This is interesting because the military pilots I know simply love to fly. It's an amazing opportunity to fly amazing kit, and to get tons and tons of airtime. The pay was never that great, and young people in their early 20's shouldn't mind deployments in the midwest or wherever.
Also, it's a very aspirational job: "Jet Fighter Pilot". They make video games of that. Every little boy, at some point, considered wanting to do it.
Something fishy in the system, maybe a broken pipeline, because I can't imagine anything easier to at least get people excited about.
"and young people in their early 20's shouldn't mind deployments in the midwest or wherever."
That to me sounds exactly like the kind of thing someone in their early twenties who is ready to head out and see the world would mind. Maybe I'm just projecting?
From my experience with pilots (family, NATO training base nearby), just the opportunity to flight high performance aircraft is a thrill. The name of the piece of land below you isn't as important as what aircraft you're in and what you're allowed to do with it.
Weren't we talking about people in their twenties? Do you people often get married at that age? I thought it was more common to delay marriage and kids to later in the career nowadays?
As the other poster said, women marring into the military tend to be more conservative, and they're generally looking for a financial set-up. They marry the military guy because he has a regular job that's hard to get fired from, usually paid housing, etc., and she won't have to work.
Of course, a huge number of military marriages end in divorce, but then the wife gets a nice payout from that too.
People in the military tend to marry early, at least partially because there are a bunch of benefits that the military provides to spouses. If you get re-assigned to a base across the country, the military will pay to move your spouse, but not your girlfriend/boyfriend. If you need to be picked up from the base after work, that's a lot easier for a spouse to do (they have an ID) than a girlfriend/boyfriend. You also get a bigger housing stipend, they get medical benefits, etc. If you're in a long-term relationship anyway, there's a big financial benefit to making it "official".
That delay is common where many Hacker News people reside, in places ranging from San Francisco to northern Sweden. It is however unnatural, and people in more affordable locations are still starting families closer to the natural time. My wife and I had 5 or 6 kids in my twenties, and then about that many in our thirties, and then still more. This sort of family becomes impossible if you delay, and you might not realize you want it until well after you can't have it.
For many people, moving to NYC/LA is not the end-all.
That said, I think times are changing.
As we become more urban/suburban, the notion of living in the middle of the desert has less appeal, I should admit.
But for many folk, it's not a problem, or, it should be an adventure in itself.
As the commenter above states, it can get dry and boring, but I'd hope that the combination of maturity and 'sense of duty' help prevail over that.
Maybe the entire US Army / Forces should re-oriented how they move people around. Maybe they should try to have multifaceted bases instead of having to move people around constantly. Maybe 1 year long deployments can be broken up with bits of vacation and rest (that might have operational benefits as well).
Maybe they should beef up their bases near urban areas.
Toronto had a massive airport sized base, they closed it and it's now civilian. They should have kept it, it was big enough for a lot of kinds of training, and it could have allowed way more forces people to be in Toronto, the big city of Canada.
The type of person that joins the military doesn't mind deployments. In fact the entire point of becoming a pilot is to fly those damn planes and shoot stuff.
When I was young and single the last place you were gonna catch me relocating to was some sleepy midwestern town. That was a weird thing to just paper over
The problem is that a lot of these guys are getting shunted from 'real' flying into drone piloting. They get front row seats to pushing a button and killing someone impersonally thousands of miles away, and they're managed like call center employees.
In the words of one of my childhood buddies, "I didn't go through all that to fly a simulator, even if it's connected to something with wings somewhere else."
That excitement has to last through years of training with crappy hours in crappy locations. Doesn't matter if you are cool fighter pilot if you can't be there for your family, move them out to the desert, don't have any say over when and where you will go for weeks at a time when you aren't deployed, gone for months or a year at a time when you are deployed, move from one crappy location to another every couple of years with sub-standard housing, and deal with a litany of red tape and BS not only on the ground but in the air. Assuming the stomach twisting maneuvers never get old and you still love the actual flying (many people have to learn to keep their puke in their stomachs). You have crazy hours and can't get regular sleeping hours, can't even drink when you want, but are still surrounded by functional alcoholics and professional bros. I could go on. The sheen wears off, the data backs it up. Imagine never seeing your kids even when you are at home because you are gone before they wake up, and home after they have gone to bed. The pilots often have to do more than fly. I hear it's much worse in the Marines since the pilots are also the officers in charge of the enlisted in the squadron, whereas in the Air Force you can be a pilot and an officer with no one reporting to you.
Aren't fighter pilots pretty young? I work in an office and I don't know anyone under 30 with a family. If SF cost of living is enough to delay marriage and kids, you'd really think the demands on the military would be too.
I get that there are middle-aged career officers, but I don't see why guys in their 20s are having kids before they get out.
Yes, that's the problem. They keep getting out before they get old. The retention problem is for field grade officers (think people in their 30's). If you get a pilot slot you are signing up for a 10 year commitment, you can't leave. The first couple of years are basically training. You then get worked to the bone and start counting the days until you can get out. A lot of military do have families early if they can (they are people who don't get hung up on making a commitment after all). Those that don't often want a family and can't get one because of their work.
When your commitment is up you are in your 30's and thinking what do I want to do when I grow up? Re-sign with Big Blue and get transferred to God knows where, be out of the country a lot, etc?
On top of that the real fast burners get promoted out of being a line pilot early and go on to be commanding officers in the Air Force. So the attrition is happening at the top and bottom. I don't know if this shows up in the stats because I'm pretty sure they are still counted as pilots even if they are flying a desk at the pentagon.
In short, the Air Force wants their pilots to stay in for a career, 20-30 years. If you want to wait that long to start a family you're going to have a tough time.
An aspirational job is a recipe for supply problems.
Whether it's fighter piloting, game development, teaching, acting, athletics, or music, you'll find people who love the idea of the work and are willing (for a time) to be exploited and mistreated for the "opportunity".
Employment, at its most basic level, is a business transaction: Employees sell their time and skills, employers offer financial compensation in exchange. This exchange is complicated by expectations of status, morality, patriotism, fulfillment, health care, education, high risk/reward opportunities, societal obligations, and so on into the sales pitch. It's also complicated when the actual job involves fewer fun flight hours and more paper-pushing, distant deployments, bureaucracy, and boot-licking (all revealed only after time in the job). problems are going to arise. Specifically, financial compensation can be reduced, working conditions made worse, and responsibilities increased, without immediate feedback from the starry-eyed recruits.
But eventually, someone taking a critical look at their employment will say "This isn't as glamorous as I expected. It actually kind of sucks." A while later, starry-eyed recruits will hear about that and stop thinking that the job is Top Gun and think it's more like Office Space. And someday, way down the road, management will wonder why there's a shortage of people willing to work in the conditions they created for the pay they're offering.
"Job dissatisfaction, career dissatisfaction, frequent and long deployments, poor quality of life, non-competitive pay and lack of personal and professional development are among the reasons cited"
It sounds to me like "fly jets" is the only upside, and every other part of the job is pretty lousy.
> They make video games of that.
Video game design is constrained by what is feasible to program, and what makes a decent game. Tetris and Minecraft are incredibly popular, but that wasn't because brick laying was ever an aspirational job.
Apparently fighter pilots only fly ~16 hours a month [1]. Against a typical 40-hour work week, that's less than 10%. No matter how much I love flying, it's tough to sell me on a career where I'll spend more than 90% of it doing the parts I hate.
For techies, working at a startup is cool ("aspirational"!) these days. How many programmers would you still get if they earned less than $50K, would spend less than 10% of their workday writing code, and had to basically retire from coding altogether by 45?
Seems like the Air Force is trapped in a vicious underhiring/overhiring cycle. When I was in college I did Air Force ROTC. A lot of my peers had pilot slots; I was poised as a 17D (Cyber Ops). After graduating, my training date was put on hold virtually indefinitely. Eventually I got an email that the Air Force had commissioned way too many officers and were looking for people to voluntarily leave with no commitment/obligation - seemed like a good deal, so I took it as did a lot of my non-pilot friends.
Later I found out a bunch of my pilot buddies were reassigned to other career fields because of overly stringent medical requirements (the real reason was likely a shortage in the other career fields?). For example one friend indicated he had pollen allergies on a form and was instantly disqualified (like you would ever be breathing pollen at altitude). Another wasn't even poised to be a pilot but a CSO - nope, disqualified because it turned out he had a tiny benign cataract in one eye (he has 20/20 vision otherwise).
Canadian Air Force, but same issues with the overly stringent medical requirements. A minor form of scoliosis disqualified me from ever using an ejection seat. Although I wanted to fly transport planes, the training required the use of an aircraft with ejection seats.
