OK, everyone take a breath - but I think this concept is important. First of all, we are all on the same team working towards ONE and only one objective at this point as far as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are concerned. Guys flying humanitarian missions in Africa would be working towards another objective. Considering this is football season, this is no different than a football team - everybody has a role to play towards the goal, but everyone's role is different. Not everyone can be as important as the QB, but everyone has to do their particular job to get things done. People like the QB need to be running 100% all of the time, if they "drop the ball" (sts) the team suffers big. Others get a little more leeway to make errors or not operate at 100% sometimes; but at other times, if they perform at less than 100%, the costs wil be large. There are some plays were the defensive safety can be out of position (running play where the runner is stopped at the line) with no penalty at all, then there are plays where the safety being out of position will result in a touchdown. Keep that analogy in mind, I'll get back to that later. (By the way, I have never claimed that MY job is one of those QB type jobs - I have always been in a support role including, and especially, my time in the F-15 - more like that safety example)

Now we need to talk about manning. Let me use your monthly budget as an analogy. Let's assume that you have $10,000 in debt and $8,000 to put towards it. You have two options - you can divide the $8,000 evenly amongst all of the creditors, or you can allocate more resources to the more important bills and leave the others for later. I don't know about you, but I would go with option two. I would figure out what are the more critical bills (mortgage, utilities, groceries) and pay those at close to 100% to keep a roof over my head and the lights on, and the do the same down the line until the money is gone. Maybe one of my creditors would go without money for the time being, maybe not, we'd have to go through that process to figure it out. In the USAF, we don't have enough people to man everything at 100%, so we are going to have to figure something out using one of those same two options. Considering that we are in an actual shooting war with US troops getting maimed and killed on a nearly daily basis, it is obvious to me that we need to prioritize our manning "spending" to take care of that first - so that means option 2.

Don't take this the wrong way, unless it applies to you, then take it however you want. As long as US soldiers are dying and being injured in ground combat, not a single one of us should think that our job is so important that the world would stop without us - we are supporting the ones on the ground. That's it. Until you are walking down the road wondering if every pile of trash is an IED, every person on the sidewalk is wearing explosives, or every building hiding a sniper - you are not that important to me relatively speaking. If you don't see this mission as the most important, you are beyond help.

Given that we now have a goal, to keep US forces on the ground from being injured or killed, we need to figure out how to spend our capital to best get there. Keep in mind that we also have to be concerned about future wars, but let's forget about that for now. Let's focus solely on how we will keep those soldiers from getting killed or injured.

The first thing to do is prioritize the bills - to figure out what roles have a direct impact on that mission, what roles have an indirect effect on that mission, and what roles have no impact on that mission. For you safety geeks, think "causal". As we do that analysis, we will see that certain jobs are similar to the QB - they have to be ready 100% of the time and when called upon they need to perform at 100%.

Sidenote: this is not to say that every single mission is a mission where the asset needs to be at 100% - sometimes you just CAP/refuel/CAP and go home. What I am saying is that these are the assets that, when that critical situation presents itself, we have a 100% chance of having a 100% qualified manipulator at the controls who can be 100% effective at taking care of 100% of the mission.

These are the assets that have missions where the cost of failure is unbearable and the randomness of these events prevents you from pre-stacking the deck. On these assets, you need to man the controls with your 100% team 100% of the time. Let's use the A-10 as an example: most of the time the A-10 goes out, orbits, gets gas, orbits, repeats, then goes home. No big deal. But, sometimes, the A-10 goes out, orbits, then gets tasked with providing CAS to US or Allied troops in close contact with the enemy who are about to overrun our position. In this case, the cost of failure is unbearable - an overrun position means all US forces killed/injured/or captured (which in some cases is worse than killed). That A-10 needs to be 100% effective on target ID, he needs to be 100% effective on weapons employment, and he needs to be 100% on doing everything within his control to ensure that these US forces are protected. Even though this mission may only occur once every 180 days, if that one time ended in failure the cost would be unbearable. So, despite the low odds of occurence, the cost mandates that you man the controls with your 100% people every time.

Other assets have the luxury of being able to identify these missions ahead of time. Using the C-5 as the example, you usually have at least some notice before the mission is launched what that nature of the mission is. I don't care if it is 1 hour or less, you have some forewarning. An example would be a medevac mission going to a strange field in marginal conditions and requiring extraordinary experience to ensure success. For this type of mission, you have the luxury of stacking the deck and putting the A-team in (IP and AC, senior AC and senior CP, anyone but the squadron CC, etc.). The cost of failure is unbearable, but the advance warning allows us to stack the manning. Because the majority of the missions are not of this time-critical nature, you don't have to man 100% of the sorties with 100% A-team - you can have any qualified crew fly any of these missions because the cost of the mission not being successful is not that great. Most of your missions could slip 24 or more hours with no major detriment to the mission, most of your missions could weather divert with little effect, etc. Therefore, these assets could sustain a different manning model than the first type of asset.

Putting this all together, what does this mean. When we start considering new manning models for the future, we use these priorities when analyzing the potential for any changes. This means we identify those assets that are directly supporting the troops and have to be manned with extra-qualified personnel, and we don't even consider sending them less-than-qualified candidates. Those other assets, the ones with the luxury of forewarning, may be able to sustain the lowering of entry requirements. Those assets that have indirect effects on the mission may even be able to have reduced numbers in manning as they can afford to mx or ops cnx with little to no effect on the primary mission. Those with no effect on the mission can endure even greater cuts, as the mojority of their ops could be eliminated and the effects on the troops would be nil.

Unfortunately, putting this into action, I clearly see ISR (U-28, RC-12, UAS) as one of those assets where that most important mission can pop up without warning and the cost of failure would be unbearable. The UAS is one of those assets where, when the mission that is the difference between our troops living and dying pops up, the crew needs to be 100% capable. 100% capable can only be ensured with 100% experience. 100% experience means anyone except recent UPT grads and non-rated pilots.

This concept is even more critical because there is no supervision in the UAS capsule for the UAS pilot. He is it, when we say we need 100% accomplishment, it is 100% reliant on the UAS operator sitting in the seat at the time. That C-5, on the other hand, has built-in supervision in the form of the AC. As a matter of fact, that brand-new guy could just sit in the seat and do nothing, and the mission would still be accomplished - the rest of the crew would step up. And, since we would have forewarning whether this is one of those critical missions, we could have even left the C-5 new guy back at base.

So, if we are looking to add bodies to the pool just to add bodies to the pool, there are better places to put them. If we need to add non-rated officers to the pool, let's put them in assets such as the C-5 (and other similar crew-served aircraft) where there are others who could take over if required.

Unfortunately, the USAF leadership is not doing this kind of analysis. They are doing exactly what most of the responses on this board look like - "It's not an airplane, so put the new guy there." - end of story.