If there’s one thing that will be drilled into your head as you get into fighter training, it will be tactics.
Tactics is both a science and an art. It is when your units converge in such a way to achieve the greatest and fastest results to win the battle. You start by developing a strategy, which is the series of objectives (short-term goals) to achieve the overall goal. Then you move to operations, which is the formation of the combat units, and then tactics, the decisions made to achieve as many short-term goals and victory in as little time as possible.
In a fighter squadron, as I’ve talked about before, this is played very much like a chess game, with moves and counter-moves as short-term goals and route to those goals keeps changing as the game takes shape. The key is to never lose your cool and run your opponent down to the point of frustration.
In your pursuit of your dream to become a fighter pilot, which is your current overall goal, you’ve no doubt felt a lot of that frustration as you’ve gotten to your short-term goal and hit a stumbling block. It could be that you’ve gotten grades that aren’t good enough, or something seemingly completely out of your control like having had hay fever when you were a kid or noticing that you can’t focus on far away objects like you used to.
But you can still make it into the cockpit of your dreams! How do I know? Because ALL THREE of those things happened to me and I STILL made it into the cockpit of the F/A-18 Hornet, my dream jet, and flew it at the prestigious TOP GUN Fighter Weapons School flying it!
What I learned over the course of BECOMING a fighter pilot (by sheer luck in my case) is that it’s all about tactics from the very beginning, from the very moment you decide you want to be a fighter pilot, you begin to form strategies and try to implement them, but a lot of the time, because of all the bad information that is out there, you begin to think that your strategies won’t work, and you get frustrated, which can lead to giving up.
Don’t let this happen! I formed the Afterburner Club to take the guesswork out of the formation of your tactics and weed out the bad information so you won’t have to rely on luck and people just happening to give the right information as I did. You can’t rely on luck to get you through to victory in your tactics.
A chess game is a lot easier when you know that types of strategies for winning. Sign up with the Afterburner Club and TAKE CHARGE of your future by finding out exactly what ALL of your options are and forming up your very own tactical plan to success.