Yes, this has been a thing forever. (Former 33S/17D here) I went through two separate instances of reductions in force (aka "force shaping") - 2006 and 2010 - but there were others as well. (I chose to separate in 2010) They believed they brought too many officers on board in the 2001-2004 timeframe and were looking to trim down, especially because of budget cuts. I remember hearing about your situation as well (letting ROTC accessions off the hook). Yet the USAF periodically seems to cycle through "we have too many"/"we are way short" phases and this has now come back to bite them for their most critical asset, pilots. (Cyber retention is an issue as well - how do you keep them from getting out and working as contractors? The incentives don't line up)
When I was accepted into the Army's ROTC program in 1998 (which I ended up declining), they were willing to pay up to $14,500 per year. I assume the other programs were about the same.
Sure, I ask because some programs, like the Navy uses for nuclear engineers, offer a much higher number. I'm somewhat curious how much the US government gives away due to poor planning, where the candidate is released because there's no spot for them at the end.
Currently, ROTC cadets who are offered a scholarship (not all are), receive:
1) Full tuition and fees OR $10k/year to cover room and board. Cadet chooses. I'd expect at most schools the tuition+fees is worth more, but some cadets have other scholarships that might cover all or part of tuition.
2) $1200/year for textbooks
3) $300-$500/month (depending on year) living stipend
In addition to the offer I described above, it looks like a "Type 2" scholarship is the same, but with tuition+fees capped at $18k/year, and "Type 3" is the same, but with tuition+fee capped at the in-state rate at a public university.
These tiers are ridiculous. The only reason I am not in the Air Force is that ROTC would not give a type 1 for a two year scholarship to a prior active duty at Harvey Mudd. The remaining cost was too much, so I went elsewhere on academic scholarship.
And...there is the other end. My brother is a pilot and was retired by the Air Force because he had been in so long...so out he goes. Now he is a contractor flying drones for them getting paid 3x as much while drawing a hefty retirement. My brother loved the Air Force and wanted to stay...now he gets to stay and get paid a boat load more. Air Force brass not very smart.
Not in this case. He's already going to get retirement benefits. Now, he's being payed a lot more, and part of that pay is for an additional retirement benefit.
Contracting is really for short term needs. You pay short term wages (which bundle in insurance, retirement, profit, etc) for contractors. However, if the organization will continue to have that same need for several years, then paying people short term wages for that long is very expensive.
Large job changes like that aren’t forced in my experience. If the person isn’t happy doing it the results are unlikely to be good, so they always try very hard for volunteers. It’s a volunteer service after all.
Hi, have you heard of the NCORP? It's how the Air Force levels out enlisted career fields. Since the Air Force sets force-wide promotion rates, some career fields end up with too many folks in some of the NCO grades.
When that happens, they take the most junior folks in the grade and force them to retrain into another career field. They give you a short list to choose from. Most of the jobs are special operations and aircrew. You have a short period of time to make a choice and submit a package. If you don't act, they pick one for you. They picked airfield management for me near the end of an enlistment that earned me a 5.0 SRB when I re-upped as a 3C072. I self-promoted myself to Mr, instead. This was in 2008. The Air Force has been bad at staffing for a long time.
Once you have volunteered, the needs of the service are what matters. They attempt to accommodate, but in the end if they need you somewhere they're going to put you there.
> force them to retrain into another career field. They give you a short list to choose from. Most of the jobs are special operations and aircrew.
How can that possibly work? How can you force someone to retrain into special operations? How does anyone build the motivation and determination to pass the qualification courses for that when they don't even really want to be there? Why would special operations even want someone who wasn't remotely a volunteer?
The big hurdle is volunteering to be in the military. Once you have though, you can’t quit whenever you want and can’t skip without serious punishments.
You can only pick the ones you're qualified for, and the special operations jobs all require pre-approval to retain into. Similar with aircrew, if you want an aircrew job you have to get medically qualified before you can select it. If you don't pick a new job you just don't get to re-enlist. They don't force you into a job you don't want as far as I'm aware. I'm sure they have the authority (and your agreement when you signed the enlistment paperwork) to do so if they really needed to, but when I went through they just gave you a re-enlistment eligibility code that would prevent you from serving beyond your current obligation if you declined the jobs they selected for you. I'm sure it'd put you high on the list for force shaping if that was going on, too.
E: forgot special duties were an option, too. If you applied for and were selected to be something like an MTI, MTL, or recruiter then you didn't have to retrain. I'm not sure what would happen after the special duty was done. Usually you would return to your career field once you're done, but I don't know if that's the case if you do the special duty to avoid NCORP retraining.
Would you please add to you message whether he flies lethal drones or just pure reconnaissance?
While some people could be tempted with "paid 3x as much..." most will pass on this opportunity, learning you actually have to drop bombs and undoubtedly kill people for your tripled pay rate.
What makes you think that most people who join the military would be strongly averse to killing people? Even if you're flying pure reconnaissance you're helping and enabling the people doing the killing.
There are so many core misconceptions you have about the nature of volunteer service in an armed profession, its people, and your statement is so tangential and charged with auxillery purpose that i question whether you actually care about the pilot shortage at all
The deal is that when you join ROTC, the military agrees to pay a certain amount of your your college costs (depending on scholarship, could be most of it), and in return, you agree to a certain number of years of service.
Even if OP did really want to be in the Air Force, having an obligation washed away like that with no penalty sounds like a pretty good deal.
If they really wanted to join for the sake of joining they weren't going to be forced out. Otherwise you get free college (worth up to 200K in the US) for a small amount of weekly training. That's an insanely good deal.
I believe the F-22 uses air that is oxygen-enriched by a mechanical device that does some sort of filtering/diffusion process.
Picture this:
It's time to go fly. The alarm is going off, and you need to get in your jet. Boogers are streaming down your face, and you are experiencing sneezing fits that have you bent over with your eyes closing and tearing up. You can put on a mask with nice clean air, but it'll take an hour before you are in condition to fly. Sitting there on the runway waiting for your allergies to stop acting up is not acceptable.
I wouldn't want to be dealing with itchy eyes and sneezing when I need my full attention managing the airplane in combat. The hay fever drugs make one dizzy (and it says on the label to not take them when operating machinery). (I have hay fever. One nice thing about getting older is my hay fever symptoms have steadily declined. They were rather bad when I was fighter pilot age.)
You'll also need a HEPA filter to filter out pollen, just a dust filter won't do it.
Not all allergies are like that. I would wager the vast majority are pretty mild symptoms easily treatable with anti-histamines. I myself have allergies, but I never even notice because the air at work is filtered and I'm not outside long enough for symptoms to manifest as I travel to and from my car.
Maybe the case could be made for fighter pilots (though I still think it's a non-issue for 99% of people with seasonal allergies), but what's the excuse for disqualifying for all aircraft? Airline pilots can have allergies and fly. How is that much different from a heavy cargo plane?
> How is that much different from a heavy cargo plane?
1. Deployed environments are often less than pretty. There's pretty much no comparison between a peacetime US/Europe life and wartime, even at airbases.
2. In the military, aircrews are expected to go down behind enemy lines, regardless of how often it happens against terrorist groups. They want to maximize your probability of survival after the crash/shootdown. Medical preconditions of any kind don't really help that.
Well, all that's going to do is create an incentive to lie about your medical history so you don't get DQ'd and/or artificially limit the size of your pilot candidate pool, thus creating an even bigger shortage.
Non-pilot millitary personnel get deployed and are on the ground in war zones 10x more than pilots (especially in the army) and they aren't disqualified for having allergies.
It's just not a big deal except in the most egregious of hay fever cases
While I don't agree with the initial assertion of Oxygen masks being incompatible with seasonal allergies I will say that the Docs are looking to disqualify you as early in the pipeline as possible, reason being: $$$. In addition, the only times I've heard of specific pipeline disqualification is if you "anthro out" of certain aircraft, i.e too big or too small for the cockpit.
If this was around 10 or so years ago, my understanding for the stricter pilot requirements was that same glut of recruits. The Air Force flip-flops on how strict or lax they are on some of those based on the need for pilots at any given time. When there's a deficit, suddenly someone with 20/70 vision can get a slot as a heavy (cargo or bomber) pilot, but when there's a glut they want everyone to have 20/20 vision. It's an arbitrary discriminator because they don't have more effective methods.
And the long-term consequence of that is that even if they relax the requirements later, a large number of people who might have considered it as a career simply wrote it off.
I know that's what happened with me. I heard nothing but nightmare stories about how hard it was to get a pilot slot, so I let that go and went to college instead.
Yea afpc decision making is always short term 3year scale thinking with real consequences rarely analyzed, just number crunching whether or not current training pipelines are optimized for minimal idle time of trainees.
When a t34 rudder issue it a fleet in the navy pipeline, numbers for 92T slots dropped accordingly, so the marker for pilot qualification is as much luck as it is merit
> had pollen allergies on a form and was instantly disqualified (like you would ever be breathing pollen at altitude).
