From captain to two-star general in a day
October 3rd, 2011 | Flightlines | Posted by Scott Fontaine
Everyone knows how it works: You do a good job and stay out of trouble, and you earn a promotion.
But usually it’s one rank at a time.
Enter the Georgia National Guard, which just received its newest adjutant general. Maj. Gen. Jim Butterworth is responsible for more than 14,000 personnel in the Georgia National Guard, the Georgia Air National Guard and the Georgia State Defense Force.
Butterworth’s new gig comes with a promotion — from captain to major general.
It’s a political move. Butterworth is a former Air Force and Air National Guard pilot with experience flying B-1s. He left the service in 2002 over concerns with the anthrax vaccine. Since leaving the service, he has worked for Delta Air Lines and served as a state senator. And it comes at a time of a major shake-up of Georgia National Guard brass.
If you ask big Air Force, though, Butterworth remains a major. And he told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution he doesn’t plan to show off his new stars while doing business in D.C.
“As I understand it, there are plenty of adjutant generals that show up [at the Pentagon] in a suit. That would be my intention,” Butterworth told the paper.
Tags: air national guard, b-1, georgia
Spice inventor: Don’t smoke spice
September 29th, 2011 | Flightlines | Posted by Scott Fontaine
Spice has been in the news — at least in our newspaper — quite a bit lately.
The Air Force banned it, and then it developed a urinalysis for it. Occasionally, you’d read about some airmen or some cadets getting nabbed for the synthetic marijuana.
Not that many airmen are smoking spice — the surgeon general told me earlier this month it’s “a small slice of the pie” of drug usage — but the over-the-counter nature of the drug makes regulation even tougher.
All of this leaves the creator of spice and other synthetic cannabinoids shaking his head.
“These things are dangerous — anybody who uses them is playing Russian roulette,” John Huffman told the Los Angeles Times. “They have profound psychological effects. We never intended them for human consumption.”
He later added: “You can’t overdose on marijuana, but you might on these compounds. These things are dangerous, and marijuana isn’t, really.”
Didn’t Eisenhower warn against this exact thing?
September 29th, 2011 | Flightlines | Posted by Scott Fontaine
Efficiencies, efficiencies — everywhere, the military is looking for efficiencies.
Well, Time Magazine’s Battleland blog has one idea of how to save almost $25 million: The Air Force could actually write up its own report on how it does its own work.
Booz Allen Hamilton will receive $24,966,507 to write a series of studies including the vageuely titled “Tactics, Techniques and Procedures Report.” (TTPs on what, folks?)
As Battleland’s Mark Thompson points out, “‘Tactics, Techniques and Procedures” is a oft-used military phrase that simply means how we do things around here; the fact that it’s plucked as the title for a multi-million-dollar report seems strange.”
He later adds: “Not sure what’s more appalling: the lousy grammar, or the fact that the U.S. Air Force apparently lacks the ability to do this kind of work on its own.”
Tags: air force, military-industrial complex, TTPs
Cranial vacancy on display
September 28th, 2011 | Flightlines | Posted by Scott Fontaine
Dope du jour Daryn Moran, the former AWOL-but-not-really-AWOL Air Force NCO, is back on YouTube to take up his crusade against his former commander in chief.
This time, the former Ramstein airman, vows to arrest the president for forging his birth certificate. He plans to “gas up the car, drive in my vehicle to Washington, D.C., knock on the president’s door and tell him he’s coming with me.”
Seriously.
In a bizarre, 13-minute screed, Moran takes aim at a wide range of topics: FactCheck.org, Adm. Mike Mullen, Transportation Security Administration, gays and lesbians, the Democrats, Vice President Joe Biden, Muslims, the Secret Service, the elected officials of Omaha, and, puzzlingly, “Jeopardy!”
Here are a few of the juicier quotes:
Read the rest of this entry »
Top honor for combat controller?
September 27th, 2011 | Flightlines | Posted by Scott Fontaine
Columbist Robert F. Dorr wrote last week about Staff Sgt. Robert Gutierrez, the combat controller who stared down death to call in airstrikes and save his Special Forces A-team.
Dorr, who knows a thing or two about the Air Force, was unequivocal in his writing: “His heroism was unrelenting; his dedication to his service and his country, indisputable.
For his actions, Gutierrez is nominated for an Air Force Cross, the service’s second highest valor award. He should, however, receive the Medal of Honor.
Only the nation’s highest distinction is appropriate for the combat controller, who lost half his blood from a bullet wound yet never stopped fighting, calling in one airstrike after another.”
Part of Dorr’s column (no link available, but a similar column is here) is a plea for more “balance” among the services in the awarding of the Medal of Honor.
