|
Crazycryodude posted:So in light of Herr Trump's recent statements about increasing military spending, what's the current situation like? I'm not an expert, but I've always had the impression that the US military is pretty loving intimidating as is. By no means perfect, and a lot of capabilities have been degraded/forgotten about, but what problems there are have to do more with political meddling (both by actual politicians and Pentagon types) and fighting Operation Bomb Some Dirt for 15 years than not having enough money. Retention of highly qualified/intelligent people. I know I trot this out a lot, but it's a Big Deal...the USAF is offering fighter pilots almost half a million dollars ($432k) to sign up for an extra 9 years when their commitment is up. Now it's not like an increased budget is going to bump up the regular pay scale to replace that $48k/year (until this recent change, it was 25k since 1999), but what it could do is allow the service(s) to stop gutting the support structure. The Air Force in particular absolutely thrashed the personnel, finance, etc career fields as a way to cut the budget...this started in the 90s and hasn't really stopped. Flying squadrons used to have something called an "orderly room" where you'd have some personnelists (and others) managing the most basic functions of the organization. Making sure travel orders were done, people were issued the proper equipment, pay and travel vouchers weren't getting hosed, leave was approved, the commander was signing all the poo poo he needs to sign, etc. They knew the thousands of pages of regulations governing this stuff, because it was quite literally their job. Orderly rooms completely disappeared about a decade ago. They were replaced by a "commander's support staff" which typically consists of whatever female aviators are pregnant and unable to fly, a civilian secretary making about $30k a year until she gets fed up and gets a real secretary job elsewhere, and one or two lieutenants who will work in that office for the next 6-12 months until they switch to the training or tactics shop for career broadening. EVERYTHING is getting hosed up in the meantime, because there's no training for these jobs, and nobody does them long enough to learn the regs. So to compensate, it's been pushed to the individual. Now everyone has to keep track of this poo poo, in addition to mission planning, flying, deploying, going on TDYs, to studying blue, gray, and red systems, to PME (some of which you have to do TWICE because why the gently caress not), getting a masters degree, and maybe trying to get to know their kids and keep the wife happy enough not to sleep around when you're in the sandbox. People are fed the gently caress up and most of the best are getting the hell out. Half a million dollars to stay in a job that's supposed to be one of the coolest loving gigs in the world...a goddamned fighter pilot. And yet, it's not even working. Retention is still hosed. Hiring new pilots is easy. Holding onto pilots with a decade of training and experience is really hard, and there's a massive qualitative difference between the two which the USAF has been vehemently denying for the past 10 years, but is finally starting to recognize. Most of this also applies to other highly valuable career fields, like aircraft maintenance. Except those guys aren't making nearly as much money as pilots, and they sure as poo poo aren't getting 48k a year as a bonus. I'd like to see expansion of the supporting career fields. But it'll never happen.
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2017 04:47
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 10, 2024 10:14 |
|
|
Thanks, that's really helpful. So, basically, more money WOULD help as long as it got spent the right way - namely, on working to (re)build a robust and efficient support infrastructure, not more carriers. But it'll never happen. Is there any way to unfuck it that doesn't involve tearing down and rebuilding the whole thing ("thing" potentially including the political system outside the military and/or society at large)?
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2017 04:58
|
|
|
Crazycryodude posted:Thanks, that's really helpful. So, basically, more money WOULD help as long as it got spent the right way - namely, on working to (re)build a robust and efficient support infrastructure, not more carriers. It sounds like it doesn't need tearing down, its literally something you can throw people at.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2017 05:02
|
|
|
Training and maintenance. There's no point in buying more fancy poo poo if we don't have the money to maintain the poo poo that we already have, and to train people how to use that poo poo effectively. If half your aircraft are unflyable due to a lack of spare parts and maintainers, and you can't even properly use the aircraft that do fly because you aren't funding the simulators and exercises that you need to maintain proficiency, then it doesn't matter how many aircraft carriers or F-35s you buy.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2017 05:25
|
|
|
Wait fighter pilots get 48K a year?