Any form of rhinitis (nose irritation or inflammation) after age 12 is disqualifying (allergic, nonallergic or vasomotor).
The reason for this is because anyone who has rhinitis has higher risk of getting the reaction at least sometimes from changes of humidity, barometric pressure, irritants like chemicals, dust, stress, etc. Having runny nose or puffed eyes is no-go for fighter pilot in a breathing mask. Spending millions to train someone who has a change of not being able to fly is not a good investment.
It's the same for the eyes. They estimate how the eye conditions develop for the rest of the career. Small things that don't matter now can become problematic later.
Except they do. Pilots also fly in humanitarian aid, fly out civilians and medical casualties, carry out Search and Rescue, and perform reconnaissance during natural disasters.
I'm skeptical that when disasters strike that any private/civilian organization has the capacity to actually mount an effective relief operation. (Excess capacity is unprofitable and would be trimmed out before the disaster happened.) The military, on the other hand - by definition, in times of peace - has plenty of excess capacity to execute an effective relief operation.
Excess capacity and, for sure, logistics. Despite their other failings, there's still no one else with the experience and infrastructure necessary to carry out huge-scale international relief efforts quite like the US military.
They're called "entitlement" because people explicitly pay into them and then the government has to pay those benefits. That's not relevant if you're talking about the discretionary budget.
I'm kinda surprised that anyone still believes this, although politicians do say it all the time.
What actually happens is that people pay a tax. The tax goes towards covering people who are currently receiving payouts. The collected tax does not cover the payouts and has not for quite a while. In other words, you're not "paying in" to anything, other than that if you pay the tax for 3 years, you're eligible to receive benefits.
And the payouts are a really bad investment if you are a Gen Xer or younger. You're going to get a lot less out than you put in.
It was a really great deal for the WW2 gen, as they paid in hardly anything and got decades of payouts.
Sure, it's not the same dollars that I pay in that I'll be getting in the future. That doesn't change the fact that these these taxes have to go into the SS trust fund and is not part of the discretionary budget.
When people say things like "the government spends most of its money on entitlement programs" like it's a bad thing, they're completely misrepresenting the situation. If they weren't spending the tax that's explicitly supposed to fund social security on social security, that would be a bigger story because that would be fraud.
Most of the boomer airline pilots will be retired in the next decade. The number of pilots in the US currently is about half of what it was in 1980. I'd imagine the demand for air travel has not decreased by half in that same time frame.
I’ve fucking had it. I’m finally giving up on my Air Force and I’m throwing in the towel. Flying fighter jets is no longer cool enough to outweigh the bullshit, and so I’ve broken the mach for the final time. You’re going to believe that I’m leaving because I’m tired of deploying, that I’m sick of the queep, and that I seek the money bags and greener pastures of the Airlines. I’ve heard you on TV spouting those same lines over and over. Boss, I probably will join the airlines, but that’s not why I’m leaving. I’m leaving because my wife (I love my wife) got tired of hearing me come home every night and bitch about how the leaders of my Air Force are running it into the ground. I’m leaving because you took the coolest job on the planet, you, the leaders of this job, and you ruined it. You took one of the few jobs left in the world that kids hang posters of on their walls, and you made it so damn miserable that thousands of guys like me are calling it quits. And the worst part is, you have no idea HOW you made it miserable, and even less of an idea how to fix it. You are focusing on the second and third order effects, but not the root cause.
Boss, you were a fighter pilot. You were trained for years in how to identify the root cause. I know you have the ability to dig past the airlines, ops tempo, queep, and other reasons you’re currently focusing on, and find the DFP. I know that you know what it is, I just don’t think you have the stones to call it out in public and do something about it, so I’m pulling the handles.
Yes, life in my Air Force has gotten tough. But the real reason I’m leaving boss, the heart of the issue is this. I’m a leader, I always have been. People follow me because I’m good in the Air, I have a strong act in the bar, and I give a shit about the people that work for me. And because I’m a true leader, I will never lead in this Air Force. Instead, the guys that are leading in my place, and in the place of all of the others like me, are boot-licking, risk-averse, yes men who have spent an entire career being faithful followers and couldn’t lead a 2 ship to the end of the runway. They’ve been rewarded their entire careers for being non-confrontational, making only safe decisions, punishing downhill and protecting uphill, and most importantly, being loyal to the bad leaders above them.
That’s the real problem here, boss…. loyalty has become the new CURRENCY of your Air Force. More than integrity. More than excellence. More than tactical ability. More than taking care of the people in your charge. Absolute loyalty to your superiors is what gets you promoted. And in return for that loyalty, you get protection. Protection by your bosses for every stupid, unethical, illegal, hair-brained, vindictive decision you make that degrades morale, drives people out, and makes good leaders like myself write this letter.
I have been feeling the same. This prevalence of bullshit in an industry I joined (computer science) to avoid such bullshit has been the most shocking experience of my life.
The Air Force wants fighter pilots to end up as generals. In order to do that and compete in the promotion system that is in place in the Air Force, they need to do more than just fly. The fact is that the Air Force wants officers first and pilots second. Perhaps the answer is that pilots should just be warrant officers like in the Army. They can fly their entire career and do just that and nothing else. There would be really good pilots. However, the Air Force wouldn't have fighter pilot generals. The training now takes so long and is so expensive that it seems like a huge waste for a pilot to go through all that and do other things most of the time.
This is an issue on the civilian side as well. They're strongly encouraging engineers and scientists to pursue management positions and degrees. They're tacitly discouraging pursuit of higher degrees in science and engineering outside of a few areas (and even there it still turns into resume fodder for management positions). So there's becoming a huge drain on the civilian workforce of experienced people and the new people are too young (fresh grads) to keep up the level of capability their predecessors (now bosses) had (and now expect, but don't understand that the new people have no guidance or mentors).
I'm a former Air Force pilot and was going to writeup a long post about my experience. But, this pretty much sums it up.
I loved the people, and LOVED the flying. Some of the best times of my life. But, the organizational bloat, bureaucratic BS, and constant deployments just became too much.
As you can imagine, it really wears on you to be gone 6 mo's every year risking your life for a counterproductive endless war that the American public barely knows is happening.
I think it's ironic that your comment was downoted. The mentality of Americans is warped beyond repair. If you don't think you have a chance of winning, it's not "realistic" or what-have-you, until you get to the lottery...
See the sister comment about voting for HC against DT because it's all or nothing.
It's a structural problem with how our elections work. No sense blaming individual voters for chosing "vote with the intent to maybe (but almost certainly not) affect the outcome" versus "definitely do not affect the outcome, but maybe (but almost certainly not) send a message".
You're literally restating the tactic, as if that countermands the truth. There is no change unless the behavior changes, which is at the individual level. Why not dispense with the public altogether, if the individuals don't matter? Just leave it to the political parties?
> You're literally restating the tactic, as if that countermands the truth
The truth is the current system stabilizes at two parties due to how the rules are written, and that most voters are de facto disenfranchised at the federal (and, largely, state as well) level for a bunch of reasons. Spending any time or energy getting worked up at someone (uselessly) voting one way to try to work within that system for change, versus someone (uselessly) ignoring (or misunderstanding) that system and voting some other way, is counterproductive.
An effective use of one's time is working at the party level (by which, yes, I mean the two that get elected, not the rest) to get better candidates on the ballot, for one's own definition of better, voting in local elections and advocating for or against local candidates, and educating fellow voters on issues that matter to you. This includes working to change the way our elections work to break the two-party stability point and expand the effective franchise, if you care about those things—the means to fix that are the same as anything else.
>Spending any time or energy getting worked up at someone (uselessly) voting one way... is counterproductive.
No, it's really not, because there is no alternative: the voters are the ones who have the ultimate power and responsibility here. This isn't China where the Party controls everything.
>An effective use of one's time is working at the party level (by which, yes, I mean the two that get elected, not the rest) to get better candidates on the ballot
People have been trying that for ages, and it doesn't work; the system itself is broken, and when they do get "better" candidates elected, those candidates don't actually make any big changes because they don't really want to.
>This includes working to change the way our elections work to break the two-party stability point
The only way to do this is to change the voting system altogether to one like those used in Europe. Working to get "better" candidates on the ballot isn't going to accomplish that. I've never seen any popular candidates talk about changing the voting systems.
> I've never seen any popular candidates talk about changing the voting systems.
Popular candidates are the ones that get elected. By definition. So yes, trying to push forward better candidates supported by a party the support of which will automatically raise their profile is the way to fix the problem. Plus, as noted, voting for the changes you want (including reforming voting & districting, if that's your thing) at levels closer to home, where non-big-two candidates or oddballs within the big two might actually win.
