My thoughts for the VFA community come down to a combination of the following: poor locations (especially F-35), lack of manning, golden path, and OPTEMPO.
Lemoore is absolute trash and everyone knows that. When I was a first tour JO I was basically out of town every weekend. I don’t want to be within 3+ hours of a cool place… I want to live in one. The air quality here is also terrible and makes people sick. For those with families who don’t want orders here, I don’t blame you. As for the base, the infrastructure is a celebration of mediocrity.
The manning crisis is real. There are several single seat squadrons with 2-3 DHs. For now F-35 is healthy, but the writing is on the wall seeing how many FRS IPs leave after their shore tour. This is causing extensions back in the fleet, and those who stay have to work harder.
The golden path… my biggest issue with this is burnout and not getting a break. After 2x OIR deployments, work ups, and an aircraft transition in my JO tour, a demanding tour in Fallon for almost four years, and straight to DH immediately into a full workup then deployment… I still have another set of workups and deployment before my DH orders are up. After all of this, I’d like to still fly, maybe instruct, but also have some downtime. If there was a “chill” opportunity for DCMA or some disassociated tour flying C-whatevers somewhere nice, that would be awesome. But the message from PERS is [insert Pawn Stars meme] “best I can do is a non-flying joint tour pushing PowerPoints.” The on-track flying jobs that would be available mostly don’t work for my timing. It’s ridiculous. Another idea, maybe like AEDO, we could have some type of career path for SFTIs where you just stay in that world and actually use your specialty, instead of being Admin/Safety/MO/Skipper. In my opinion you should be able to do whatever the hell you want in your post-DH tour if your performance record up to that point is sound.
OPTEMPO… see the above paragraph. We’re burning out planes, ships, and people, and I saw it on this last deployment. And while IKE is catching the headlines, the rest of the fleet is sitting at max E, making half the salary of an airline guy or gal doing basically the same thing. Except they don’t have to deal with living on the boat and the asspain that brings, which could be its own separate thread.
In my opinion, money isn’t the issue. The real “one problem” is a combination of the four items above, leading to burnout for the people who stay. When they’re not doing the flying they used to, with increased admin responsibilities, and look at their friends on the outside and see the lives they’re living in better places with more time for family and hobbies, it makes them think “why the hell am I still doing this?”