So you're saying the failings of the USAF are due to all those utterly incompetent zoo grads who get forced through UPT by congressional intervention?

BS.

Likely true back in 1870, but the large majority of congress people today simply make a list of ten applicants (in no particular order) based on qualifications (at least the academy min admission criteria), and then let the academies pick from those ten. Perhaps surprisingly, most modern congress people find the original patrician system distasteful, so they just kick the ball back to the admissions office. If you somehow have acquired some outrageous notoriety or social media presence at age 17, then yeah they probably exercise their veto power. In any event, the service academies can and will reject congressional appointees who don't meet their standards.

Then there are numerous appointments set aside for enlisted folks.

And I can guarantee you that no congress critter ever intervenes in military training for random cats they don't even remember appointing in the first place. Now if they're on the armed services committee, and if it's their own kid, or some kind of political football (ie Kara), they might follow up. But that's exceptionally rare.

Also think about this... if you took that away from congress and just had the admissions offices do it, that sounds fair right? Weeeellll.... now you have a component of the executive branch hand-picking the future core cadre of the officer corps. They could apply some political criteria to that, and you end up with a military which is asynchronous with the citizens. Maybe best to just leave it with the elected reps. There was a reason for that in the first place.

I beg to differ. Never been an IP but friends I’ve flown with have personally seen two cases. And don’t get me started with foreign military trainees and the Wing King having to coordinate with the friggin’ state department before they can be downchecked. I personally witnessed that as an IWSO.

Congressional, state dept, and senior officer ‘interest’ DOES occur.

And in fairness, most zoomies are absolutely fine - including the two IPs I mentioned. Some Congresspersons aren’t.

It happens, it's extremely rare

That of course is very true, and the nature of diplomacy, foriegn relations, and alliances. Also doesn't help that many allied political leaders do in fact take a very personal interest in the youth of their nobility who get opportunities like that in the first place. Meh. They're not getting commissioned in OUR military.

In rare special cases. It's the nature of people. Not enough to degrade our system (so far).

IDK, but a kid in my UPT class was killed by his father. Dad, a USAF senior doc, insisted son was F-15 material. Son got said F-15 and died in an LOC-I accident in Germany. Not the first of that kind.

It is as simple as this. The United State's Air Force is a broken enterprise. It is the most mismanaged organization I've ever been apart of. They've promoted leaders who are yes men, more worried about being woke and diversity than the mission, and are failed leaders because they're afraid to make the right decisions which would put their future promotion at risk.

Look at how many man-hours the USAF wastes on:
1. outdated, mission failed Promotion System (OPRs EPRs)
2. Orders System
3. Travel Vouchers
4. Endless CBTs created by support and non-combat ops staff.

The active duty USAF has PLENTY of pilots. They just need to make flying the airplanes a priority, promotion worthy, and push back anything and everything they can back to support folks.

Not quite *everything*.

You really don't want staff/support folks representing your warfighter equities at the joint, procurement, congressional, and national command tables. What may seem like wasted warfighters in staff jobs is actually learned lessons written in blood many times over (yeah I get that some Great Americans and/or reservists complain that they're relegated to trivial BS at the COCOM HQ, but some warfighter, somewhere on that staff is making a difference).

I wouldn't even want my XO to be staff... assign an admin professional for admin, etc but leadership should be warfighters. Navy does that right IMO.

Gets back to officer first, pilot second. If you wanted to have a bunch of pilots just fly, the army model works for that (but they have plenty of other combat arms officers to represent them at staff). Of course Army aviation is a combat arms component, it's not *the* mission. For USAF it's *the* mission, for USN it's the 800 pound gorilla (not counting boomers, but that's a stovepipe which doesn't need to be integrated much with joint).

the whole model is antiquated. The constant pcsing, never taking into account that we may have a spouse with a decent career, last minute taskers, line of sight scheduling, feckless leadership. The only guys who ever stay in are either dweebs or too dangerous to get hired by the airlines.

Missing the forest for the trees re. PCS... that came about in part because of the civil war (didn't combat formations going native in the various states) and also for career broadening purposes. Now I think we could keep enlisted local, but officers probably do need breadth of experience.

As for spouses, that problem is an artifact from the past... when a spouse's job was "spouse". Not sure what the solution is there, other than offer them GS jobs with a portability feature.

You could in theory go with a WO pilot program... but that would be a BIG cultural change.

Leadership... yeah that's a problem and if people voting with their feet doesn't force change I don't know what will. Although at some point you need to look in the mirror. I stayed longer than I meant to (or wanted to), and it was because I kept landing in positions where I though I could help or improve things.

That's an artificiality applicable only to FW aviators (and Navy nukes) who can step right into lucrative careers in civvy land. The whole system is not changing just because of a few.

It’s a jobs program. Too big to fail. The bureaucracy IS the mission. The purpose of the DoD is to spend taxpayer money, to which it does exceedingly well.

We’ll never actually go to war with the “near peer” bogeyman.

I hope you are correct