Where muh airmen gone?

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Aesop
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Re: Where muh airmen gone?

Post by Aesop »

"U.S. Air Force is using civilians to fly drones..."
I keep going back to "How could they tell the difference?" :P
(I kid, I kid.)

Besides, the USAF is missing a golden opportunity by not developing a game called Drone Pilot, and secretly using it as a live controller for that very thing, a la Robert Preston in The Last Starfighter. Plus they'd get the money from game sales and commercials for strike videos posted to YouTube, which might someday pay for the F-35 Thunderjug. Then again, it would be kinder and quicker to simply declare in-house that the entire F-35 program is a threat to national security, and quietly start knocking off Lockheed execs and senior project officers, and blowing up the bare few flying examples, until it simply ceases to exist. Which is ten kinds of 1950's-elegant.


But worse than that, between two Dumbocrat regimes intent on screwing the entire military more, harder, faster, interspersed with an eight year stretch of "Do everything with even less! Fuck yeah!", I can't see why anyone there stays, unless you're hanging at 18-years-in-and-almost-out, or just plain 18-and-believe-your-recruiter-as-if-he-lactates-single-malt.

I couldn't seriously counsel anyone to embark upon the career until the entire current generation of general officers die off, and probably not until this entire generation is out of the business. Whatever thin, hard cadre there is tending the eternal flame, it's got to be getting to be a pretty damned small core.
"There are four types of homicide: felonious, accidental, justifiable, and praiseworthy." -Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
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Netpackrat
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Re: Where muh airmen gone?

Post by Netpackrat »

From the article about civilians flying drones:
It's an important differentiation because the use of civilians in combat operations is technically illegal.
I guess that will matter if at some point we find ourselves once again at war against an adversary who observes the laws of war.
Cognosce teipsum et disce pati

"People come and go in our lives, especially the online ones. Some leave a fond memory, and some a bad taste." -Aesop
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randy
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Re: Where muh airmen gone?

Post by randy »

First Shirt wrote:But what the hell do I know? I was an intel geek, and everyone knows the we don't EVER get our hands dirty! Right, Randy?
Well, as an Occifer, I certainly didn't!
...even before I read MHI, my response to seeing a poster for the stars of the latest Twilight movies was "I see 2 targets and a collaborator".
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Denis
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Re: Where muh airmen gone?

Post by Denis »

randy wrote:
First Shirt wrote:But what the hell do I know? I was an intel geek, and everyone knows the we don't EVER get our hands dirty! Right, Randy?
Well, as an Occifer, I certainly didn't!
There is an old story about the Irish army... Officers were dining in the mess, being waited upon by NCOs, as tradition dictated. The officers were talking over the port about their marital "duties", but couldn't decide whether those were properly regarded as work or as fun.

One of the officers called on the senior NCO present to adjudicate - "Sergeant, do you think that satisfying officers' wives is work or is it fun?"

NCO: "Sir, without a doubt, that's one hundred percent fun".

Officer: "Why do you say that?"

NCO: "Well Sir, if there were any work at all involved, you'd have ordered me to do it for you!"
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Weetabix
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Re: Where muh airmen gone?

Post by Weetabix »

Netpackrat wrote:From the article about civilians flying drones:
It's an important differentiation because the use of civilians in combat operations is technically illegal.
I guess that will matter if at some point we find ourselves once again at war against an adversary who observes the laws of war.
I know a guy who's involved in that, but he's reserve. I've assumed they use that status more than reporters realize.
Note to self: start reading sig lines. They're actually quite amusing. :D
MarkD
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Re: Where muh airmen gone?

Post by MarkD »

Oh, stories of enlisted men serving at officers mess you say?

Dad story-time!

Dad was a Marine in WW II, and one time he and other Marine enlisted men were given the task of serving as waiters in the officers mess. From what I recall they were fairly junior enlisted.

Well apparently the day before the enlisted mess served something that....didn't agree with the men's digestive systems, and was coming out in a manner both gaseous and noxious (albeit quietly). They made a point of discharging at a distance from the dining officers, but air currents being what they are the effects wafted throughout the room. He said it was amusing to see officers give each other the hairy eyeball, trying to determine who'd befouled the air. I don't think they ever determined that their waiters were the offending parties.
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Weetabix
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Re: Where muh airmen gone?

Post by Weetabix »

When I used to travel more by air, I'd eat stuff guaranteed to cause anterior distress and save the discharge for nearby TSA agents. Petty, I know, but it made me laugh.
Note to self: start reading sig lines. They're actually quite amusing. :D
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Jericho941
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Re: Where muh airmen gone?

Post by Jericho941 »

MarkD wrote:Oh, stories of enlisted men serving at officers mess you say?

Dad story-time!

Dad was a Marine in WW II, and one time he and other Marine enlisted men were given the task of serving as waiters in the officers mess. From what I recall they were fairly junior enlisted.

Well apparently the day before the enlisted mess served something that....didn't agree with the men's digestive systems, and was coming out in a manner both gaseous and noxious (albeit quietly). They made a point of discharging at a distance from the dining officers, but air currents being what they are the effects wafted throughout the room. He said it was amusing to see officers give each other the hairy eyeball, trying to determine who'd befouled the air. I don't think they ever determined that their waiters were the offending parties.
Almost certainly eggs.
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Wrenchbender1
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Re: Where muh airmen gone?

Post by Wrenchbender1 »

Rod wrote:My nephew was a Major flying right seat in MC-130s. He crashed on a landing where 40 of the runway was removed without anyone being notified. The bird was totaled and some special operators of very high rank were hurt.
I remember that one. They were extremely lucky that the left gear held up, or there probably would have been few to no survivors aft of the 245.

Getting back to the main topic, if they want to retain people, they need to cut down on the weapons grade bullshit. With one exception, every first termer I worked with, separated. A few of them were slackers, but most were top notch mechanics. It wasn't the shitty pay, or the constant deployments to some of the finer tourist destinations on the planet (Deployments were actually a relief from the bs, until it crept over to the desert), It wasn't the long hours, or never having what you needed to do a job (At the tail end of the Clinton years). It was the stupidity, plain and simple.
Jericho941 wrote: Just before my last Christmas in the Air Force, the MXG CC gave a powerpoint presentation to the group about how much harder everything was going to get, and that we'd better get our shit together or we'd be out, as they were looking to fire people who'd failed a PT test years ago regardless of present performance, among other things. He then started making comparisons between himself and Curtis LeMay ("I don't mind being called tough, because in this racket, it's tough guys who lead the survivors") and quoted his own change-of-command speech from a year or two prior, and went on about how "the weak will be left behind."

It did not have the desired effect.
Was his name Maj. Decker? Had a clown exactly like that on my second deployment in '03.
Beware lest in your anxiety to avoid war you obtain a master.
- Demosthenes
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Jericho941
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Re: Where muh airmen gone?

Post by Jericho941 »

Wrenchbender1 wrote:Was his name Maj. Decker? Had a clown exactly like that on my second deployment in '03.
Yep, though by this point he was a full bird colonel, and still a damn cartoon character. When he wasn't pretending to be LeMay, he was pretending to be General Savage from 12 O'Clock High.

http://www.moody.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123426527

Speaking of BS creeping into deployments, Decker had a hand in that. Before he was the Moody MXG commander, he was the expeditionary MXG commander at Kandahar. The guys from Moody were deployed there and had plenty of fun stories about doing things like open ranks inspections between rocket attacks. Then they found out he was coming home with them. :roll:
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