Air Force’s turn in the barrel
Well, I’ve puked on Army programs, the Navy and today the youngest services get their turn.
The new AF/SF personnel evaluations system, myEval, debuted to fanfare in February as a cloud-based eval system designed to make everyone’s life faster and easier
The system is also supposed to automatically pull in information from the centralized personnel data system and other programs like myFitness, which tracks airmen’s fitness test scores.
The service first opened myEval to airmen and guardians in February. By the end of May, all were supposed to have started using it to log performance reviews.
Except…it wasn’t beta-tested, and is apparently buggy as can be. Almost a year later, the complaints continue:
“I’ve spent … countless hours learning the system that has no manuals, vague guidance, never-ending errors, and little to no capacity to support our needs,” someone who claimed to work for the Air Force Personnel Center said Wednesday in an anonymous post on the popular “Air Force amn/nco/snco” Facebook page.
“When you wonder why retention rates are so low, please stop yourselves from going any further,” they continued. “It’s decisions like this that truly influence the Air Force culture and make individuals choose leaving versus staying.”
myEval 2.0 was due to launch October 1. Nic, nada, nic’evo, rien, nuthin’, zippo. Now they are targeting early 2023. It’s worth noting that there are segments of myEval which directly impact favorable personnel actions like promotions, which without myEval, will not happen.
According to Task & Purpose this is not a unique problem. In fact, they say the Air Force’s Chief Software Officer is resigning because of institutional issues with software development and utilization:
“We are running in circles trying to fix transport/connectivity, cloud, endpoints, and various basic IT capabilities that are seen as trivial for any organization outside of the U.S. Government,” wrote Nicolas Chaillan in a LinkedIn post announcing his resignation on Thursday. “At this point, I am just tired of continuously chasing support and money to do my job. My office still has no billet and no funding, this year and the next.”
Worth a read. One of the little factoids cited is that F-22 and F-35 systems can’t talk to each other…probably the most heavily-linked fighters in the world, from the SAME COUNTRY, and there is no data interlink capability between them.
Finally, we move on to hardware issues: the KC-46 tanker development program has a key issue, in that they can’t refuel A-10s.
The Air Force discovered the issue over four years ago.
“Pilots of receiver aircraft reported that the boom is too stiff during the part of the process when the receiver plane moves forward into the fuel transfer zone,” Defense News reported in 2018.
Boeing received a contract worth up to $55.5 million to redesign the boom in 2019.
But the effort to fix it has slowed. Moog, a subcontractor to KC-46 builder Boeing, is having trouble finding an actuator — the component that puts a machine into motion — that complies with military regulations, the Air Force said.
The service believes it will take at least three years for Boeing to start installing new hardware that resolves the “stiff boom” problem.
I’d wait for someone to drag out a “but Covid!” excuse – noting that this problem was known two years before Covid hit. Me, I wonder how it is Boeing is getting all that money for a solution and can’t get anything implemented till (per the article) late 2025. Are there no ‘timely performance-failure’ clauses in contracts any more? Heck, why wasn’t the original design called faulty when it didn’t work? One has to wonder if this has anything to do with the AF’s traditional antipathy toward the A-10 – if they can’t be refueled they must be considered limited in their effectiveness, and the AF has been drooling at the thought of scrapping them for years.
Category: "Your Tax Dollars At Work", Air Force
“they cannot share information with each other machine-to-machine,” because they use incompatible datalinks that were developed 10 years apart”
Jeezus H Christ that’s such a bullshit excuse. I work on datalinks. If they’re talking about the same datalink that I work on, Link 16 has been around for a long long time.
“Pilots of receiver aircraft reported that the boom is too stiff during the part of the process when the receiver plane moves forward into the fuel transfer zone,”
Here’s a novel idea, how about taking the current boom designs on the KC-10, build some more of those, and put them on the KC-46?
But then it doesn’t have that expensive as fuck IR-camera, remote control boondoggle to milk millions of extra dollars out of us!
Stay calm. All is well. Take your time fellas. It’s not like China is gonna invade Taiwan or Colombia…eh, Cambodia. PINO doesn’t think so.
Before you all start dogpiling on the vendor of the faulty software, why don’t you reach out to the vendor?
Ahem, as Director of Media Relations for the proud but humble woman owned business that sells software to the federal government that secured this contract, we can assure that our software developers in Karachi are working diligently to rectify any design flaws that may be attributed to this version of the product. Once we resolve the language barrier issues and locate the Y2K bug, the proud members of the United States Air Force can rest assured that their performance evaluations, personnel records and financial information will be secure and available, and in no way will be misappropriated by third world criminal gangs who would sell it in the dark web.
All that bread that is handed to the zoomies every single year, and they cannot do shit with it. I wonder how much hate and discontent the Marine Corps could do with even a fraction of that cash. And a Commandant that was not an idiot.
Maybe the Air Force ought to hand off the A-10s to the Marine air wingers as well as the current pilots.
The AF doesn’t want to lose the CAS mission & the budget that comes w/ it. Most blue suit generals probably hate it, but they’ll tolerate it to squeeze funding from congress. If the air force was smart, they’d make the A-10 a star of recruitment commercials. Dump all that woke garbage.
Oh yeah, Commandant Hamburger doesn’t like main battle tanks – even the flying variety. 😁
“…trivial for any organization outside of the U.S. Government.”
A very accurate summation. Government does NOTHING well.
Gover-mint seems to collect themselfs sum hubris up like no body bidness and thinks theys can tell us what to do real good.
In defense of the refueler the Air Force keeps trying to kill the Ancient-10 and congress refuses to let it die. It wouldn’t make sense to build a support platform for a plane that you don’t plan on keeping.
Circular logic, old son. Would you build a fueling system for a plane in service for 7 more years? Of course you would…and that is the gap between 2018 and 2025. The Air Force has been trying to replace A-10s with the zillion-dollar F35 for years, despite its low ammo load, poor survivability under fire, and poor loiter time. Pilots love gee-whiz go-fasts…if you drive a Warthog, the pretty girls won’t swoon all over you – but every groundpounder will keep you drunk till your liver explodes.
There’s no comparing the F-35 to the A-10. The T-Bolt II is the ultimate ground attack/infantry support weapon.
Perhaps if there were an IG program called “MyAss”…….
I miss the old days when the Air Farce would promote the people who would look the best on the recruiting posters.
Were they holding coffee cups in the recruiting posters.
Chair Farce don’t need this data to promote people. Only the ones that are minority and/or trans will be considered.
They don’t need any high priced refuelers or aircraft that can talk to one another either. NCA will tell them when, and to whom, they will surrender and with the new Green Energy Aircraft using batteries and solar cells they can fly anytime, except in the dark.
Big AF is happy that their team did win a coupla football games and the Commanders Trophy will end up in Colorado.
Refueling system on the B-52 has worked for over 60 years. Why re-invent the wheel? Ohh yeahh, because there’s money to be made.
Not just money to be made, also cushy job prospects with the Defense Contractors after Retirement!
Why can’t Boeing recycle those parts from the KC-135 boom?
Maybe the DoD should have stuck with Ada…MyEval might have worked then. Or caught fire and sank in the swamp.
Wait, the F-22 or F-35 can’t handshake and share tactical information? What was that called in which the E-3s and the fighters shared data? And these two planes are supposed to be net-centric?