8 years for Space Force

| February 26, 2024

The Space Force is trying to retain trained people by offering an eight year active duty contract.

The Space Force hopes to offer new Guardians the option of serving the regular eight-year enlistment — with four years typically spent on active duty and four in the Individual Ready Reserve component — entirely on active duty, in an effort to retain highly skilled new recruits.

So as I read it, a young Forceketeer enlists, does 4 years on a Force base, then is off to join a Force Reserve unit as an active-duty  person, right? Oh, and bonuses are on offer, presumably for an 8 year hitch, hefty ones.

New Guardians who take the option would not drop into the Individual Ready Reserve status the way most enlisted personnel do — their ties to the Defense Department would be complete the day they left active duty.

Makes sense…they day they leave completes their entire commitment, no Reserve component duty needed – served your time, paid your debt to society, done.

In addition to changes made to boost retention, top Air and Space Force officials announced structural changes in early February that they said should better prepare their troops for a potential conflict in the Pacific with China.

The changes include bringing back warrant officers after more than 65 years without them — a plan first reported by Military.com — as well as changes to training; renaming and upgrading training and educational systems for Air Force Academy and ROTC cadets; and setting up a new field command called Space Futures Command that would focus, in part, on “experimentation and war games,” the Department of the Air Force said.

Time for a little something I didn’t know about the Force:

It was formally established in 2019 and has only around 8,600 personnel.

Comprised of near-equal numbers of enlisted and officer personnel,…  Military.com

Forgive me for laughing, I can hear it now: “Lieutenant! Do you know what your sergeant did last night?”  Or “Have you seen my privates?”

I have to be honest, I am not terribly sure this is a great idea. As I recall, back in the Stone Age when Ed was young (okay, me too) the two most traumatic days in the service were:

1) Arrival at whatever your service called Basic Training, whether at Great Lakes, Leonard Wood, PI, or the hotel at Lackland. Holy crap! Everything you had ever heard or knew of the military somehow turned out to be incredibly wrong.

2) Arrival at your first duty station after training when you found out that a whole bunch of what you had spent weeks or months learning didn’t mean squat in the “real” Army, Corps, Navy, etc.

I remember a lot of gung-ho kids who left training  and KNEW they wanted to make a career of it – until they found out about things like 2AM alerts, motor pool days, overnight work/guard shifts and all the other fun aspects of active duty. Within a few months all they wanted to do was ETS and “git th’ f outta Dodge”.

Now, I’m not saying this is everyone or even a majority – but remembering how easy it is to get into the military versus how hard it is to quit, and putting that up against the maturity of a BIG percentage of enlistees – it’s going to take some really squared away – mentally – kids to make this 8 year first term workable. Maybe give them a decision point a year or so in:  “hey, if you really do want to stay 8 by now, sign here and that bonus is yours. But this is the final decision.”

 

 

Category: Reality Check, Space Force

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Anonymous

Livin’ da dream…

th.jpeg-13
Jerry

So, do they have Space Cadet’s???

President Elect Toxic Deplorable Racist SAH Neande

….Cadets.

Quantavious

No… our cadets all come from AF commissioning sources

Hack Stone

Like other branches, Space Force has a lot of advantages to offer their personnel. Of course, there some drawbacks too.

Pro:.

Combat Rations: Space Force MRE’s have Moon Pies, Mara Bars, Milky Ways and Tang. Trading them to the locals while deployed to a distant galaxy can make you a bundle on the black market.

PCS/TAD: You can make a fortune using a POV when transferring or on temporary assignment. At the current rate of $0.22 per mile, a self move to Mars will bring you a check for $54,186,000.

Weapons Qualification: Hit or miss, you still graduate basic training. Never saw an Imperial Stormtrooper hit shit in Star Wars.

Con:

If you are part of a landing party, and your uniform of the day includes a red shirt, you may want to double check that your SGLI is updated.

If you enlisted without an MOS guarantee, you can expect to be spending most of your days scraping barnacles off of the side of the Death Star.

Medical care can be spotty, at best. You stand a good chance of an alien life form bursting through your chest, and the only training the medical staff has is repeating “He’s dead, Jim.”

Hack Stone

In space, no one can hear you request mast.

SFC D

Q: What’s the differenct between Tang and orange juice?

A: Tang just tastes nasty. OJ will fuckin’ kill ya.

Hack Stone

Dat’s a good one.

SpaceChairForceOne

Hahaha good ones…
Although the Tang always gave me heart burn, ugh.
Don’t forget what Scotty the engineer also said about time needed for maintenance jobs – always add several hours/days needed for the first estimate. That way when you get it done in half the time you can keep your reputation as a “miracle worker”!
Plus if you think your overweight for your next PT weigh-in just turn the gravity generator down a hair and you’ll pass every time.
Worked for me, honest!

Hack Stone

In Zero Gravity, everyone makes weight.

AW1Ed

What they think the Space Force does:

OIP
Green Thumb

Dudes.

Roh-Dog

It’s always the free t-shirt and key chain that gets’ed.

Suckers.

Last edited 7 months ago by Roh-Dog
Roh-Dog

edit: It’s always the free t-shirt and key chain that gets’em.

Damn computer is loving to ruin formatting and forcing corrections lately. Even if I ignore ‘speeling*’ mistakes it’ll force a correction as it posts.

*lets see if this lasts.

Also, when is SpaFor going to have Mobile Infantry? Here’s a critique from AG: Starship Troopers is Not a Satire.

A slightly off-topic bit of the article:

The most unrealistic part of the military training in the film is that it shows men and women not only living and working together but also showering together and sharing the same quarters. Like Plato’s guardians, these young warriors are so dedicated to the common good that they almost completely give up on private pleasures. They can, to a very high degree, at least, subordinate the longings of their genitals to the demands of duty and military virtue.

You know… (couldn’t find a clean one without talking)

KoB

If I could be guaranteed a position to “serve” under Lt Cmdr Jadzia Dax, I’d enlist today!

SpaceChairForceOne

I’m mostly thinking this is a good idea due to the technical investment that Space Force makes in these young folks.
I spent the last 8 years of my USAF career in and out of “space” related comm jobs. I already had many years of comm experience and related training under my belt so their training additions for me (to do what they wanted me to do) were not over the top but still expensive.
I’d see a good reasoning for not wanting to loose that expense and experience after 4 years.
Although that might just mess up lack of assignment rotation a bit more than it already was as I remembered.
I knew many enlisted folks that had been in the same “space” maintenance job & office for 6-7 years. A few were pushing 10 years in the same unit, just moved to a QA or training slot or something to update duty titles every few years.
I volunteered for an Iraq deployment to get away from one job after seeing that lack of rotation.
The officer/enlisted balance waffled a lot as several of my “coworkers” were officers doing a maintenance rotation before moving to their actual career field position; got them a perspective of what really happened behind the screens.
Hoping they will get the balance right for the Space Force with the return of warrants. A bunch of us comm types made that suggestion about bringing back warrants for our jobs. We’d constantly lose solid young talent to contractor positions after they did a few years in the job.

RCAF-CHAIRBORNE

They MUST model the Jr Ranks Mess after the Mos Eisley cantina!

SgtM

8 years of good chow halls and sleeping in my own room. I would have done that standing on my head. I did 6 active when I enlisted.

Green Thumb

Master Chief Space Officer.

A historic first!

Hack Stone

What you heard the Company Commander say to you: You’re being assigned to the MARS Station.

What the Company Commander actually said to you: You are being assigned to a station on Mars.

Quantavious

O3 in the Space Force here… the 50-50 officer enlisted split has us postured for failure. I don’t think this would solve that.