Heard of guys getting them in the Guard, but it's not easy.

He has many times mentioned my being gone 'all the time' during his upbringing, which is a huge exaggeration on his part, since I rarely wored more than 12-15 days a month. And when I was home, I spent lots of hours coaching his basketball, baseball, soccer teams and flying the J3 Cub with him.

But if you're not home for dinner -every night- well, he and my 3 other kids saw it as me being gone, 'all the time'.

His hang-up now is, he's got a steady girlfriend and he doesn't want to be gone from her at all. At All. As in, never.

When I was 23 I had a steady girlfriend too, for 3 years, but I wanted to fly, badly (I had over 4000 hours at 23).

I was about to ask her to marry me just before I left for UPT, until she said,

"You don't expect me to wait for you, do you?"

Well, long story short, she broke my heart and I took it out on every woman I dated for the next 5 years!

Now my wife and 3 daughters are trying to get even... for all of them!

My mom just laughs and says, "Serves you right!"

So anyway...my son and not many of his friends are interested in joining the military and/or flying for a living. I doubt they could put their phones down and stop texting long enough to get through a 1 hour lesson anyway.

Short of pilots? Well, yes. But the real problem is that the USAF refuses to budge from its model of requiring pilots to be full time administrators and part time pilots. My opinion is that we've got plenty of pilots. Most of them are just too damn busy doing the job of SrA and MSgts in support career fields. Each squadron could probably cut 20% of its pilots if it could get rid of the following additional duties:
- DTS
- Resource Advisor
- MICT
- Readiness, UDMs
- Awards & Decs
- Execs

On the other hand, each squadron could really use:
- A Personnel NCO instead of a bunch of Execs
- A Finance NCO instead of an RA and DTS Flight
- A Contracting NCO instead of an RA and End of Year UFR Czar
- An IT person who can actually do IT work like hook up computers and keep the printers working.
- Zero ancillary training. It's "ancillary" and by definition has nothing to do with the primary mission.

But hey, what do I know? I'm just an AMC pilot who's been muddling through this for 19 years. I've never been a 4-star exec or aide-de-camp, so I suppose I'm lacking the "big picture" that explains why it's smart to use an organization's most highly trained/paid/scarce resource to do the work of low to mid level Airmen.

Heck you don't need an NCO, a GS-5 would be just fine. In your plan that's 5 more civilians per flying squadron.

Assuming long as you keep a ratio of about 1 pilot retained for every 20 civilians hired the AF saves money by reducing UPT costs. If you cut demand for UPT slots you BRAC a base and return 100+ pilots to big blue and who knows how many millions are saved.

The AF gets better and more experienced pilots for Day 1 of the campaign vs a JATWSH or North Korea scenario.

Congress gets a cheaper, more combat effective military plus dozens of jobs in their district.

Everybody wins in this scenario, what's not to like?

What's not to like? (I agree with you in concept.) I am a pilot and currently do all or part of the management duties listed above which I detest. There's a talent shortage. You can't find/retain someone sharp enough to take over the "management" functions currently done by the highest educated/experienced managers in the squadron (pilots). Nobody who can take over the level of staff work currently done by pilots (and some other officers and some smart NCO's) will work for GS-5 or even GS-12 pay.

I respectfully disagree. The GS's at my last squadron (Navy training command) were significantly better at their administrative support function jobs than any pilot I ever met, because it was their only job, they had been doing it for 10+ years, and they actually wanted to do the job.

Every time I got good at my "ground" job, the Marine Corps decided it was a good idea for me to switch jobs and learn another ground job. I did all of this while flying 6-8 hours per month. It was one of the most blisteringly offensive examples of belligerently intentional mismanagement of human capital resources that I have ever seen. It was the defining reason for my decision to get out. I couldn't in good conscience stand by and watch the utter failure in leadership anymore.

You mean actually put personalists back in the CSS????? What would we do with our time if orders were efficiently processed and pay documents handled appropriately. I would have to find real work to do for 2/3ds of the drill weekend.

Experience aside, the continuity they provide is huge. If you fly a night line you're out of the office for about 36 hours and you are completely out of the loop when you get back and god help you if your coworkers who did know what was going on are flying when you get back. The laziest, most stereotypical government worker who sits in the office from 9-5 but knows what is going on will get more done than any flyer could dream of.

Sure keep scheduling, training, safety, tactics and stan eval in the hands of the flyers, but if you can throw a dozen plus bodies at each shop the workload would be manageable even with a the present level of qweep.