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2017 05:37
|
|
|
I would blow Dane Cook posted:Wait fighter pilots get 48K a year? Thats their bonus in addition to normal salary for signing on an extra 9 years. The air force is so bad they'd rather make just that 48k sitting in the right seat of a CRJ-200!
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2017 05:40
|
|
|
hobbesmaster posted:Thats their bonus in addition to normal salary for signing on an extra 9 years. The air force is so bad they'd rather make just that 48k sitting in the right seat of a CRJ-200! Geez did they ban homoerotic volleyball or something?
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2017 05:52
|
|
|
That's the navy
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2017 05:56
|
|
|
I would blow Dane Cook posted:Geez did they ban homoerotic volleyball or something? Portions of the Air Force have been on a wartime footing since the 1980s, over in the Middle East. From Elf One to monitoring the Iran-Iraq War to Desert Storm to Northern & Southern Watch to OEF & OIF to Libya to Syria, poo poo's worn out and so are the people. But to gloss over a tedious rant that I almost started, yes. Almost everything that was cool and fun and steeped in tradition has been banned. loving images of WWII nose art were banned because it was offensive, for gently caress's sake.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2017 05:57
|
|
|
Meanwhile in the Great Harmonious People's Republic...
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2017 07:21
|
|
|
Crazycryodude posted:So in light of Herr Trump's recent statements about increasing military spending, what's the current situation like? I'm not an expert, but I've always had the impression that the US military is pretty loving intimidating as is. By no means perfect, and a lot of capabilities have been degraded/forgotten about, but what problems there are have to do more with political meddling (both by actual politicians and Pentagon types) and fighting Operation Bomb Some Dirt for 15 years than not having enough money. I’m not opposed to all military spending, but MOAR CARRYURRS is one of the worst things to go for, this side of bringing back battleships.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2017 07:48
|
|
|
JcDent posted:Maybe drone killing could be a part of the capability that makes that system "next gen!" It has already been pointed out that it's about more than grenades. And if it can track and attack drones, maybe it can also provide some defense against the rocket artillery that those drones spot for, no? I remember that. I was the BLUFOR battalion commander on that go around. Better part of a combined arms battalion smashed into a bunch of T-90s and BMP-3s. It was goddamn carnage.   Oh and we killed a KA-50 with a Stinger. 
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2017 07:57
|
|
|
There's a whole lot going on in air defense artiller-CHUNK-CHUNK-WHIIIIIRRRRRRROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSSSSSSSSHHHHHH https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBLZtyDGHcs
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2017 10:31
|
|
|
How is babby BTR formed Looks a lot less like a high tech car plant and more like a WWII German assembly (noted for lack of conveyor work), but I might be mistaken.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2017 13:34
|
|
|
Godholio posted:Retention of highly qualified/intelligent people. I know I trot this out a lot, but it's a Big Deal...the USAF is offering fighter pilots almost half a million dollars ($432k) to sign up for an extra 9 years when their commitment is up. Now it's not like an increased budget is going to bump up the regular pay scale to replace that $48k/year (until this recent change, it was 25k since 1999), but what it could do is allow the service(s) to stop gutting the support structure. The Air Force in particular absolutely thrashed the personnel, finance, etc career fields as a way to cut the budget...this started in the 90s and hasn't really stopped. Flying squadrons used to have something called an "orderly room" where you'd have some personnelists (and others) managing the most basic functions of the organization. Making sure travel orders were done, people were issued the proper equipment, pay and travel vouchers weren't getting hosed, leave was approved, the commander was signing all the poo poo he needs to sign, etc. They knew the thousands of pages of regulations governing this stuff, because it was quite literally their job. Orderly rooms completely disappeared about a decade ago. They were replaced by a "commander's support staff" which typically consists of whatever female aviators are pregnant and unable to fly, a civilian secretary making about $30k a year until she gets fed up and gets a real secretary job elsewhere, and one or two lieutenants who will work in that office for the next 6-12 months until they switch to the training or tactics shop for career broadening. EVERYTHING is getting hosed up in the meantime, because there's no training for these jobs, and nobody does them long enough to learn the regs. So to compensate, it's been pushed to the individual. Now everyone has to keep track of this poo poo, in addition to mission planning, flying, deploying, going on TDYs, to studying blue, gray, and red systems, to