MMA will have no FE's, that is true. But VP will have P-3's (and hence FE's) for a good 10 to 15 years or so. Sailors applying for FE with 10 or so years in the Navy already should be able to have a full and complete career as a VP FE.
Agreed, as alluded to (poorly) in my previous post. My question would be more in the line of even tho the P-3's will be around for a long time, the squadrons will be transitioning one at a time (or faster) starting in the 2011-2012 time frame. As that happens, the FE's from those squadrons will have nowhere to go in the FE rate, as I doubt very seriously that the other remaining squadrons will have the ability to absorb them,along with still training new FE's in the rag. It is an interesting problem, manpower-wise, and does leave some risk for the career minded young sailor looking at FE as a rate. We discussed this problem some when they were proposing a replacement concept, but no real solution that "took care of" those guys seemed to be very apparent. The UAV idea is interesting, but there is still a lot of ambiguity as to how the MMA will be integrated with UAV's. Whether or not the VP community/squadrons themselves will "own" any of them, or simply be a remote/aux control platform depends a lot on what direction the DOD goes with UAV buys/implemention. (Type and manning) I can see how it would be difficult to get people to sign on for FE under those concerns, but I wouldn't say that they are necessarily getting bad gouge about the P-3 going away. You could very feasibly get caught in a situation where you are in one of the squadrons that transitions first and as a junior FE you are now forced to transition to a new rate. The contract maint also would limit the direct trans to maint, and I know from talking to some of the FIT guys and program managers that I know on this thing they are leaning really heavily towards that option right now. Another AW rate would really be the only option to keep in the air as more and more transition squadrons come in, and that will require more school, etc, all the while those schools are still producing new SS1/SS3 guys to fill the seats from within. It is a tough problem, and an interestin challenge. I was curious if they had made any headway or if those guys were going to suffer the needs of the navy "man without a country" phenomenon, but I guess that there is no clear answer yet. Probably still some time to look at that but not a lot! It will really get interesting if the community decoms a couple of squadrons or so to "reshape" for the new platform. The rumblings are out there!