Category: Work

Just On Stuff. Been talking about it since before I retired from USAF. Been writing about it for at least a couple years. The last conversation I had with a Boeing employee was standing in front of a comm rack at the SBIRS facility in Boulder. We’d been waiting for the new links to go live for a few hours when I decided to go check on them. He was in the middle of swapping out a crypto module when I walked up looking over his shoulder and jokingly quipped you guys know what you’re doing? IIRC he replied simply saying “I’m competent.” I stuck around and helped him key the box, but detected a little eye roll as if to suggest maybe all four of that particular gang here that day weren’t.

Having been exposed to both sides of the customer/contractor fence in DoD aerospace contracting from the purely military perspective, I shudder to think what shenanigans go on in the private sector. The human factor always looms large. If I had a nickle for every time I had to ask who was the last one touched it… Try doing that job as a COMSEC inspector.

Lawsuit says seat belt saved passenger after door blowout.

ALARMIST RHETORIC: Today, the U.S. Air Force faces an almost-existential crisis… The U.S. military is woefully unprepared for warfare in this newly contested subdomain of the air littoral. Needless to say, the U.S. drone inventory looks nothing at all like Ukraine’s. It is a fraction of its size and scale, focusing on small numbers of highly advanced systems.

Boils down to old retired military dudes in a pissing contest, but I have questions. Is the honorable retired general unaware how drone technology has been a high-priority USAF focus ever since Gates fired the Air Boss back in…? Maybe he didn’t get the memo about ongoing Ai integration in the CCA program? I’ll forgive him for being ahead of the times Billy Mitchell was sinking battleships in this same scenario.

I am somewhat familiar with how the Army operates, and please believe me when I say they never seem to be opposed to doing things the hard way. He contradicts himself with a link to our own massive drone inventory. No, what we have here is an old ground pounder waxing nostalgic on the glory days before the zoomies started having all the military fun. I agree his guys need better localized drone protection. Try slicing up the Army budget correctly first, before eyeing bigger shares of DoD – and whenever they get in a real hot spot (not a 1-off blunder), just radio the nest locations and we’ll cluster the whole outfit with one shot, for ya. 😉

Oh, they didn’t want to hear it. The only thing they wanted to hear is how fast the planes can get out the door. And so that was their metric. And, unfortunately, it’s the same metric today. We have seen this for the last six years.

You don’t need me to list it out, just happens to be one of my many pet peeves. Talk to anybody in the USAF Maintenance Business. I’m taking credit for calling this one right off the bat – same problem everywhere. It’s just down to the people doing the work. There’s alot of places in aviation fields where the margin for error is very small.