PME (some of which you have to do TWICE because why the gently caress not), getting a masters degree, and maybe trying to get to know their kids and keep the wife happy enough not to sleep around when you're in the sandbox. People are fed the gently caress up and most of the best are getting the hell out. Half a million dollars to stay in a job that's supposed to be one of the coolest loving gigs in the world...a goddamned fighter pilot. And yet, it's not even working. Retention is still hosed. To expand on this a little bit, they pushed so much of that poo poo down onto commanders' desks in the Army that they literally had a traveling tour of ethics briefings about how Commanders had to sign off on so much poo poo they didn't care about or understand that the very idea of what's true or not true and integrity was being eroded. If you sign swearing you did a thing or validated a thing roughly 100+ times per day, maybe you stop paying attention or caring at some point and the very idea of honesty erodes. At the end of this ethics briefing they concluded with basically "Yeah, hosed up how much we have everyone signing and validating and double-dog signing, oh well what are you gonna do, don't be truly evil!" Also a culture where really lovely, stupid training with a sign-in roster is good and fine, but excellent training without a sign-in roster or with a misfiled sign-in roster counts for literally nothing is bad for people taking things seriously. Doubly so when they blanket mandate training that has nothing to do with your job. I get training on how I shouldn't use my NSA spying abilities to stalk ex-girlfriends. My job involves nothing even remotely close to that kind of realm, and it never has, and it likely never will.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2017 14:07
|
|
|
mlmp08 posted:To expand on this a little bit, they pushed so much of that poo poo down onto commanders' desks in the Army that they literally had a traveling tour of ethics briefings about how Commanders had to sign off on so much poo poo they didn't care about or understand that the very idea of what's true or not true and integrity was being eroded. If you sign swearing you did a thing or validated a thing roughly 100+ times per day, maybe you stop paying attention or caring at some point and the very idea of honesty erodes. At the end of this ethics briefing they concluded with basically "Yeah, hosed up how much we have everyone signing and validating and double-dog signing, oh well what are you gonna do, don't be truly evil!" That is amazingly hosed up. I had to sign an annex to my employment contract that I would definitely not participate in any illegal performance enhancement schemes because the place I work at was tangentially related to a sports doping scandal ages ago and they decided that the way to fix that was to make every janitor and paper pusher they would ever hire sign that they would definitely not do anything like that.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2017 14:37
|
|
|
aphid_licker posted:That is amazingly hosed up. That and both the original example aren't really about a bona fide effort to curb problems, IMO, it's the organization protecting itself by kicking responsibility down to the individual level, so that if a shitstorm ignites, they can point at the person who signed the piece of paper and put all the blame on them for doing the bad thing instead of the blame laying on organizational culture.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2017 14:44
|
|
|
JcDent posted:How is babby BTR formed The hulls are on a movable line. It looks pretty similar to other heavy equipment manufacturing. Keep in mind that a car plant (say Ford River Rouge, F-150 production) will run a new car every 90 seconds. Armored vehicles are a lot lower volume and the components are a lot heavier, meaning fewer workstations with more heavy lifting equipment.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2017 14:49
|
|
|
Throatwarbler posted:What baffles me about Canadian procurement is that so much of this stuff isn't even corruption. I might have a modicum of respect for some of these people involved if they were actually sitting on a yacht full of coke off St. Barts or something from all the money they skimmed off the helicopter contract. Nope, our elected leaders are just so incompetent that they're probably too stupid to even try to steal from the public. It is corruption, but you have to understand the perspective of the politicians. You have this process you are in charge of. You want to use this control you have over this process to mint as much political benefit to you as possible. If there was any political benefit at all to having military procurement done well, then that might be a concern. As it happens, the public knows nothing about the military. So, you get political benefits by funneling money to rotten burroughs, political favors etc. If you look at the people the DND hires, they are not people who actually know anything about procurement; they are people who know economics and statistics. These could be useful if they actually informed procurement decisions, but the pols use them as props to create 'facts' to justify whatever minting mangle they have in mind at a particular time. The end result is that blocks of money set aside for the military are diverted, not to lady boys a cobra whiskey, but to building trucks outside of Montreal at 4x the cost of just buying them from VW in Germany. You can also defund the whole military with very little real world consequences, as the Cons did after they got a majority. I mean obviously there are shitloads of real world consequences, but we're talking political consequences The only time the issue does become political is when the other side can score points off this incompetence. The thing is though, and you can see this again and again, even if this political damage influences a change in government, then the victorious party has no motive to change the system, since the "political issue" is some argument over a specific procurement, not the underlying broken system itself