How have we reformed elections in the past, against the wishes of entrenched, powerful groups? Replace or win over one of the big two parties (the latter is easier—the former's rarely worked) and push your candidates forward. The Democrats have a strong incentive right now to get rid of gerrymandering, for instance. There are local and state level movements to reform voting—it's mostly a state-level issue—so try to get some initiatives on the ballot. Work with that. One step at a time. Voting Green or Libertarian or whatever for President or Senator's simply pointless, good feels aside—though only barely more pointless than any other vote for a federal office, under the current system. It just doesn't matter.
Feel good, or get something done? For the former, keep on voting however you like. For the latter, work to change the ballot. Initiatives/referendums and influencing candidate selection in the big two. You can try other stuff, but those are the first things you should look at if you're serious about getting things done.
The basic principles are 1) the earlier you're involved in the process (e.g. influencing who's running, what's on the ballot) the more effective you're likely to be, 2) the more you're swimming downstream the better (if you can work in one of the big two, 100% you should), and 3) the smaller scale the election, the more likely you can affect the outcome (obviously).
It's ultimately the voters' fault. First-Past-the-Post (FPTP) voting systems do result in this, but still, it's the voter's responsibility to demand change from their leaders, and demand that they implement a better voting system. Have they done this? No. Everyone just assumes this is how it is and refuses to look at all the European countries that have had approval voting for ages, with much better outcomes.
In 2016, I voted for Stein, because Hillary and her supporters (esp. all the really nasty, condescending supporters on Reddit) clearly told me they didn't want or need my vote (as a Bernie fan), and the media told me my state was absolutely certain to go to Hillary. Well, the media was right, but not as right as they thought, but Hillary did win my state by a reasonable margin.
Honestly, I can kinda understand why some people would be turned into Trump voters after seeing what kind of people Hillary fans are really like. They're truly horrible human beings. I even had the displeasure of having to sit through a nasty argument between a Trump fan and a Hillary fan while in a carpool last year, and it was pretty interesting how the Trump fan was the one who actually cared about rural voters, and the Hillary fan's attitude was seriously "let them die". It's no wonder things are falling apart in this country.
The coming election will be a measurement of American voters. Now they do have a choice. There is actually a candidate opposed to mass murder as our official policy. Now we've learned she's also the only major-party candidate wise enough to correctly judge the whole Assange situation, as well.
Yes, she's the only human in the current posse presidential wannabe reptiloids. Too bad that her understanding of economics is lacking. (Rand Paul / Tulsi Gabbard (in whatever order) anti-war ticket would be great... not gonna happen).
As a former Air Force air traffic controller, the sentiment is similar on the enlisted side. I remember a Chief called all controllers in for a meeting to discuss his new policies, then asking the NCOs what he thought of his them. Every NCO agreed and said they were needed Chief. I told him they were counterproductive and would cause more problems than solve. He kicked everyone out of the room, and we had a one-way conversation in which I was instructed to never disagree with him, ever, particularly in a group setting.
While ATC isn't fighter pilot cool, it was an amazing job to have when you're 18 at the beginning of the war (2003), but after 11 years of many similar experiences, as I illustrated above, I left. What struck me most, was when I told my Chief, Flight Commander, and SQ/CC I wasn't reenlisting, none of them tried to talk me into staying. I was dual rated - Tower and RAPCON (with ARTCC) - with 4 different facility ratings plus a deployment to Balad AB where we were pushing 1000+ aircraft a day. They could care less to keep their experienced NCOs in, their sole focus appeared to be on their next promotion and/or assignment. It solidified my choice while reassuring me I made the right decision.
> it really wears on you to be gone 6 mo's every year risking your life for a counterproductive endless war
Did you not think about that before signing up? What, honestly, did you expect military life to be like?
The entire history of military organisations has been pushing the individuals at the sharp-edge to their limits and beyond in order to achieve the unachievable as directed by the politicians. And usually without anyone knowing about their sacrifice.
There is nothing unusual or inconsistent with the modern USAF. Back in the 1960s "SAC SUCKS" could be found scraped on the interiors of B-52s after 26-hour Chrome Dome missions.
I just finished reading "Blood Makes The Grass Grow", about a Norwegian soldier who decided to leave the Norwegian military to join the Kurds and fight ISIS on the ground because his skills weren't being put to use in the Norwegian military. In it, he talks about how the Norwegian brass painted him as a traitor and a war criminal, and shunned him from his old unit.
Every Western military suffers from this. Every. Single. One. And the reason is Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy: there are two kinds of people in bureaucracies: those who serve the bureaucracy's goals, and those who serve the bureaucracy; ultimately the organization is led by people who serve the bureaucracy rather than people who serve the bureaucracy's goals. It's simply unavoidable in a military which must necessarily be a large bureaucracy.
As an Air Force vet, I think he accurately identifies the problem but I don't think the solution is what he thinks it is. The Army has been flying with Warrant Office pilots for years. They make less money, but they don't require a college degree so they have a _much_ larger pool of applicants.
The solution is to disentangle leadership and piloting. Currently, because they're all officers, pilots view themselves as leaders of men. However, as the author of this post says, the most leading a pilot will ever do is lead a flight of jets. Piloting has always been a tactical skill, and its place as an officer-exclusive job makes it incorrectly perceived as a gateway to a strategic career.
You only needed a high school degree to fly in WW2, and I honestly believe the Air Force should be hiring pilots based solely on ability to fly vs credentialism.
As a funny aside, the Air Force originally gave up Warrant Officers so that they could have have higher ranked enlisted personnnel (E-9). Afterwards, all of the other services complained that their enlisted personnel were outranked by the Air Force so they got E-9s and didn't have to give up their warrants.
> A recent RAND study found the cost of training a basic qualified fighter pilot ranges from $5.6 million for an F-16 pilot to $10.9 million for an F-22 pilot.
Those numbers seem outrageous to me. Why does it cost so much? Are there frequent plane crashes?
Just a single sortie is very expensive in just maintenance + supply. You need a whole crew to prepare a plane. Not to speak of the whole infrastructure required to train pilots, having places to fly from, teachers to learn from. It all adds up to a huge number, that when you divide by the number of pilots trained, doesn't get reduced by a lot.
I'm guessing it has to do with flight time. Flying a jet is expensive. A jet will consume something like $10,000 of fuel per hour of flight time. Not to mention maintenance costs, the costs of the maintenance crew, the cost of having dedicated f-16s and f-22s for training is probably included in there as well. Not to mention what is probably a high dropout rate. All that adds up. $5.6M still sounds high to me, but I imagine there are a bunch of other costs I'm not thinking about.
A lot of it is allocation of fixed costs. It costs a fortune to operate training programs. Lots of buildings, runways, infrastructure, staff, maintenance, security, etc. So they take that annual cost and divide by the number of pilots trained every year.
It seems as expected to me. These planes cost tens of thousands per flight hour plus a huge support staff is needed. I don’t think they even fly that much.
There was a flight for 44.3 hours, then without even stopping the engines another one of 30 hours. That makes for a $10,030,500 flight not even counting the bombs.
Cost of flying F-22 for an hour is reported anywhere between $33k and $70k, with most estimates in the $60k range. Let's assume $50k/hour to be safe - 200 hours of flight time gets you to the $10 million figure on its own, with no other costs accounted for.
Pilot still ends up the cheap part of the equation, given ~$200mil+ per airplane cost.
"A few", as in 2500? That's roughly the number of working days in a year multiplied by the number of working hours in a military day. What are all those people doing, and is there a distinct set of people doing those things for every aircraft? There must be some other explanation...
Remember that our strategy against the soviets was to bankrupt them through military buildup in their massively corrupt and inefficient economic system. Back then, we could build things a lot cheaper than them, so we built a lot of stuff we didn’t need because they would have to try to keep up.
This wasn't so much a strategy as a backward explanation for why we were spending so much. They couldn't say the real reason, corruption. Now spending so much has been just as normalized as a "standing" army. No one still alive remembers what peacetime used to mean. So, they don't have to lie any more about "strategies" for the Soviets.
How much do you think it costs to fill up an F-15 with Jet Fuel?
Not to mention the maintenance requirements on the planes (and the ground crews to do it) and the cost of ammunition used in training (missles aren't cheap)
Think about the logistics of getting a class of pilots from the training sites, simulators, classrooms, housing, etc. Not to mention the costs to keep all those places open. Pilots have 100s or more of hours in simulators before they even touch a plane. Now add the costs of training in the actual plane and related training missions bombs, fake targets, bombing ranges etc...
Weirdly, the article says almost nothing about the impact of drones on career pilots, especially their will to reenlist. The focus was fighter jocks, but I doubt most will end up flying commercially -- the skills of flying passengers or freight don't overlap much with dogfights, missile tech, or flying invisible.
The article also says nothing about which kinds of pilots are in shortest supply (fighter, heavy, rotary, carrier-based fighters, VTOLs, etc), or which service suffers most. It briefly mentions the cost of training fighers, but nothing on non-fighter pilots, which must make up the vast majority of onboard pilots, much less the cost of drone pilots. Nor does it mention the rate of departure for all of these MOSes.
