Gentlemen, I understand what you're saying about those cush desk jobs. I've got one right now.
I spent 135 days over in Turkey in 2002 as a KC-135 Guard pilot refueling guys like 1seat1engine while they flew ONW sorties.
By winter 2002, our Guard unit had furloughed pilots stacking up like chordwood so I moved over to a cush desk job in TACC at Scott AFB working diplomatic clearances. From the time that I started the job, I worked with a lot of other airline pilots who were taking mil leave and soaking up a nice cush desk job. We worked 6 days a week, but only 8 hour shifts because our bosses found that we were pretty worthless after 8 hours. I was there during the big push to preposition stuff for Afghanistan and stayed in that job during offensive ops in both Afghanistan and Iraq. There were many shifts where I sat in my chair at the beginning of my cush 8 hour shift and didn't get up until my replacement tapped me on the shoulder. I personally worked dip clearances for more than a dozen emergency medevac flights to Landstuhl, GE.
In the spring of 2003, my wife (an AF Reserve critical care nurse) got a sweet deal 180 day cush TDY to Frankfurt, Germany. She worked at the Landstuhl hospital. When she got back, she started showing me slides of some of her patients. I made her stop after about the fourth slide. Two of her pictures are indelibly etched in my memory. During the next year, there were a lot of nights that I would hold my wife as she cried in her sleep. Sometimes she'd wake up, sometimes she wouldn't. As long as I live, I'll never get those photos out of my memory.
Once the major airlifts for Afghanistan and Iraq were complete, I moved over to another cush desk job in the DC area. My job is to make sure that the US is prepared for any WMD (weapons of mass destruction - chem, bio, radiological, nuke, high yield explosives) attacks. I got to spend a couple of weeks over in Hawaii over the last couple of months for an exercise (
http://starbulletin.com/2006/08/06/news/story09.html). Total cush job; I even got to the beach twice during my time there - once during daylight hours.
I'd give my left nut to be able to volunteer for a TDY to Iraq or Afghanistan, but the DoD won't allow us to go; they say that our WMD mission is too critically important.
Yep, there's nothing like a cush desk job.
Gentlemen, peel back a few layers on the onion. If it were a cush desk job, it has probably already disappeared with defense cutbacks.
And 1seat1pilot wasn't kidding about the Guard & Reserve policing our own for abuse of the system. There may be a couple that are abusing the system, but they're not as prevalent as you'd like to think.