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2017 14:54
|
|
|
JcDent posted:How is babby BTR formed The Textron plant in the New Orleans area builds APCs in almost the exact same fashion.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2017 14:59
|
|
|
Every time I think "Hmmm, maybe I should think again about joining the military after I didn't get in when I was younger" I am glad there are brave goons and goonettes willing to do their service by telling me how lovely it is
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2017 15:06
|
|
|
MikeCrotch posted:Every time I think "Hmmm, maybe I should think again about joining the military after I didn't get in when I was younger" I am glad there are brave goons and goonettes willing to do their service by telling me how lovely it is It's lovely but it's not the worst thing you can do
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2017 15:09
|
|
|
A.o.D. posted:It's lovely but it's not the worst thing you can do for example you could overdose and cook to death in a car
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2017 15:19
|
|
|
Godholio posted:Retention of highly qualified/intelligent people. I know I trot this out a lot, but it's a Big Deal...the USAF is offering fighter pilots almost half a million dollars ($432k) to sign up for an extra 9 years when their commitment is up. Now it's not like an increased budget is going to bump up the regular pay scale to replace that $48k/year (until this recent change, it was 25k since 1999), but what it could do is allow the service(s) to stop gutting the support structure. The Air Force in particular absolutely thrashed the personnel, finance, etc career fields as a way to cut the budget...this started in the 90s and hasn't really stopped. Flying squadrons used to have something called an "orderly room" where you'd have some personnelists (and others) managing the most basic functions of the organization. Making sure travel orders were done, people were issued the proper equipment, pay and travel vouchers weren't getting hosed, leave was approved, the commander was signing all the poo poo he needs to sign, etc. They knew the thousands of pages of regulations governing this stuff, because it was quite literally their job. Orderly rooms completely disappeared about a decade ago. They were replaced by a "commander's support staff" which typically consists of whatever female aviators are pregnant and unable to fly, a civilian secretary making about $30k a year until she gets fed up and gets a real secretary job elsewhere, and one or two lieutenants who will work in that office for the next 6-12 months until they switch to the training or tactics shop for career broadening. EVERYTHING is getting hosed up in the meantime, because there's no training for these jobs, and nobody does them long enough to learn the regs. So to compensate, it's been pushed to the individual. Now everyone has to keep track of this poo poo, in addition to mission planning, flying, deploying, going on TDYs, to studying blue, gray, and red systems, to PME (some of which you have to do TWICE because why the gently caress not), getting a masters degree, and maybe trying to get to know their kids and keep the wife happy enough not to sleep around when you're in the sandbox. People are fed the gently caress up and most of the best are getting the hell out. Half a million dollars to stay in a job that's supposed to be one of the coolest loving gigs in the world...a goddamned fighter pilot. And yet, it's not even working. Retention is still hosed. So in a nutshell:
My dad calls this "accounting delirium". When you're so obsessed with cutting costs on something that works well that you end up with having to spend a lot more on something completely broken. Godholio posted:Portions of the Air Force have been on a wartime footing since the 1980s, over in the Middle East. From Elf One to monitoring the Iran-Iraq War to Desert Storm to Northern & Southern Watch to OEF & OIF to Libya to Syria, poo poo's worn out and so are the people. But to gloss over a tedious rant that I almost started, yes. Almost everything that was cool and fun and steeped in tradition has been banned. loving images of WWII nose art were banned because it was offensive, for gently caress's sake. Don't forget the Balkans in the 1990s.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2017 15:42
|
|
|
I bet you don't actually have to hand out the bonus though when airlines aren't hiring. It'd be interesting to see the correlation between pilot retention and the state of the airline business.
