The NCMAS didn’t have much to say about efficiency in our problematic, run-down, pre-WWII depot-level maintenance facilities (page 38) in those concentration areas. The report, discussed in another thread, also explains plenty of retention factors.
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Pilot shortage?
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I’ve set up training with guard units a couple time. We had to phase the training, crawl walk run style. Verbatim quote “we have guys that will be showing up after a layover with Delta, we need to work them up.”
No doubt the thousands of hours of experience they had are worth the couple of reps to get current, though. Obviously easier than teaching a FNG that’s just trying to get out of chocks on them.
No one expects ANG units to lead a strike against a peer adversary at the kickoff. They are, however, way quicker bang for your buck than taking an off the street college graduate and turning them into a competent wingman.
I get the resource constraint. Maybe we need less active duty nuggets to match the flight hours in a given squadron. We either need quality or quantity: right now we have neither.
Somewhere, a more efficient use of salary needs to happen because we are paying a lot of highly trained individuals to be memorandum formatting experts and excel jedis. Spoiler alert: a lot of really valuable highly trained people are making a break for it, even in the fucked up economy of covid.
Saying 'we've always done it this way' works until it doesn't and when it doesn't, it'll be too late. Having talked to lots of guys who flew in the 80s, it hasn't always been this way.
I get the resource constraint. Maybe we need less active duty nuggets to match the flight hours in a given squadron. We either need quality or quantity: right now we have neither.
Somewhere, a more efficient use of salary needs to happen because we are paying a lot of highly trained individuals to be memorandum formatting experts and excel jedis. Spoiler alert: a lot of really valuable highly trained people are making a break for it, even in the fucked up economy of covid.
Saying 'we've always done it this way' works until it doesn't and when it doesn't, it'll be too late. Having talked to lots of guys who flew in the 80s, it hasn't always been this way.
Not sure how this is germane to my point. Perhaps you could elaborate.
I’m arguing that, on the maintenance facilities side, that Navy/DOD is not in a good place with the few depot-level maintenance facilities they have. They are going to have to spend to make it better, so spreading out the fleet and facilities wouldn’t hurt.
For physical location of training systems and ranges, I agree with you, but only because we’re not very good at virtual training or virtual reality yet.
For physical location of training systems and ranges, I agree with you, but only because we’re not very good at virtual training or virtual reality yet.
But if you needed them to, you could throw an ANG unit into a workup period and they could do it. History has shown just that. F-16s from Syracuse (NYANG) and McEntire (SCANG); A-10s from New Orleans (LAANG), RF-4s from Birmingham (ALANG) and Reno (NVANG) and a bunch of tanker squadrons, all participated on day 1 of Gulf War 1. The SCANG dudes were even flying wild weasel lines.
Most of the rest of them were on ready reserve status- flying their asses off, waiting on a short recall that they were either going to join on a tanker to take a C-5 into an airbase somewhere, as we thought that we'd be taking some serious losses within the first few days- especially in the A-10 community.
Though that was the Guard of the 80s. The Guard today is smaller, with far fewer fighter squadrons than then. We're MQ-9 heavy now- but that isn't a bad thing.
SELRES_AMDO
Well-Known Member
The Navy's restructuring of depots into FRCs removed a whole bunch of skilled civil service billets. The Navy pushed for contractor maintenance to reduce labor costs. Then big Navy severely slashed contractor costs from their budgets due to OSD/OMB level budget guidance. So that plan totally backfired.
The maintenance side of the house also faces manning problems. We have qualified maintainers who try to go SELRES and are told there's no billets for their rate. So they can be some other rate or not join. And when they do get to keep their rate they rarely get to turn wrenches. Most never see a hardware unit in the reserves. I know many good sailors who left to the Army/Air guard since they could actually go to a hardware unit and ride out the rest of their career doing something meaningful.
It's a hard sell to get a AD2 with 5 years and tell him to do 15 more years in random NR units where he will transfer every 3 to 5 years and be expected to travel on his own dime.
The maintenance side of the house also faces manning problems. We have qualified maintainers who try to go SELRES and are told there's no billets for their rate. So they can be some other rate or not join. And when they do get to keep their rate they rarely get to turn wrenches. Most never see a hardware unit in the reserves. I know many good sailors who left to the Army/Air guard since they could actually go to a hardware unit and ride out the rest of their career doing something meaningful.
It's a hard sell to get a AD2 with 5 years and tell him to do 15 more years in random NR units where he will transfer every 3 to 5 years and be expected to travel on his own dime.
Yep. They are called the reserves for a reason. There's a minimum level of competence that gets maintained, and when that level needs to rise, money, time, and resources get pointed at the problem pretty quickly.
HM does what you guys are talking about, to an extent. Seemed they always had reservists in Bahrain helping out. Not that we should use HM as a stellar example of community management, but it does happen. Probably helps they have a whole admin department good at getting people's travel claims cleared every week.
Those aren't the facilities I'm talking about. Simulators of various flavors and multi-level security facilities, which is a huge deal for Tacair folks, and is a significant investment. Replicating those at each reserve base would be an extraordinary expense that some folks may not realize or appreciate.
Sure. But all three services are flying the F-35 now. Perhaps it's doable with some joint effort of all parties who have skin in the game.
Could an AFRES guy do a workup and deploy from a boat without much effort? I think that based on what everyone says about that airplane the pilot skill development (of an already experienced guy) would be easier than the admin queep of getting an AFRES guy to volunteer to live on a boat.
It's not quite that simple. You need a bunch of MLS facilities just to operate the aircraft, mission plan and train, etc. This is something that existing AD bases are already way behind on. Replicating those facilities is cost prohibitive.
Your second paragraph makes no sense to me. This has nothing to do with training for the boat.
I don’t disagree and this is the logical “no” argument. But now we find ourselves like a monkey swinging from vine to vine. We can’t afford more airframes (perhaps because we by bloated systems that take years to field and try to do too much) but we can’t keep good people in those airframes. In effect, from my distant outpost, it looks like we are buying big-league equipment and training up youngsters to fly them but then letting them slip away right when they gain efficiencies and capabilities that make them pros. Our current answer of offering some pocket change to stay in is rather short sighted in my nearly pointless opinion.
So, what vine do we reach for next? Money for people or money for aircraft? The reserve solution might be seen as money for both. But @Brett327 is right, it would be expensive and the dollars would come at a cost to something else. Personally I am a believer in people power. I don’t really want any more Captains/Colonels...Admirals/Generals....I want the people that are at that perfect point where they can plan and fight - senior O-3’s to early O-5. I want to keep those people in the game even when they want step away a bit.
I guess the answer is Mo Money?
Mo problems