IMO, this article went to press with far too little background research. That, or it was edited out later.
> The focus was fighter jocks, but I doubt most will end up flying commercially -- the skills of flying passengers or freight don't overlap much with dogfights, missile tech, or flying invisible.
My understanding is that the main "skill" commercial airlines are looking for is flight hours - lots and lots of flight hours. The combat-focused skills obviously don't transfer, but an experienced fighter pilot is still very prepared to transition to flying commercial flights if they want to.
Probably the majority of fighter pilots end up flying for the airlines once they leave active duty. For one thing, the airlines are just as desperate to find qualified pilots, though that's greatly driven by the ups and downs of the economy.
> The focus was fighter jocks, but I doubt most will end up flying commercially
My understanding from folks I've talked to in the airline business is that they generally want people who flew fighters. Those people who have previously taken aircraft to their maximum limits are not as freaked when things go wrong in the cockpit of an airliner.
The Army also has a pilot shortage, but they've done a little better than the Air Force due to allowing warrant officers to fly. Many pilots just want to fly, they don't want to deal with all the other management responsibilities and staff assignments that come with being a commissioned officer. When the Air Force split off from the Army they decided they only wanted commissioned officers as pilots and eliminated WO ranks.
It's interesting how the US military copied the British class-based system of management, officers v other ranks. It does stymie a lot of creativity and talent.
> It's interesting how the US military copied the British class-based system of management, officers v other ranks.
That’s been the military system the world over for millennia - not really a uniquely British thing is it!
And officers don’t just manage - they lead.
Also - you can be a pilot and an enlisted soldier (Sgt and up) in Britain unlike in the US, so we do not differentiate as much for that role as the US does!
The way I see this is that the US Air Force does allow enlisted to fly. First, get a college degree, and go through the application process to become an officer. Prior enlisted with the smarts to do it are seen as better officers. Then once you've done that you can get a pilot slot. Why would I want someone who is not willing or able to get a college degree pilot my $150 million dollar jet?
You'd want that because a college degree is a 4-year delay during which the human body ages. Everything gets worse with age: hearing, eyesight, neck strength (needed for high-G pilots), etc.
That cuts the career by 4 years, meaning that a larger portion of it is training and a smaller portion is being useful. There is then an incentive to let excessively older people keep flying, meaning a reduction in the physical standards (eyesight, etc.) for the people who fly that $150 million dollar jet. Good eyesight matters more than college gunk like "Art Appreciation" and "Intro to Humanities".
This is a strong argument, but that 4 year delay also helps you mature and figure out how life works and become more independent and self-sufficient. A 19 year could do a great job I'm sure. I know a guy that was flying combat missions in Vietnam at that age. From what I hear he was a phenomenal pilot. I think he made some decisions he wouldn't have made if he was a little older though.
Also I have a feeling the older guys can handle the G's ok, better than a lanky 18 year old who hasn't gotten his man-physique yet.
With the technology we have I think I'd rather have an older, wiser 40 year flying my F-22 than a 22 year old, but maybe I'm wrong, I have no stats for their relative performance.
Many of the best pilots in history had no university degrees. Chuck Yeager famously had none. Jacqueline Cochran had none. Amelia Earhart dropped out of Columbia. Charles Lindbergh dropped out of UW-Madison. Howard Hughes dropped out of Rice. Hanna Reitsch dropped out of medical school at Kiel.
If the idea is simply use willingness to pay for / put up with university as a proxy to test seriousness and dedication, why not ask prospective aviators to get full-face tattoos? Surely that stunt would prove more dedication than a college degree, and waste less of everybody's time.
One of the arguments for pilots to be officers is that they are the ones who ultimately make the final decision on dropping bombs. The U.S. Air Force took a heavy mental beating over the horror of indiscriminate bombings it conducted in the Vietnam War (that was not a war...), and has internalized it.
The thinking is that officers are personally responsible for the command decisions that they execute. If you are ordered to do something you think is illegal it is your responsibility as an officer to refuse. Enlisted are not expected to be held to this requirement. I understand the realities of things, but this is the theory.
The tie-in with a university degree is that that is supposed to have exposed you to enough other thinking that you are better (not to be confused with "well") prepared to make those sort of decisions.
The supposed connection between ethical behavior and university degrees is totally spurious. It's a post-hoc justification for blatant class discrimination, plain and simple. I recommend you dig into the life of Jacqueline Cochran in particular; she was far more than merely one of the best pilots to have ever lived.
> Why would I want someone who is not willing or able to get a college degree pilot my $150 million dollar jet?
You could ask this same question about almost any requirement. You just finished saying that prior enlisted are seen as better officers. So why not require all officers to have previously enlisted? (in addition to college or instead of college)
And there are blanket answers to your question that apply to just about anything. souprock pointed out that a college degree takes four years, cutting short their career. And any extra hoops or delays reduce the candidate pool. Remember, the article is discussing a shortage of pilots. The answer might be "because otherwise no one will fly your $150 million jet" or "because otherwise your very few, very perfect pilots will make poor decisions from exhaustion".
Requiring officers to be enlisted first would be a great idea, in my opinion. And yes, most jobs nowadays require a college degree, and flying F-22s is one of them. Again, the problem is not that they can't find enough people to train, show me anything that says that. It's that they can't retain the people they have already trained.
Since their incoming pipeline is completely full, if you want to use enlisted pilots you are going to have to pull some officers out of line to replace them with enlisted.
I'm not saying enlisted guys can't do the job, just that this is the way the system works, and this part doesn't seem to be too broken. If you're enlisted and want to do it, the government will pay for your entire college and give you a stipend on top (ROTC, GI Bill), you can even do it part time while you are still enlisted in the military[1], then give you a nice raise to become an officer. Pretty good deal.
The numbers might not always add up for free tuition, but there are a lot of schools in the yellow ribbon program that will cover additional costs for servicemembers[2].
This is true of basically every army on Earth, because it works. In fact, the USSR notably attempted to do away with the idea of an officer class in the Red Army (since it was seen as un-Socialist) and wound up changing their mind and re-instituting officers about a decade later.
This is probably part of the reason why the USAF is leaning so hard towards unmanned systems in the future, because it opens up a lot of doors here. Drone pilots can be put pretty much anywhere in the world so they don't need to be forward-deployed, which will probably help attract people. The physical standards can be strongly relaxed, no need to worry about eyesight or their ability to handle 8Gs, which increases the pool of possible pilots. You can to some degree "oversubscribe" and have fewer pilots than aircraft (alternatively, fewer pilots on shift, meaning pilots don't have to work as many hours), since not all of your planes will be in the air at once. Some of the more mundane tasks can be automated or distributed (maybe have air traffic controllers control taxiing, takeoff and landing directly?) like in-air refueling. It's not a panacea, and there are missions drones will not be able to do anytime soon, but I imagine it will help with the pilot shortfall.
> Drone pilots can be put pretty much anywhere in the world so they don't need to be forward-deployed, which will probably help attract people.
Unfortunately the USAF likes to put all their drone pilots at Beale which from what I have heard isn't a very big difference in experience from Minot.
Also right now all drones are required to be full pilots and officers. This is a big factor in the shortages problem. No one wants to through the Academy and then sit at a desk flinging a joystick around. When I was in it was asked all the time why not have warrant officers or let enlisted fly drones? Brass always said no.
All of that can be automated. For new drone systems it makes a lot of sense to strive for fully autonomous systems. Why have some human in the loop for things a computer can do faster and more efficiently? That stuff will eventually trickle down to civilian aviation as well. Just like self driving cars are likely to happen in the next years; self flying planes are just as feasible. The shortage for pilots is short term. Pilots starting today in their careers need to consider that they might be automated away some time during their career.
Fortunately, a large part of the planes flying today will still be flying for years to come and they won't be flying themselves. E.g. the B52 program was just extended to 2050 I believe. Replacing that stuff will take decades even when it is feasible technically.
Drones are susceptible to electronic counter-measures (ECM). As it stands now, Russia has a lead in this field. So, (presumably) has China which is busy buying Russian military hardware in addition to developing its own.
Drones are great for slaughtering camel herders armed with AK-47s and TOW missiles. They're not that great against a tech-parity adversary.
This story's title here on HN seems to contradict the actual news story. According to the HN title, there is no shortage of AF pilots. It says the outlook is grim for the shortage, not for the number of pilots, so it means that the shortage is probably going to go away.
I can't fathom how the answer to the pilot shortage couldn't simply be "pay them more". They are flying $100 million dollar planes, pilot salary must be a drop in the bucket.
I'm not sure I understand. The reason you pay more for higher ranks is because you want to incentivize people to work to be promoted to those ranks, right? If you have enough generals but not enough pilots, it ought to flip.