Mortabis fucked around with this message at 15:47 on Mar 3, 2017 |
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2017 15:44
|
|
|
Crazycryodude posted:So in light of Herr Trump's recent statements about increasing military spending, what's the current situation like? I'm not an expert, but I've always had the impression that the US military is pretty loving intimidating as is. By no means perfect, and a lot of capabilities have been degraded/forgotten about, but what problems there are have to do more with political meddling (both by actual politicians and Pentagon types) and fighting Operation Bomb Some Dirt for 15 years than not having enough money. O&M have been cut to the bone, the USAF is the smallest it's been since it's been the USAF and morale sucks so people are leaving in droves, readiness is lovely across the board, capabilities that would be critical against a near-peer have been neglected or forgotten. Aside from that everything's fine.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2017 15:58
|
|
|
KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:The hulls are on a movable line. It looks pretty similar to other heavy equipment manufacturing. Keep in mind that a car plant (say Ford River Rouge, F-150 production) will run a new car every 90 seconds. Armored vehicles are a lot lower volume and the components are a lot heavier, meaning fewer workstations with more heavy lifting equipment. Yeah, the BTR-60 one of the most produced armored vehicles ever, reached a volume of about 25,000 including all variants over however many decades they made them. Any modern car production line is putting out hundreds of thousands of cars every year. The variants are going to be substantially different between troop carrier, CP, etc. Stuff like the G-wagen and the HMMVW are the same way.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2017 16:07
|
|
|
Mortabis posted:I bet you don't actually have to hand out the bonus though when airlines aren't hiring. It'd be interesting to see the correlation between pilot retention and the state of the airline business. Retention was bad even before the current hiring boon. It's worse now, but it's been consistently bad for over a decade. The old pilot bonus was 25k/year since 1999, when they realized cuts from the "Peace Dividend" initiative weren't well-enacted. Late last year they bumped it to 48k/year, and it had almost no effect. I know exactly ONE pilot who took it. I focus on the pilot side because that's the one that has the most open information. But there are a lot of career fields that are in similar straits, though I think pilots have the highest bonus. One way to look at it is that the Air Force's authorized strength (Congress sets the limit) is the lowest it has been since 1939, when it was still the Army Air Corps. And yet they can't keep enough people from rushing out the door. From 1954-70, the USAF had almost a million people in uniform. In 1992, it dipped below half a million and '95, below 400k. For the past couple of years, 317,000. And yet the 2000s had a higher service ops tempo than at any time in history, including Vietnam and WWII. I'm not sure how today compares, but I suspect it's only slightly relaxed. Godholio fucked around with this message at 16:48 on Mar 3, 2017 |
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2017 16:38
|
|
|
brakeless posted:for example you could overdose and cook to death in a car When you include the crackhead clubhouse, the thought "as a goon I could do worse" has a hell of a floor "At least I didn't render my arm necrotic by injecting it with smack and then passing out on top of it for 12 hours"
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2017 17:08
|
|
|
A.o.D. posted:The Textron plant in the New Orleans area builds APCs in almost the exact same fashion. I'm learning! A.o.D. posted:It's lovely but it's not the worst thing you can do You can be a politician or a POG!
