year will only consider engineers/scientists and will consist of a single board. Not at work, so I can't source, apologies.

All boards after 14OT01 and 02, Rated and Non-Rated, have been officially suspended until further notice.

If you mean the 01 (Non-Rated) board will only consider STEM degrees, that's correct. If you mean it will only consider applicants to fill engineering/scientist slots, I'm not to sure about that. The 02 Rated board is set to release in another week, and the rumor surrounding it is that they won't be picking up any Pilot or RPA slots for the rest of this fiscal year (OTS backlog of pilot selects), but we'll see if that pans out or not.

Source: AFRS Press Release and countless hours over at AirForceOTS.com waiting on a suspended board. :beer:

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  • 11 months later...

So...any big news from the SECAF?

Haven't watched it yet, but I will tomorrow. The news agencies' big takeaway was no involuntary FMP's in 2015.
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The broadcast is 40 minutes long, but has <30 minutes of "questions." Her opening and closing comments were very saccharin and scripted. She's pretty incapable of showing sincerity, rarely dropping a politician's demeanor.

The scripting continues to the questions and sets the tone that this isn't a genuine Town Hall for free discussion but instead an all-you-can-drink Blue Kool-Aid party (exactly what everybody expected). The questions are softballs that only benefit somebody living under a rock, ignoring the news. The answers are obvious to anybody reading any military-specific news outlets (military.com, AF Times/Military Times, Stars & Stripes, etc.) or forums like this one.

The toughest question was some slight distaste at the BAH/Pay levels from the 2015 NDAA, however those levels aren't dictated by the AF/DOD, but Congress. Her answer was the same company line we've heard many times over the last year about slowing entitlement growth. The ONLY real news out of the entire hour was the announcement of no involuntary separations for FY15 and efforts to reduce costs from Contracts/Contractors in the near future.

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She's pretty incapable of showing sincerity, rarely dropping a politician's demeanor.

That's disappointing, the interim dude actually seemed to show some candor when he spoke at Nellis a year or so back. Granted it was one "town hall meeting" and he was always just an under-secretary, but still....

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  • 2 months later...

http://www.afa.org/airwarfare/airwarfaresymposium/recordings

SECAF James speech is mostly nothing new (mainly a repeat of the FY16 budget proposal, which is discussed in another thread). The three things I want to highlight are:

  1. AF may have cut slightly too many folks for FMP 2014--anticipating a tiny increase of total force (AD/NG/RV) by 6.6K in certain career fields to 492K, which would be a mere 1.3%.
  2. RV pilots should be allowed to be IP's for AD UPT students (assuming they meet whatever the requirements are for that position).
  3. Major interest in building domestic space-launching capabilities, especially to reduce dependency on Russian platforms. Former-CSAF Larry Welch continues his review of the certification process for launch vehicle contractors.
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Huh? I'm not sure I understand this bullet.

Apparently there is some restriction for Reserve pilots from being IP's in the UPT pipeline. I don't fully understand it--I'm a nonner so maybe I'm not communicating it correctly. I just hadn't heard the idea before, so I wrote it down. You can listen to it yourself and interpret it back to dumb-dumb English for me (and everybody else) if you care badly enough.

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Apparently there is some restriction for Reserve pilots from being IP's in the UPT pipeline. I don't fully understand it--I'm a nonner so maybe I'm not communicating it correctly. I just hadn't heard the idea before, so I wrote it down. You can listen to it yourself and interpret it back to dumb-dumb English for me (and everybody else) if you care badly enough.

I just listened to it (it's ~14:00 minute mark for anyone who cares). The reason it's confusing is because I had tons of Reserve IPs going through training. We already have a metric fuck ton of reserve IP's teaching UPT/IFF/FTU/PIT.

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"So one such request that we'll be sending to the congress would, if it is agreed to, permit reserve

component pilots to train active duty -- the Active duty component, so in effect, to allow reserve

component pilots to be instructor pilots for all."

I think this saying have more AFRC FTUs. Reservists already augment UPT.

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The current limitation on reserve component instructors really only affects the percentage of full-timers. That limit is based on how the statutes define the allowable duties of AGRs and ARTs, which right now makes their primary duties reserve-component-centric. They are trying to change the law to amend those duties to include "train RegAF" so that a more appropriate number of full timers can be involved in things like UPT and FTUs than current JA interpretation of the law would allow.

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there's also an issue (Guard, I think) of if the AGR doesn't own any like iron, then there can't be Guard pilots on that airframe. This is currently an issue at Kirtland (58 SOW), where there are no Guard or Reserve entities who own Hueys or CV-22s, so all the Guard Huey and CV-22 instructors at the 150th are fucked. And this is also fucking the AD instructors. It's a lose-lose, and not sure if anyone's figured out a workaround yet.

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