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…
Author 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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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.
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…
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…
Confused about the whole on-again, off-again nature of the sale of F-16s to Taiwan? Let our favorite Taiwanese animators explain it: [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gLFicPDB0s[/youtube]