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2017 17:15
|
|
|
Cat Mattress posted:So in a nutshell: drat I have to remember that. That's good.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2017 17:47
|
|
|
It's fairly plausible they save money on secretaries still by only paying one set of healthcare benefits. But it still sucks. The military also has a terrible habit of making do with a "temporary" shortage and then money/personnel counters on high decide you aren't short after all. You just used to be over-resources. And repeat. And repeat. Then something falls apart and they call it a "leadership failure" for some poor NCO or officer.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2017 17:54
|
|
|
mlmp08 posted:It's fairly plausible they save money on secretaries still by only paying one set of healthcare benefits. But it still sucks. Probably, salary (even salary + health care) is only a portion of the total cost of an employee.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2017 20:30
|
|
|
Cat Mattress posted:So in a nutshell: You can generalize this all across the civilian DoD as well, except the jobs are offloaded to contractors, and there's not even a fig leaf of feigning interest in retaining a qualified civilian federal workforce.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2017 20:50
|
|
|
Captain von Trapp posted:You can generalize this all across the civilian DoD as well, except the jobs are offloaded to contractors, and there's not even a fig leaf of feigning interest in retaining a qualified civilian federal workforce. No, but you see, the hiring freeze EO will fix it 
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2017 20:58
|
|
|
mlmp08 posted:No, but you see, the hiring freeze EO will fix it Honestly, it wouldn't affect things much anyway even if it applied to DoD. Taking my agency as an example, you can't hire people without money, and we we had no money. So we had already been in a near hiring freeze for years. And even that metastasized into an effective promotion freeze when the hiring freeze failed to save enough. All the hiring authority in the world is pointless if there's just no billets.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2017 21:10
|
|
|
Captain von Trapp posted:Honestly, it wouldn't affect things much anyway even if it applied to DoD. It absolutely applies to DOD. Waivers are being passed through CPAC to installation CG, then to the MACOM (I think), then to SecArmy. Then SecArmy can either waive the freeze or not. At least this is what our CPAC is telling us. CYSS was recently given a waiver after a few garrison commanders prominently announced they were poo poo-canning a bunch of summer childcare services due to the hiring freeze. As a result, BMM requests are skyrocketing or a lot of programs are cancelled and positions sitting vacant in DOD positions. It turns out making "the military" exempt was vague as gently caress and no one wants to seem to just keep hiring people and see what happens. Agencies are allowed and encouraged to post openings, but unless new word comes down, they can't act on those posted openings. So people apply and just cross their fingers and hope OMB puts out the new guidance in time. edit: gently caress, acronym storm, I blame just having been at work.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2017 21:22
|
|
|
Ah. Well in that case they're an additional level of boned. They were boned before, but it is extra grim to scrounge up a billet and not be able to fill it.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2017 21:41
|
|
|
Godholio posted:Portions of the Air Force have been on a wartime footing since the 1980s, over in the Middle East. From Elf One to monitoring the Iran-Iraq War to Desert Storm to Northern & Southern Watch to OEF & OIF to Libya to Syria, poo poo's worn out and so are the people. But to gloss over a tedious rant that I almost started, yes. Almost everything that was cool and fun and steeped in tradition has been banned. loving images of WWII nose art were banned because it was offensive, for gently caress's sake. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLKSVI4sGm8
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2017 22:14
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 10, 2024 10:14 |
|
|
Captain von Trapp posted:You can generalize this all across the civilian DoD as well, except the jobs are offloaded to contractors, and there's not even a fig leaf of feigning interest in retaining a qualified civilian federal workforce. Contractors means you don't have to worry about pensions. The US was still paying civil war pensions until last year (and still might be, I don't know if that woman I still alive.)
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2017 22:15
|
|