hindsight2020

Indeed. Look, basically people are speaking the quiet parts out loud in here, and some are gonna get miffed about it. It's not that surprising, in what is essentially is a MLOA echo chamber.

It's an open secret, it's discussed widely in reserve circles, and I personally have no particular motivation to put effort in ensuring civi only pilots never become aware of the practice. It's a legal loophole plain and simple, and good bad or indifferent, it's the law. But as you said, people should also have the freedom to be critical of it without being accused of lack of patriotism. I'll be the first one to push back on that "you can't be critical of the military as a civilian" canard.

On a personal level, the one thing I have the most objection to is the VA disability payment and rating abuse. This encompasses more than pilots mind you, it's an at-large national problem imo but I digress.

I do think current MLOA benefit retainment allowances is ripe for abuse; it is abused, and it's legal. That's my opinion of course, which doesn't matter. For whatever it's worth, there are other ways of splitting the middle on this issue without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. IMO, if USERRA protected seniority accrual, but did not protect longevity pay accrual, this problem would vanish overnight. I think that would be a reasonable compromise. I can hear the blood curling screech from the MLOA bat caves though. Not my fight, just saying there's other ways to do this without creating polarization. To each their own.