The ultimate answer to any skill shortage is always going to be "pay them more." However, that falls apart quickly, so the problem is finding a better answer.
We build manned warplanes because you want a human with decision making capability on the trigger, drone communications can be jammed, and AI is a myth.
This is just as bad, if not worse, in other career fields too. I am an active duty EE. The Air Force paid for my undergrad then paid for my Masters. I am on my payback tour in a research lab, and I spend more then 80% of my time managing contractual requirements, finances, and other "inherently government functions" that they need a warm body to do (and that I have only gotten on the job training for). This is not even close to the unique story. Active Duty get tapped for all of the "odds and ends" duties because they can be tasked to, they either won't hire someone or taking the time to hire someone takes too much time/resources.
I had a friend of mine (also with a fully paid Undergrad and Grad in engineering) with the same experience get tapped to do Honor Guard Duty for six months. Seriously.
That was actually how air forces adapted to the jet era. Attrition was horrific, about 35% of USAF F-84s and F-86s being lost in crashes through the 1950s. Actual combat losses in Korea were insignificant compared to accidents.
The 1970s-designed F-16 has a loss rate of 3.4 per 100,000 flight hours. The two 1950s fighters were 52.6 and 44.2 respectively.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 239 ms ] threadAlso, it's a very aspirational job: "Jet Fighter Pilot". They make video games of that. Every little boy, at some point, considered wanting to do it.
Something fishy in the system, maybe a broken pipeline, because I can't imagine anything easier to at least get people excited about.
That to me sounds exactly like the kind of thing someone in their early twenties who is ready to head out and see the world would mind. Maybe I'm just projecting?
Of course, a huge number of military marriages end in divorce, but then the wife gets a nice payout from that too.
Hence the evolution of the species known as "Tricareatops".
That said, I think times are changing.
As we become more urban/suburban, the notion of living in the middle of the desert has less appeal, I should admit.
But for many folk, it's not a problem, or, it should be an adventure in itself.
As the commenter above states, it can get dry and boring, but I'd hope that the combination of maturity and 'sense of duty' help prevail over that.
Maybe the entire US Army / Forces should re-oriented how they move people around. Maybe they should try to have multifaceted bases instead of having to move people around constantly. Maybe 1 year long deployments can be broken up with bits of vacation and rest (that might have operational benefits as well).
Maybe they should beef up their bases near urban areas.
Toronto had a massive airport sized base, they closed it and it's now civilian. They should have kept it, it was big enough for a lot of kinds of training, and it could have allowed way more forces people to be in Toronto, the big city of Canada.
In the words of one of my childhood buddies, "I didn't go through all that to fly a simulator, even if it's connected to something with wings somewhere else."
Aren't fighter pilots pretty young? I work in an office and I don't know anyone under 30 with a family. If SF cost of living is enough to delay marriage and kids, you'd really think the demands on the military would be too.
I get that there are middle-aged career officers, but I don't see why guys in their 20s are having kids before they get out.
Yes, that's the problem. They keep getting out before they get old. The retention problem is for field grade officers (think people in their 30's). If you get a pilot slot you are signing up for a 10 year commitment, you can't leave. The first couple of years are basically training. You then get worked to the bone and start counting the days until you can get out. A lot of military do have families early if they can (they are people who don't get hung up on making a commitment after all). Those that don't often want a family and can't get one because of their work.
When your commitment is up you are in your 30's and thinking what do I want to do when I grow up? Re-sign with Big Blue and get transferred to God knows where, be out of the country a lot, etc?
On top of that the real fast burners get promoted out of being a line pilot early and go on to be commanding officers in the Air Force. So the attrition is happening at the top and bottom. I don't know if this shows up in the stats because I'm pretty sure they are still counted as pilots even if they are flying a desk at the pentagon.
In short, the Air Force wants their pilots to stay in for a career, 20-30 years. If you want to wait that long to start a family you're going to have a tough time.
Whether it's fighter piloting, game development, teaching, acting, athletics, or music, you'll find people who love the idea of the work and are willing (for a time) to be exploited and mistreated for the "opportunity".
Employment, at its most basic level, is a business transaction: Employees sell their time and skills, employers offer financial compensation in exchange. This exchange is complicated by expectations of status, morality, patriotism, fulfillment, health care, education, high risk/reward opportunities, societal obligations, and so on into the sales pitch. It's also complicated when the actual job involves fewer fun flight hours and more paper-pushing, distant deployments, bureaucracy, and boot-licking (all revealed only after time in the job). problems are going to arise. Specifically, financial compensation can be reduced, working conditions made worse, and responsibilities increased, without immediate feedback from the starry-eyed recruits.
But eventually, someone taking a critical look at their employment will say "This isn't as glamorous as I expected. It actually kind of sucks." A while later, starry-eyed recruits will hear about that and stop thinking that the job is Top Gun and think it's more like Office Space. And someday, way down the road, management will wonder why there's a shortage of people willing to work in the conditions they created for the pay they're offering.
It sounds to me like "fly jets" is the only upside, and every other part of the job is pretty lousy.
> They make video games of that.
Video game design is constrained by what is feasible to program, and what makes a decent game. Tetris and Minecraft are incredibly popular, but that wasn't because brick laying was ever an aspirational job.
Apparently fighter pilots only fly ~16 hours a month [1]. Against a typical 40-hour work week, that's less than 10%. No matter how much I love flying, it's tough to sell me on a career where I'll spend more than 90% of it doing the parts I hate.
For techies, working at a startup is cool ("aspirational"!) these days. How many programmers would you still get if they earned less than $50K, would spend less than 10% of their workday writing code, and had to basically retire from coding altogether by 45?
[1]: https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2018/03/01...
Later I found out a bunch of my pilot buddies were reassigned to other career fields because of overly stringent medical requirements (the real reason was likely a shortage in the other career fields?). For example one friend indicated he had pollen allergies on a form and was instantly disqualified (like you would ever be breathing pollen at altitude). Another wasn't even poised to be a pilot but a CSO - nope, disqualified because it turned out he had a tiny benign cataract in one eye (he has 20/20 vision otherwise).
The USAF brought this upon themselves
Now I learn they actually started allowing laser surgery corrected vision some time ago.
C'est la vie.
1) Full tuition and fees OR $10k/year to cover room and board. Cadet chooses. I'd expect at most schools the tuition+fees is worth more, but some cadets have other scholarships that might cover all or part of tuition.
2) $1200/year for textbooks
3) $300-$500/month (depending on year) living stipend
In addition to the offer I described above, it looks like a "Type 2" scholarship is the same, but with tuition+fees capped at $18k/year, and "Type 3" is the same, but with tuition+fee capped at the in-state rate at a public university.
Contracting him could easily still be cheaper than having him still be in.
Contracting is really for short term needs. You pay short term wages (which bundle in insurance, retirement, profit, etc) for contractors. However, if the organization will continue to have that same need for several years, then paying people short term wages for that long is very expensive.
My impression is that very little about the military is voluntary. If they need pilots to fly different craft, the pilots will fly different craft.
When that happens, they take the most junior folks in the grade and force them to retrain into another career field. They give you a short list to choose from. Most of the jobs are special operations and aircrew. You have a short period of time to make a choice and submit a package. If you don't act, they pick one for you. They picked airfield management for me near the end of an enlistment that earned me a 5.0 SRB when I re-upped as a 3C072. I self-promoted myself to Mr, instead. This was in 2008. The Air Force has been bad at staffing for a long time.
Once you have volunteered, the needs of the service are what matters. They attempt to accommodate, but in the end if they need you somewhere they're going to put you there.
How can that possibly work? How can you force someone to retrain into special operations? How does anyone build the motivation and determination to pass the qualification courses for that when they don't even really want to be there? Why would special operations even want someone who wasn't remotely a volunteer?
The military isn’t all sir-yes-sir as people think - if you don’t want to be there then they don’t want you to be there either.
E: forgot special duties were an option, too. If you applied for and were selected to be something like an MTI, MTL, or recruiter then you didn't have to retrain. I'm not sure what would happen after the special duty was done. Usually you would return to your career field once you're done, but I don't know if that's the case if you do the special duty to avoid NCORP retraining.
While some people could be tempted with "paid 3x as much..." most will pass on this opportunity, learning you actually have to drop bombs and undoubtedly kill people for your tripled pay rate.
...3x as much as an Air Force pilot whose job is to...wait for it...sometimes drop bombs on people and kill them.
Let me know if you need a step ladder to help you off that high horse.
How’s that a good deal? Presumably you wanted to join and now that’s something you’d never get to do?
Even if OP did really want to be in the Air Force, having an obligation washed away like that with no penalty sounds like a pretty good deal.
If they really wanted to join for the sake of joining they weren't going to be forced out. Otherwise you get free college (worth up to 200K in the US) for a small amount of weekly training. That's an insanely good deal.
