DASHED DREAMS
Why does the Air Force offer airmen the Assignment Preference Sheet if they don't even care what is on the sheet?
I am making a permanent change-of-station move. I am married to an active-duty member in the same career field, I have a ex-wife who is also in the same career field and rank, and we were trying to go to the same base so I can be with my daughter. We have the same DEROS [date eligible to return from overseas] and chose a base that is usually hard for the Air Force to fill. We only put that base on our "dream sheet" so we could hopefully be stationed at that base.
They ended up giving my ex-wife a base that was not even on her "dream sheet" and giving me and my wife the base we were trying to get.
There were more than five spots for our rank and DEROS time, and the Air Force has a program for Volunteer Stability tour for this place, and we could not get it together.
They also did this to me while I was in Korea and trying to curtail my assignment two weeks early to go to my next station, where my wife at the time was stationed, to be there for the birth of my first child. I had all the paperwork and both commanders signed off, but I was rejected by the Air Force Personnel Center because "it was not mission essential."
So why even give us airmen a dream sheet if you are not going to use it? Now I am going to be apart from my daughter. I do not understand their reasoning.
Staff Sgt. Adam Fralick
Kadena Air Base, Japan
SAVE THE A-10
When the Air Force broke away from the Army in 1947, they made one major mistake that they have never figured out how to fix. They did not bring any infantry over to the Air Force side, so there could be soldiers-turned-airmen to stand with a rifle in their hand and defend an air base.
Back in the olden days, airfields were far to the rear of the front line battlefields. The belief was airfields would not be overrun by enemy ground forces, so why waste valuable airman manpower doing soldier stuff. My big Air Force felt and still feels that airmen are there to fly planes, fix broken planes and maybe even stand guard duty to make sure no one steals an aircraft, but you do not waste airmen defending the Air Force mission on the ground. If it gets that bad, just launch all the planes and send them off to safety. After the Japanese destroyed most of the U.S. air assets on the ground in the Philippines, there were a whole lot of Army airmen with nothing to do as practicing airmen. So Gen. Douglas MacArthur had these Army aircrew members and maintenance troops issued rifles, bayonets and World War I helmets so they could try to be part-time infantry when the Japanese army overran the islands.
Pilots and maintainers did not make good infantry back in 1942 when they still had the title Army written on their orders. They do even worse now that modern airmen really do not see themselves as soldiers.
So what the Air Force did with the coming of the Korean War, and ever since, was take the "cops" of the Air Force — whether they were called Military Police, Air Police, Security Police or Security Forces — and declare in time of conflict the "cops" were their infantry. For 30 years the ground combat training was less than stellar. In the early 1980s, the Air Force started sending their "cops" to Fort Benning, Georgia, to attend Army Infantry School. As an Air Force "cop," I attended the Infantry Officer Basic Course and learned how to be an infantry leader. I took a lot of Bravo Sierra kidding from my Army classmates, being only one of three Air Force officers in the class. They believed and continued to be taught by the Army instructors that the Air Force was not going to be there for them when the hard times of battle would inevitably come.
However, in one of our final live-fire exercises, 200 of my classmates were on a range, firing from M-113 armored tracked vehicles. We were shooting at old tank hauls and truck bodies with .50-caliber machine guns, M-60 machine guns and M-16 rifles.
Then, some Air Force A-10 tank-killing Warthog aircraft showed up on our firing range and proceeded to destroy everything sitting in the open down range. All the students stopped firing their weapons and stood in amazement watching. The A-10s stole the show, and our instructors were not happy. They demanded we keep firing our weak ground weapons as the A-10's 30mm GAU-8 Avenger rotary cannon dominated the battlefield like no one infantry soldier ever could.
The Air Force was trying to get rid of the A-10 back then, and they are still trying. The A-10 is the cheapest combat aircraft in the Air Force to operate. The problem is the A-10 is the only Air Force aircraft solely designed for close-air support. That means air-to-ground attacking. If you're a fighter pilot, you want to kill Russian-made Mig fighters and you cannot do that in an A-10, so the A-10 must be removed from the inventory.
This is a mistake; this is a potentially a criminal mistake. We will be in another shooting war in the deserts of Southwest Asia in the near future, and the A-10 is the king of the ground war fought in "sand." I get why Air Force fighter pilots cannot wait to sacrifice the A-10; what I do not understand is why every Army and Marine Corps infantry officer and senior NCO is not writing their Congress members and demanding the A-10 be kept in the Air Force or transferred to the Army or Marines.
The A-10 is an air-to-mud asset that cannot be allowed to disappear. Truly American lives will perish if the A-10 is taken from our future battlefields.
Maj. Van Harl (ret.)
Cudahy, Wis.
WRITE US:Email your letters to airlet@airforcetimes.com. Include your name, address, phone number and rank. Submissions may be edited and published in print and electronic form and become the property of Gannett Government Media.
