Sorry for the slow responses. Just finished up a port call and didn't want to use precious beer drinking/sightseeing/lady watching time on AW. I am sure most of you understand.
Meh, maybe prioritize taking care of people, regardless if they are getting out or not. Not taking care of people is one of the reasons we are understaffed. Also, terminal leave helps justify the reasoning for being understaffed. It should be accounted for by Millington in filling billets..
Yeah, no don't get me wrong, I don't like the policy, but I respect that he set expectations. That's more than most. The rest? Yeah, garbage policy.
Your CO is a bit misinformed. Millington isn't going to slash billets because your CO lets people go on terminal. In fact, it's likely to have the opposite effect where they formally see a demand signal for a new person and send the replacement sooner. Also a conversation to have at wardroom planning conferences to get the detailer on the same page.
It's not about slashing billets, it's that they want more billets or at least a higher % of them manned. He claims Millington would just say: "why give you more if you have x% on terminal leave? You obviously don't need them and thus your staff can continue to be remained at x%."
Leave is an entitlement, not a request. At any given point, a command should be able to operate with 8.5% of their people on leave. I wouldn’t care if one is consistent with this kind of blanket policy, that just means they’re consistently wrong.
Take your leave. Drop tues-Thurs leave chits a couple times in a row. When one gets denied, start a paper trail and ask why. It’s literally thousands of bucks this one guy has decided you don’t deserve because he can’t manage his personnel or cares more about perception than reality.
And we wonder why people don’t want to stay in the canoe club run by mutant clowns.
No lie, I have thought about doing this.
Concur with renting. Save money, don't lock yourself in.
I'd have a long conversation with your wife and do some expectation management. If your wife is close to her family, I would very highly consider moving to where they're at. You're going to be gone a lot. And not making a ton of money. The war chest will obviously help, and in my opinion military wives are used to their husbands being randomly gone, but I think this could help her out a lot. Especially coming from an overseas tour. If she's not close with her family or for whatever reason it's just not a good idea, possibly consider going back to where your family is.
Being local to your guard unit would be a tremendous help as well, for fairly obvious reasons. If there's a base you can drive to for the regional that's palatable, do that too. If one of these locations is close to a base for a different regional that you find palatable, consider that. Regionals are desperate for bodies. Don't feel loyalty to the one just because you already have a CJO. Don't jump ship willy nilly, but if you worked at airline x for 6 months and then went to airline y it's pretty understandable to explain at a later interview that you didn't need to commute, etc etc.
The road to the majors may not be easy or super quick, and I would have a conversation about that as well. Not trying to scare you or be mean, but you (and of course everyone else doing rotary transitions) should have realistic expectations.
Appreciate the advice. Based on our current lifestyle and savings rate, I think what will most change will be just the volume of how much and what % of income we're saving and I expect our housing will be more modest compared to what I had in Pensacola; fortunately, base housing at my current location is very modest and we've been doing fine.
Kind of just skimming this, but if you're having such a hard time with your front office/admin, what makes you think the Skipper will approve SkillBridge?
Without re-reading everything I wrote, I think I wrote that I do not expect Skillbridge to be approved. I am expecting I will only be approved to depart on the last day of my PRD, no terminal, no Skillbridge.
The ‘no terminal leave’, no skill ridge etc. policy, especially when overseas, is unreal. I understand manning sucks but there’s a huge majority of people transitioning who don’t have a plan nearly as comprehensive as DanMa. It’s your transition and you only get to do it once and it takes lots of time to plan and do right. Once you make the leap your first role on the outside sets your baseline value in the civilian job market and starting low and trying to work your way up is like trying to raise raising a shitty GPA.
Ha, part of the reason I asked for overseas orders was because I was told most commands understand the difficulty of transitioning overseas and will help you out... bad gouge for the command I ended up at!
It’s a shame they didn’t write SkillBridge such that a CO has to justify a denial to their ISIC, or some other deliberately uncomfortable echelon, using specific reasons. In writing. For each individual denial.
If you’re going to get a pound of flesh like that, there should at least be some admin pain involved.
I can see why it's not, but yeah, I wish it was. Without any teeth behind it, there's no reason any CO would want to approve it other than good will.