Notice that I was not saying you were not working hard, I was responding to your comment about us who YOU said were sitting pretty - as if we were born into that privelege. Remember, we joined during Desert Storm 1 and were dealing with multiple contingencies worldwide, so we knew that we would be busy also. Many of us were still on AD during 9/11 and transitioned to the current ops tempo. I realize you joined knowing about the Iraq war, but that does not give you special privileges. You join when you reach the appropriate age, what is happening at the time is beyond your control.

Don't confuse crappy commanders with mission accomplishment. I have never been a fan of our peacetime leadership - and, although we are at war, it seems we are still dealing with peacetime leadership. For example, our current leadership is considering putting non-rated and inexperienced rated personnel in a MWS that is flying combat missions every day. They are putting more effort into designing a new uniform and figuring out when we should wear blues vs. who should we man the UAS with and how can we keep the flow of the most qualified pilots going to the UAS.

If you are recognizing these things, you are showing that operational maturity that I talked about. A brand new Lt in the right seat would not consider those things, his thinking would not extend far outside the aircraft cockpit and his immediate tasks at hand. "Cool, a trip to Germany"

You mentioned AETC, staff, etc. Do you think those assignments take priority over sending guys to an asset that is providing real-time combat support to our warfighters on the ground? How about we send the new and non-rated guys to those jobs? AFPC has been robbing brand-new AC's and IP's from squadrons (especially fighter squadrons) since the '90's and the pace of that has not changed. As far as your CAF friend is concerned, he is one of the few who got ops-ops. By the way, TAMI-21 was not a program to fill UAS slots per se, it was a program to take care of the over-manning (yes, it was over-manning) in the CAF and redistribute those pilots to where they were short. The CAF had been over-manned since the mid-90's, and the situation was not correcting itself with more and more fighters going away to pay for the F-22.

This is your biggest mis-statement and I am going to call you on this one. UAS pilots DO NOT operate at 0/0. I don't care what you think, but what you do in the aircraft is the same as what you do in the sim, it depends on what the asset is doing - if you were flying the C-5 remotely, what would you do differently on your last sortie than what you did in real-life? The fact that your butt was in that cockpit makes no difference - you do what you do to get the JET on the ground. 0/1 (it is 0 knots / 1 g - not 0/0) refers to the speed at which your thought process is ocurring and usually refers to the fact that you have the luxury of stopping and re-evaluating your thought process or actions without fear of catastrophy. UAS pilots do not have that luxury. Whether you want to acknowledge it or not, there is an actual airborne asset carrying several thousand pounds of ordnance, over enemy territory, operating at the same airspeeds as the A-10's out there, integrating with other airborne assets, coordinating with the troops or assets on the ground, coordinating with command authority, and potentially delivering ordnance against an enemy in close contact with friendly troops. There is no stopping to re-group. You see, it is you in the C-5 that has that luxury. At any point you can call a "timeout", you can take any approach around, and you can discuss things with your crew in holding. The USA can't. When operating over an objective, time andquickness of action are of essence. Besides, who is the sole UAS pilot going to discuss things with? He is making the calls on his own, no copilot and 3rd, 4th, etc pilots to call into the cockpit and take opinions. If the UAS pilot took a timeout, the delay could cost troops their lives or could cause enemy troops to live and fight another day (and cause even more Americans to die).

Don't know where you were going with this, but I will try. Every warfighter has to start somewhere, and that somewhere should not be in the role of hte sole decision-maker of an actual airborne asset providing actual support of troops on the ground. As far as the UAS thing, I don't think I have called them the wave of the future, but here is what I have said. They are, unfortunately, at this time the backbone of the aerial support that we are giving troops on the ground. The bulk of ISR missions, and the bulk of ordnance being delivered is coming from the UAS. You may think it right or wrong, but it is what it is. And as long as it is THE support we are giving the troops on the ground, we are obligated to give them the BEST support we can give them. Again, this is part of separating the mission from the poor leadership that you may see. We may disagree that our leadership has decided to switch the bulk of our ISR and CAS support to the UAS, but do you propose to have it be the troops on the ground that suffer from that? http://blog.wired.com/defense/files/...___Flt_Hrs.ppt The leadership has spoken, the UAS is it at the time being, now it is time for our Col's and lower ranking Gen's to make sure that we man the asset with the most qualified people we have. Despite what the leadership does, the minions work to accomplish the mission 100% - and THE MISSION is support of the troops on the ground - for all of us.

I mentioned WWII because you attempted to express your service at a higher level than mine - as if your service is more valuable than ours and your sufferings are greater than ours. As far as the family thing, that is what we all joined into. I delayed getting married for that very reason, others don't. But, just because someone joins with a family, they should not expect to be able to avoid the ops tempo that comes with being a young line pilot in an ops squadron. The family time comes later with the staff job, the AETC tour, or even the UAS tour (although they are working a pretty high ops tempo themselves - just not deploying so often).

To each his own - I probably phrased it a little differently. My stay in decision was based on how much I could contribute to a mission that I saw as worth the effort while not causing my family to sacrifice too much. I didn't rely on the USAF to treat my family any way, that is not their concern - that was my job. To be more exact, I knew that if I did rely on the USAF to treat my family in any way, I would be disappointed. I didn't trust the leadership to do much - that is why my focus was on what I could do to contribute to the mission. And, right now, the mission is supporting the troops on the ground. And, right now, we are supporting the troops on the ground with the UAS.