crewdawg

I 100% believe it. Some of the worst hate I've seen has been from former Guard/Reserve folks. It's mostly the generation that served before 9/11. One of them thought I was lying to him when I told him how much I've deployed as a Guardsman. He was clearly from the generation where the ARC was more of a flying club than an operational force. He was also just a line pilot and not a company representative. Aside from one of my returns to work (back and forth on my orders), I've generally been left alone with my MLOA. However, I only ever go on long term MLOA to deploy every couple years and TDYs here and there. I avoid full-time MIL like the plague.

As always, a few bad apples give the rest of us a bad name. Not that I agree with the "one person craps their pants, everyone wears diapers," way of doing business.

Drum

Blue Falcon much?

That's about as tone deaf a post I've seen here in a long time.

You should be ashamed of yourself.

p3flteng

you are comparing apples to oranges, a civilian guy is not the same.

Did that guy break the law? Although in very poor taste, the F18 guy was actually serving a role in the defense of this country, and whether he did it voluntarily or not, is irrelevant. The country needs Reserve members to/for our nations security, and they are protected under law. Period.

Would you prefer that the reserve slot goes infilled, and then they actually put another AD guy on back to back deployment/ orders? (Take a look at active duty retention rates and tell me that’s a great idea) Or worse, a slot is infilled and our war fighting capability Is degraded?

Look, there is a reason that USERRA was written into law in the first place, and it’s because people couldn’t serve their country and be employed by a civilian with out penalties. Do you think the law was written for the member? I think it was written for our country, in order to capture that manpower they so desperately needed and to this day rely on so heavily.

For every member that has gotten a good deal or benefited from it, there are literally thousands of other suck stories.
Its the law, just say thank you and move on.

BCan

The law needs to be revised. No one has issues with deployment orders. It’s the small minority that use it for avoiding crappy seniority (and that’s usually the plan from day 1) or avoiding holiday flying with a few days worth of orders.

BL. The law is abused and everyone knows it.

OOfff

I don’t have a horse in this race as a non-user of USERRA protections, but LOL @ this sentiment

Retired Guy

Precisely my point. The new hire that flew a desk at Eglin to avoid crappy seniority? I met him and he was not shy about how he was using USERRA and Delta couldn't do a thing about it. Legal? I guess so. Honorable? Not in my opinion.

Buddy in the CPO (and also former USAF) despised the abusers of the USERRA laws as well.

rickair7777

As unit leadership, I discouraged people from banging out for all of year one or two. It only hurts those reservists who come behind you. I would also disapprove requests for such orders at my level, unless of course it was a critical requirement of some sort.

But fundamentally if the DoD is willing to PAY you to go on orders, the orders are legit and legal. There's no such thing as "hey we don't really need you but if you want to come hang out at the unit for a year instead of going to work we can pay $180K".

You could in theory enact law such that only invol orders can be executed during the first year of one's civilian employment. But two big problems with that idea...

1) The reality is that the vast majority of civilian employers don't care about the first or second year vs. other years. Really the only people that care are airline people and even then it's only low/mid seniority FO's.

2) Most civilians change jobs a lot more often than airline pilots (especially mil who are mostly at a career-destination job). USERRA isn't a special carve out just for pilots, it applies to many other folks too. In some field a job change every two years is about average.

BCan

i don’t disagree with you at all. However, for the 90% you speak of, the other 10% abuse the system. I know of one unit that has upwards of 10 full time AGR billets. It’s a revolving door for those who get hired and drop years of orders to build seniority. Guys go into the hiring process with the intention of leaving for up to 5 years. That was not the intent of USERRA.

I also agree with you that it hurts those that don’t game the system.

CX500T

For a data point, for the pre 9/11 guys.

I joined in 97. (Enlisted reservist)
Commissioned in 01.
Active 01-2012
Reservist again 2012-now

I'm on my 15th deployment over 90 days.

10th that's over 210 days. (Have been gone up to 14 months straight at one point)

If this deployment ends as scheduled I will have done 111 months deployed in 24.5 years.

9-1/4 YEARS

That's like 37% of my time in the military is deployment. I didn't even attempt to add training dets, short underway, etc. Considering I've been a reservist for about half of the time, thats a ton of deployments.

When I was active duty I was spending well over half my time deployed.

And I was pretty much fleet average.

Squadron deployment. Then an IA, then as soon as you get back from that, squadrons deploying again.

Do another IA. Go to shortened shore tour. Back to a fleet squadron. 7 month cruse becomes a 9 month then get surged.

Go to reserves, 330 day to Afghanistan. After that keep on either getting tapped at min dwell for something that sucks, or volunteer early and waive dwell and get something that's less sucky.

The reserves have been ridden hard and put away wet going on 20 years now.

I just hit the burnout / IDGAF point this week because of all the covid insanity on top of standard deployment stuff.

3 star staff counting down the days until im forced out.

I'm honestly hoping they don't grant continuation or promote me at this point.




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GucciBoy

I’m shocked that you have a friend in the CPO. Can we go back to last week when you weren’t on this forum please?