You guys have your PMOS. You have a pipeline and career path very similar to winged aviators. You guys are getting MQ-9s (or some variant of it). We’ve arguably ponied up some very solid guys to command VMU. One of them was a very capable and well respected AH-1W driver who should’ve been an HMLA CO. Your PMOS doesn’t have enough depth to have pure MOS COs yet. I honestly don’t know what else you guys want.
Based off of my conversations in training and elsewhere with VMU, You guys seem to be very eager to be a part of the fires and effects game, but have little actual ambition to fully understand what that means with in the limitations of your current capability. There are some structural issues with retention across the services and VMU is no exception to that, but some of this attitude is internal to your community. When I start speaking basic PGM employment envelopes, laser geometry, and CFF with VMU and get handed some eye rolls, You can understand other communities frustrations with how you guys operate... and I’m not even including the perennial flying FOD/Metal bird strike hazard in an objective area you guys could create. Sometimes you can be your own worst enemy.
You're preaching to the choir man.
Yes, we've had some solid CO's, and I worked for the one of which you speak. But the guy who followed him was a DASC turned UAV guy, and now a Prowler guy. That's tough for continuity, and each squadron may do things drastically differently.
Is it getting better? Sure. But we're not there, and 30 years of somewhat botched history has made it tough.
We're not ready for MQ-9. We say we are, but... We're not at that level- some of us are, but we're wearing pilot/NFO wings on our chests. I argue that our training pipelines are too short, and our T&R manual doesn't have enough codes and too many of them can be completed in the simulator. Very few of our WTIs can hold a candle to other aviation communities' WTIs.
One of those awesome COs (a short, bald, Harrier guy) told me once, "Swanee, one day we'll be able to run, but first we have to figure out how to take the clown shoes off."
I want buy in, I want money for legitimate training and a legitimate training pipeline. I want my peers to have to have the same level of aviation knowledge that we were required to have when we winged. I want my peers to be better and I want the bar to be higher. I want the "It's just a UAV" attitude to go away.
You guys should absolutely be frustrated when you work with VMU. We've spent too much time operating in a ROZ, on a preprogrammed route, circling in the overhead pointing our camera at whatever we see, without actually knowing what being really good at what you do means.