What are we called now?

I will give a dollar to anyone who gets this into any sort of official briefing...

So we're changing our name.  Again.  The IDC is no more, it's now the Information Warfare Community, so now I can stop being teased about being an information dominator, and in the interest of keeping this blog 'G' rated, I will spare readers any dominator memes.

The bad plan might get even worse!

Notice that it's all single dollars...compounding interest takes time. Image from http://401kcalculator.org

A while back I blogged about new changes to the military retirement system.  While I proved that you could in fact beat the old retirement system, you would have to maximize the investment in the early years, but it could be done.  The assumptions were many, but at least it was possible.  I didn't like it in the end because the overall risk was shifted to the military member, in what I felt was a way to save money for the DoD.

Now it seems we're trying to place even more burden on military members.  Military Times just revealed that inside the DoD budget request are requested changes to the new retirement system...and they aren't good.

You re-tweeted what?

The 2016 election year is upon us in full swing.  With both major political parties having fairly contested primaries this year, it's a good idea to review the rules concerning US military involvement in the political process.

As a military member, you may vote and contribute financially to political candidates.  You can even attend rallies, just not in uniform.  You may not run for office yourself nor "actively campaign" for any candidate.  Those rules are fairly obvious.

But what about social media?

What's in a warfare device?

A few weeks ago I was rewarded by the NEX with a 300 dollar uniform bill when I had to purchase new sets of khakis and NWUs (losing over 30 pounds will do that to you).  I was able to take all my old patches in to save a few dollars, but I had to explain why I had two different secondary warfare devices.  For officers, its already rare to have more than one warfare device, and having three is even more rare.

Which begs the question: what's in a warfare device?  Why do we wear these small pieces of metal?  It hasn't always been that way.  The Navy operated up until the 1900s without any sort of warfare device.  Naval aviation was the first (as far as I can tell) to begin using a warfare designator, which they established in 1918.  Submarines followed suit in 1923.  Some are far more recent: SWOs didn't have a pin until 1975, and the Information Dominance Warfare Device is only a few years old.