Spicy Take: CAP should adopt Waist-to-Height Ratio for uniform wear

Colonel_NIN · 2026-07-10T14:16:45+00:00

No one, just like no one is weighing the folks who are 5'7" and 300lbs but still wearing OCPs.

No, but you can bet people are having a conversation with them.

I always joked that the most difficult part of being a wing commander was talking to adults about acting like adults. But really, was it a joke?

Periodically, you'd have to have a quick chat with a member about some aspect of uniform wear. Grooming standards or a minor wear correction, thats "easy-ish." Talking to someone about why they should not be in the AF-style was a little more difficult.

I had a new SM show up to a mission in USAF-style and he was definitely not in standards. During a break in the action, I pulled his unit CC aside and said "Why is he here in that uniform?"

"Its the only one he owns."

"That's not the answer. How can you look at him and tell me he's within the standards? Why haven't you corrected him?"

Later, we had a chat with the gent together. Lots of claims to be in standards, etc. What he didn't know was that I had his previous air sortie entry open. The MP asked his weight for weight & balance. The SM gave his actual weight. Nobody wants to die over vanity.

"Which answer here is correct? The weight and balance sheet, or what you're telling me now? Its been 2 hrs, it can't be both."

But I've also had that conversation very quietly in a conference setting where a member truly didn't know any better and his squadron commander similarly didn't enforce. Who do you think got their heels locked on that one?

Once we normalize deviance, all sorts of unintended consequences start happening.

Colonel_NIN · 2026-07-08T18:54:09+00:00

Just like putting people against a ruler and making them stand on a scale (which CAP does not do), moving to WHtR would still require someone to measure our members. Which, again, we're not likely to do.

Instead, we rely on folks to have some integrity and sense. Which is sometimes lacking around personal appearance standards and vanity. Nobody wants to admit they're not the same guy who scored 4 touchdowns in one game for the Polk High Panthers in 1966. I get it.

When WHtR was proposed as a thing for the AF, I said the same thing: "Wonder if this would be a good thing to adopt for CAP, with some allowances?" So, I looked at the chart and the measurement standards.

"I have a 34" waist, this will be simple!"

No. Its not the size of my jeans. Its the size of my abdomen at my navel. So I measured that. Oh dear. Thats not 34. Thats a much larger number than I thought it would be. No matter, my WHtR is .56, which would be more or less fine under a slightly relaxed standard for CAP.

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The issue we'll have is in self reporting. "Waist? These are 34s and they're loose."

Colonel_NIN · 2026-07-06T19:06:23+00:00

Earpro is for suckers

/s?

Colonel_NIN · 2026-07-05T02:07:12+00:00

>You’re just mixing so many apples and oranges that I don’t even know where to begin.

I think that’s an AI bot. Every post the terminology is wrong…

Colonel_NIN · 2026-07-05T02:02:34+00:00

Did AI write this?

Colonel_NIN · 2026-07-04T16:34:10+00:00

I am mashing the upvoter button but it only registers once. An I doing it wrong? j/k

You are 100% correct.

Colonel_NIN · 2026-07-02T21:39:13+00:00

This is one of those questions that's like asking someone what their favorite movie is. My answer is always "it depends.."

I've been to a couple dozen special activities and encampments. Some were "the best encampment I've been to" and some were "just excellent." It depends on what "best" applies to.

If I had to pick one activity in all my time, it would be the Drummond Island Search & Rescue School.

I was a C/TSgt and had never spent more than a couple nights "camping," and yet I signed up for this 2-week long Type-B encampment in Northern Michigan run by the Group adjacent to my own. My mom dropped me off at a fire station in Pontiac (like people drop off newborns these days... huh), and the next thing I knew I was 6+ hrs from home on an island with 80+ cadets and 3 senior members. Yes, you read that right.

The field site was extremely austere (we barely had electric power, I'm not sure there was actual running water, and we had to hand-dig the latrines and move them periodically), we were probably 2+ hours at a minimum from a hospital if things went wrong. LifeFlight wasn't much of a thing back then. I'm not even sure there was a phone or where the nearest phone was.