We want to hear from you: Do you think the Air Force is being short-changed? Should Gutierrez receive the Medal of Honor? Feel free to add your comments below.
Tags: afghanistan, AFSOC, air force, combat controller, medal of honor
Swingin’ for the fences
September 27th, 2011 | Flightlines | Posted by Scott Fontaine
The Air Force women’s softball team wrapped up the gold medal at the 2011 Armed Forces Softball Championship last week — and that gives me plenty of reason to link to this fun story from the service’s greatest C-17 reserve unit stationed at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Wash.
Staff Sgt. Lindsay Ciullo serves with the 446th Aeromedical Staging Squadron and has played on the Air Force softball team for the past four years and the All Armed Forces tam for the past three years. She is also the only reservist on Air Force squad — an interesting trivia point she would like to see change soon.
“When I talked to my unit about going through the softball process, no one had any idea that the program existed,” she said. “I want them to know it’s possible for reservists to attend training camps for sports at the Air Force level. To me, the more people who are aware of this and want to tryout will help keep the Air Force sports program alive.”
So, are you a reservist who wants to represent your service in one of 16 sports? Here’s a link that can tell you how.
Tags: 446th aw, air force, c-17, jb lewis-mcchord
Aloha, ladies…
September 26th, 2011 | Flightlines | Posted by Scott Fontaine
The Air Force just celebrated its 64th birthday (you don’t look a day above 63!) and naturally that meant photos of celebrations across the world.
Well, it looks like the folks at Hickam had one hell of a shindig. Check out this photo from Senior Airman Lauren Main:
This leaves me with many thoughts (tattoo on the dancer in foreground, anyone?), but perhaps the most important is this one: Why didn’t the Pentagon folks hire these dancers to perform in D.C.? Swing and a miss, Air Force. Swing and a miss.
Online career tips for Air Force civilians
September 26th, 2011 | Flightlines | Posted by Scott Fontaine
I was looking for a good photo to accompany this post -- and the Air Force already had some stock imagery available. What a service!
It’s a tough job market out there, and some civilian Air Force employees might be scratching their heads about what’s next for their career.
The service is there to help you out. It is offering a series of webcasts for its GS-7 to GS-11 employees — which it puzzlingly calls “civilian airmen” — to help plan and manage their careers. Information will include “topics as planning for the next job, how education affects careers, and more,” according to a news release. “The webcast series illustrates the Air Force’s commitment to developing airmen.”
Read all the details — like when and how to log on — here. But read about it quickly; the first webcast starts tomorrow morning.
Skynet becomes self-aware
September 20th, 2011 | Flightlines | Posted by Scott Fontaine
If this launches a Hellfire toward you, take solace knowing a human wants you dead. (Air Force photo Staff Sgt. Brian Ferguson)
When it comes to unmanned airplanes, how much autonomy is too much?
The Washington Post offers one glimpse of the future of UAVs. It talks about an ongoing project to increase the capability of identifying, targeting and firing upon targets — with no humans anywhere in the kill chain. (Scared yet?) The article didn’t identify which organization specifically was behind the push; an exercise took place at Fort Benning, Ga., but no military officials were quoted. Still, it’s not much of a secret that the defense industry has been pushing the Defense Department hard to increase “autonomous strike,” a nice way of saying a computer algorithm will decide whether one person lives or dies.
So how does this play at that five-sided black hole on the Potomac? Not so well, unsurprisingly. Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz was in our building last week and talked about a need for more autonomy in UAV operations — but I highly doubt he’d be a proponent of autonomous strike. (In never arose as a topic of discussion.) The chief told Air Force times last October that the lethal nature of today’s UAVs requires an officer making a strike decision.
The Air Force, in its official technology look-ahead study, doesn’t foresee autonomous strike either. Then-Chief Scientist Werner Dahm unveiled the Technology Horizons study in September, but he repeatedly said autonomous strike is not part of the future for the Air Force.
That’s something that we have policies [against], for well-founded reasons, that we will not go down that path in the timeline that we’re talking about here,” he also told a rountable interview in September. “And frankly, we lose almost nothing by having the human on the loop to make the strike decision. The real benefits of autonomy are not in that very last moment where the strike decision is made, but in the whole chain of events and the coordination that leads up to that.”
Geopolitics of fighter jets, explained for all
September 19th, 2011 | Flightlines | Posted by Scott Fontaine
Confused about the whole on-again, off-again nature of the sale of F-16s to Taiwan? Let our favorite Taiwanese animators explain it:
Tags: china, f-16, geopolitics, taiwan