Edit: Downvote me if you like, but that's the reason I was given when I asked an Air Force pilot.
Picture this:
It's time to go fly. The alarm is going off, and you need to get in your jet. Boogers are streaming down your face, and you are experiencing sneezing fits that have you bent over with your eyes closing and tearing up. You can put on a mask with nice clean air, but it'll take an hour before you are in condition to fly. Sitting there on the runway waiting for your allergies to stop acting up is not acceptable.
You'll also need a HEPA filter to filter out pollen, just a dust filter won't do it.
Maybe the case could be made for fighter pilots (though I still think it's a non-issue for 99% of people with seasonal allergies), but what's the excuse for disqualifying for all aircraft? Airline pilots can have allergies and fly. How is that much different from a heavy cargo plane?
1. Deployed environments are often less than pretty. There's pretty much no comparison between a peacetime US/Europe life and wartime, even at airbases.
2. In the military, aircrews are expected to go down behind enemy lines, regardless of how often it happens against terrorist groups. They want to maximize your probability of survival after the crash/shootdown. Medical preconditions of any kind don't really help that.
Non-pilot millitary personnel get deployed and are on the ground in war zones 10x more than pilots (especially in the army) and they aren't disqualified for having allergies.
It's just not a big deal except in the most egregious of hay fever cases
Source: Marine Pilot.
I know that's what happened with me. I heard nothing but nightmare stories about how hard it was to get a pilot slot, so I let that go and went to college instead.
When a t34 rudder issue it a fleet in the navy pipeline, numbers for 92T slots dropped accordingly, so the marker for pilot qualification is as much luck as it is merit
Any form of rhinitis (nose irritation or inflammation) after age 12 is disqualifying (allergic, nonallergic or vasomotor).
The reason for this is because anyone who has rhinitis has higher risk of getting the reaction at least sometimes from changes of humidity, barometric pressure, irritants like chemicals, dust, stress, etc. Having runny nose or puffed eyes is no-go for fighter pilot in a breathing mask. Spending millions to train someone who has a change of not being able to fly is not a good investment.
It's the same for the eyes. They estimate how the eye conditions develop for the rest of the career. Small things that don't matter now can become problematic later.
https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-the-Federal-US-budg...
What actually happens is that people pay a tax. The tax goes towards covering people who are currently receiving payouts. The collected tax does not cover the payouts and has not for quite a while. In other words, you're not "paying in" to anything, other than that if you pay the tax for 3 years, you're eligible to receive benefits.
And the payouts are a really bad investment if you are a Gen Xer or younger. You're going to get a lot less out than you put in.
It was a really great deal for the WW2 gen, as they paid in hardly anything and got decades of payouts.
When people say things like "the government spends most of its money on entitlement programs" like it's a bad thing, they're completely misrepresenting the situation. If they weren't spending the tax that's explicitly supposed to fund social security on social security, that would be a bigger story because that would be fraud.
https://www.jqpublicblog.com/punching-out-latest-dear-boss-l...
Dear Boss,
I’ve fucking had it. I’m finally giving up on my Air Force and I’m throwing in the towel. Flying fighter jets is no longer cool enough to outweigh the bullshit, and so I’ve broken the mach for the final time. You’re going to believe that I’m leaving because I’m tired of deploying, that I’m sick of the queep, and that I seek the money bags and greener pastures of the Airlines. I’ve heard you on TV spouting those same lines over and over. Boss, I probably will join the airlines, but that’s not why I’m leaving. I’m leaving because my wife (I love my wife) got tired of hearing me come home every night and bitch about how the leaders of my Air Force are running it into the ground. I’m leaving because you took the coolest job on the planet, you, the leaders of this job, and you ruined it. You took one of the few jobs left in the world that kids hang posters of on their walls, and you made it so damn miserable that thousands of guys like me are calling it quits. And the worst part is, you have no idea HOW you made it miserable, and even less of an idea how to fix it. You are focusing on the second and third order effects, but not the root cause.
Boss, you were a fighter pilot. You were trained for years in how to identify the root cause. I know you have the ability to dig past the airlines, ops tempo, queep, and other reasons you’re currently focusing on, and find the DFP. I know that you know what it is, I just don’t think you have the stones to call it out in public and do something about it, so I’m pulling the handles.
Yes, life in my Air Force has gotten tough. But the real reason I’m leaving boss, the heart of the issue is this. I’m a leader, I always have been. People follow me because I’m good in the Air, I have a strong act in the bar, and I give a shit about the people that work for me. And because I’m a true leader, I will never lead in this Air Force. Instead, the guys that are leading in my place, and in the place of all of the others like me, are boot-licking, risk-averse, yes men who have spent an entire career being faithful followers and couldn’t lead a 2 ship to the end of the runway. They’ve been rewarded their entire careers for being non-confrontational, making only safe decisions, punishing downhill and protecting uphill, and most importantly, being loyal to the bad leaders above them.
That’s the real problem here, boss…. loyalty has become the new CURRENCY of your Air Force. More than integrity. More than excellence. More than tactical ability. More than taking care of the people in your charge. Absolute loyalty to your superiors is what gets you promoted. And in return for that loyalty, you get protection. Protection by your bosses for every stupid, unethical, illegal, hair-brained, vindictive decision you make that degrades morale, drives people out, and makes good leaders like myself write this letter.
See: Graeber's Bullshit Jobs—he blames, more or less, the takeover of Finance and with it a new form of managerialism, generally.
See also: common everyday experience and observation.
See also: the mysterious non-Baumol's cost disease not-so-slowly eating "the West"'s, and especially the US', ability to get anything done.
Another related topic to add to your list: Boeing culture https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19671611
I loved the people, and LOVED the flying. Some of the best times of my life. But, the organizational bloat, bureaucratic BS, and constant deployments just became too much.
As you can imagine, it really wears on you to be gone 6 mo's every year risking your life for a counterproductive endless war that the American public barely knows is happening.
Yet the American public happily votes for these wars over and over.
See the sister comment about voting for HC against DT because it's all or nothing.
You're literally restating the tactic, as if that countermands the truth. There is no change unless the behavior changes, which is at the individual level. Why not dispense with the public altogether, if the individuals don't matter? Just leave it to the political parties?
The truth is the current system stabilizes at two parties due to how the rules are written, and that most voters are de facto disenfranchised at the federal (and, largely, state as well) level for a bunch of reasons. Spending any time or energy getting worked up at someone (uselessly) voting one way to try to work within that system for change, versus someone (uselessly) ignoring (or misunderstanding) that system and voting some other way, is counterproductive.
An effective use of one's time is working at the party level (by which, yes, I mean the two that get elected, not the rest) to get better candidates on the ballot, for one's own definition of better, voting in local elections and advocating for or against local candidates, and educating fellow voters on issues that matter to you. This includes working to change the way our elections work to break the two-party stability point and expand the effective franchise, if you care about those things—the means to fix that are the same as anything else.
No, it's really not, because there is no alternative: the voters are the ones who have the ultimate power and responsibility here. This isn't China where the Party controls everything.
>An effective use of one's time is working at the party level (by which, yes, I mean the two that get elected, not the rest) to get better candidates on the ballot
People have been trying that for ages, and it doesn't work; the system itself is broken, and when they do get "better" candidates elected, those candidates don't actually make any big changes because they don't really want to.
>This includes working to change the way our elections work to break the two-party stability point
The only way to do this is to change the voting system altogether to one like those used in Europe. Working to get "better" candidates on the ballot isn't going to accomplish that. I've never seen any popular candidates talk about changing the voting systems.
Popular candidates are the ones that get elected. By definition. So yes, trying to push forward better candidates supported by a party the support of which will automatically raise their profile is the way to fix the problem. Plus, as noted, voting for the changes you want (including reforming voting & districting, if that's your thing) at levels closer to home, where non-big-two candidates or oddballs within the big two might actually win.
How have we reformed elections in the past, against the wishes of entrenched, powerful groups? Replace or win over one of the big two parties (the latter is easier—the former's rarely worked) and push your candidates forward. The Democrats have a strong incentive right now to get rid of gerrymandering, for instance. There are local and state level movements to reform voting—it's mostly a state-level issue—so try to get some initiatives on the ballot. Work with that. One step at a time. Voting Green or Libertarian or whatever for President or Senator's simply pointless, good feels aside—though only barely more pointless than any other vote for a federal office, under the current system. It just doesn't matter.
Feel good, or get something done? For the former, keep on voting however you like. For the latter, work to change the ballot. Initiatives/referendums and influencing candidate selection in the big two. You can try other stuff, but those are the first things you should look at if you're serious about getting things done.
The basic principles are 1) the earlier you're involved in the process (e.g. influencing who's running, what's on the ballot) the more effective you're likely to be, 2) the more you're swimming downstream the better (if you can work in one of the big two, 100% you should), and 3) the smaller scale the election, the more likely you can affect the outcome (obviously).
Those are real stakes.
In 2016 I voted for HC (no love) as a vote against DT. Some things are more existential than others.
Honestly, I can kinda understand why some people would be turned into Trump voters after seeing what kind of people Hillary fans are really like. They're truly horrible human beings. I even had the displeasure of having to sit through a nasty argument between a Trump fan and a Hillary fan while in a carpool last year, and it was pretty interesting how the Trump fan was the one who actually cared about rural voters, and the Hillary fan's attitude was seriously "let them die". It's no wonder things are falling apart in this country.
While ATC isn't fighter pilot cool, it was an amazing job to have when you're 18 at the beginning of the war (2003), but after 11 years of many similar experiences, as I illustrated above, I left. What struck me most, was when I told my Chief, Flight Commander, and SQ/CC I wasn't reenlisting, none of them tried to talk me into staying. I was dual rated - Tower and RAPCON (with ARTCC) - with 4 different facility ratings plus a deployment to Balad AB where we were pushing 1000+ aircraft a day. They could care less to keep their experienced NCOs in, their sole focus appeared to be on their next promotion and/or assignment. It solidified my choice while reassuring me I made the right decision.
Did you not think about that before signing up? What, honestly, did you expect military life to be like?
The entire history of military organisations has been pushing the individuals at the sharp-edge to their limits and beyond in order to achieve the unachievable as directed by the politicians. And usually without anyone knowing about their sacrifice.
There is nothing unusual or inconsistent with the modern USAF. Back in the 1960s "SAC SUCKS" could be found scraped on the interiors of B-52s after 26-hour Chrome Dome missions.
Every Western military suffers from this. Every. Single. One. And the reason is Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy: there are two kinds of people in bureaucracies: those who serve the bureaucracy's goals, and those who serve the bureaucracy; ultimately the organization is led by people who serve the bureaucracy rather than people who serve the bureaucracy's goals. It's simply unavoidable in a military which must necessarily be a large bureaucracy.
"I've been fascinated by war as long as I can remember. I always dreamed of being a soldier, and of experiencing war myself, says "Mike""
The Norwegian forces in Iraq were tasked with training Iraqi security forces [2].
[1] https://www.nrk.no/norge/xl/_mikes_-kamp-mot-is-1.13728665 [2] https://www.nrk.no/urix/norske-soldater-i-irak-1.12382560
The solution is to disentangle leadership and piloting. Currently, because they're all officers, pilots view themselves as leaders of men. However, as the author of this post says, the most leading a pilot will ever do is lead a flight of jets. Piloting has always been a tactical skill, and its place as an officer-exclusive job makes it incorrectly perceived as a gateway to a strategic career.
You only needed a high school degree to fly in WW2, and I honestly believe the Air Force should be hiring pilots based solely on ability to fly vs credentialism.
As a funny aside, the Air Force originally gave up Warrant Officers so that they could have have higher ranked enlisted personnnel (E-9). Afterwards, all of the other services complained that their enlisted personnel were outranked by the Air Force so they got E-9s and didn't have to give up their warrants.
Those numbers seem outrageous to me. Why does it cost so much? Are there frequent plane crashes?
- Maintenance and logistics of those platforms
- Probably amortizing the cost of those planes across each pilot using it for training
No idea how many hours you have to train on the thing in real life to become proficient; but at that rate...yeesh!
I was thinking about this number when the B-2 flew over the Rose Bowl this year :-)
https://www.uso.org/stories/253-inside-the-longest-bombing-r...
Pilot still ends up the cheap part of the equation, given ~$200mil+ per airplane cost.
Whee - are we having budgetary fun yet :-)
To put what you said in another way, every hour an F-22 flys costs the same as hiring someone at a middle class wage for a year.
Not to mention the maintenance requirements on the planes (and the ground crews to do it) and the cost of ammunition used in training (missles aren't cheap)
C17s, KC-135s, A10s, C-130s make up a significant part of the USAF fleet, not to mention the smaller transport/utility craft
The article also says nothing about which kinds of pilots are in shortest supply (fighter, heavy, rotary, carrier-based fighters, VTOLs, etc), or which service suffers most. It briefly mentions the cost of training fighers, but nothing on non-fighter pilots, which must make up the vast majority of onboard pilots, much less the cost of drone pilots. Nor does it mention the rate of departure for all of these MOSes.
IMO, this article went to press with far too little background research. That, or it was edited out later.
My understanding is that the main "skill" commercial airlines are looking for is flight hours - lots and lots of flight hours. The combat-focused skills obviously don't transfer, but an experienced fighter pilot is still very prepared to transition to flying commercial flights if they want to.
My understanding from folks I've talked to in the airline business is that they generally want people who flew fighters. Those people who have previously taken aircraft to their maximum limits are not as freaked when things go wrong in the cockpit of an airliner.
That’s been the military system the world over for millennia - not really a uniquely British thing is it!
And officers don’t just manage - they lead.
Also - you can be a pilot and an enlisted soldier (Sgt and up) in Britain unlike in the US, so we do not differentiate as much for that role as the US does!
That cuts the career by 4 years, meaning that a larger portion of it is training and a smaller portion is being useful. There is then an incentive to let excessively older people keep flying, meaning a reduction in the physical standards (eyesight, etc.) for the people who fly that $150 million dollar jet. Good eyesight matters more than college gunk like "Art Appreciation" and "Intro to Humanities".
Also I have a feeling the older guys can handle the G's ok, better than a lanky 18 year old who hasn't gotten his man-physique yet.
With the technology we have I think I'd rather have an older, wiser 40 year flying my F-22 than a 22 year old, but maybe I'm wrong, I have no stats for their relative performance.
If the idea is simply use willingness to pay for / put up with university as a proxy to test seriousness and dedication, why not ask prospective aviators to get full-face tattoos? Surely that stunt would prove more dedication than a college degree, and waste less of everybody's time.
The thinking is that officers are personally responsible for the command decisions that they execute. If you are ordered to do something you think is illegal it is your responsibility as an officer to refuse. Enlisted are not expected to be held to this requirement. I understand the realities of things, but this is the theory.
The tie-in with a university degree is that that is supposed to have exposed you to enough other thinking that you are better (not to be confused with "well") prepared to make those sort of decisions.
You could ask this same question about almost any requirement. You just finished saying that prior enlisted are seen as better officers. So why not require all officers to have previously enlisted? (in addition to college or instead of college)
And there are blanket answers to your question that apply to just about anything. souprock pointed out that a college degree takes four years, cutting short their career. And any extra hoops or delays reduce the candidate pool. Remember, the article is discussing a shortage of pilots. The answer might be "because otherwise no one will fly your $150 million jet" or "because otherwise your very few, very perfect pilots will make poor decisions from exhaustion".
Since their incoming pipeline is completely full, if you want to use enlisted pilots you are going to have to pull some officers out of line to replace them with enlisted.
I'm not saying enlisted guys can't do the job, just that this is the way the system works, and this part doesn't seem to be too broken. If you're enlisted and want to do it, the government will pay for your entire college and give you a stipend on top (ROTC, GI Bill), you can even do it part time while you are still enlisted in the military[1], then give you a nice raise to become an officer. Pretty good deal.
The numbers might not always add up for free tuition, but there are a lot of schools in the yellow ribbon program that will cover additional costs for servicemembers[2].
[1] https://www.military.com/education/money-for-school/air-forc... [2] https://www.benefits.va.gov/GIBILL/yellow_ribbon/yrp_list_20...
Because very little you learn in college is relevant to whether you can fly those military jets?
Unfortunately the USAF likes to put all their drone pilots at Beale which from what I have heard isn't a very big difference in experience from Minot.
Also right now all drones are required to be full pilots and officers. This is a big factor in the shortages problem. No one wants to through the Academy and then sit at a desk flinging a joystick around. When I was in it was asked all the time why not have warrant officers or let enlisted fly drones? Brass always said no.
https://www.engadget.com/2015/12/28/us-air-force-allows-enli...
Fortunately, a large part of the planes flying today will still be flying for years to come and they won't be flying themselves. E.g. the B52 program was just extended to 2050 I believe. Replacing that stuff will take decades even when it is feasible technically.
Drones are great for slaughtering camel herders armed with AK-47s and TOW missiles. They're not that great against a tech-parity adversary.
Also to compensate for more responsibility and experience.
But we aren't logical beings, and pay is part of social status.
Why are we building manned warplanes?
I had a friend of mine (also with a fully paid Undergrad and Grad in engineering) with the same experience get tapped to do Honor Guard Duty for six months. Seriously.
The 1970s-designed F-16 has a loss rate of 3.4 per 100,000 flight hours. The two 1950s fighters were 52.6 and 44.2 respectively.