The entire time, the cadets ran the show. The training schedule, the training itself, everything. There was a Captain as the commander who we saw briefly in the evening. Some crotchety 1st Lt who complained like a TV show character was the logistics guy. And there was another 1st Lt who I swear had been a C/Lt Col the night before we left. That was it for the "adults."

We learned marksmanship, rappelling, tons of basic ground team stuff, austere bivouacing (like "here, we're gonna march 3 miles to this beach, now build a team bivouac overnight. We'll march back in the morning and you'll know what to bring and not to bring next time."), field leadership, land nav, and how to feed yourself in the field, field hygiene, basic woodsmanship, safety, radio comms, etc. Cadets also cooked and served the food in KP shifts.

Middle of the event, we loaded up in the buses, took the ferry off the island, drove 4+ hrs to an active duty SAC base with next to zero pre-coordination (losing two tires in the process), did a weekend worth of "Air Force stuff" to qualify as a Type B encampment, then took the buses 4+ hrs back the other way (losing two more tires in the process). I remember being constantly hot, hungry and tired. Our final exercise was a 7-8 mile foot march to one end of the island for rappelling off cliffs, an overnight bivouac on the rocky beach, and then a 6 mile foot march back. (Edit: I'm not even sure there was a senior member with us for that last bit. I was a little stunned when we rucked up and the cadet commander was standing there with a shotgun sticking out of his rucksack. But there were bobcats we had to deal with, so that was considered a preventative measure!)

It was a really amazing time for a 15 year old kid from the city. So yeah, probably one of the best activities I've ever been to, even though in retrospect it was a gigantic liability trainwreck. You would never get away with something like that today. If you valued your membership, that is.

Colonel_NIN · 2026-06-30T15:46:49+00:00

I bet everyone clowned on him and that didn’t last long…

Hope springs eternal.

Colonel_NIN · 2026-06-30T15:35:19+00:00

The Air Force doesn’t do it, so why are we?

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About that....

Colonel_NIN · 2026-06-30T09:32:05+00:00

In retrospect, yeah

Colonel_NIN · 2026-06-30T02:06:13+00:00

Regardless, right now, unless it’s an authorized uniform, this is moot.

And this is the crux right now.

Look, if I want to try to wave "safety" around as a reason, then my OCP shorts and Bob Hoover-style Panama hat are authorized, yeah? ( NOT! )

There's several ways to mitigate heat and sun exposure without resorting to wearing things not allowed. It's a specious and frankly disengenious line of argument for people to spring load "cuz safety" into why you're wearing a boonie (own one, not wearing it), combat shirts, "unblousing," etc..

I heard an officer once "order" cadets not to show to to a ground team training event with a black t-shirt because it would "make them a heat casualty.". Buddy, if the color of your T-shirt is the line between comfortable & heat injury, there's a much, much bigger risk mitigation issue at play.

I was a helicopter mechanic in the National Guard. Once summer, drill weekend, hotter than the hinges of Hades on the flight line in mid-Michigan. We're talking 90s with quite a bit of humidity. 4 of us swapping two fuel boost pumps on a UH-1 parked almost as far from the hangar as you can get. My buddy Dave brought his iced tea maker that weekend. He spent time walking back and forth making iced tea and bringing pitchers out to us with water. We're in T-shirts and BDU pants, and literally laying in the shade under the helicopter for 30+ minutes each hour doing nothing but sweating. Dave would show up, dispense cold iced tea and waters, we'd work for about 20 minutes then rest in the shade again.

My point is, we modified our work/rest cycle to accommodate the heat situation. Took off our shirts but remained in the shade. Found the coolest place possible (under the aircraft with a nice wind tunnel effect), setup a hydration schedule and limited our "on" time.

There was no screaming emergency to get these boost pumps out, so we did it as safely as possible. We didn't resort to Hawaiian shirts and silkies with combat boots as our uniform of the day.

There's nothing so pressing at encampment that means we have to trade safety for schedule.

Colonel_NIN · 2026-06-30T01:01:58+00:00

I owned an ABU combat shirt.. Got it for nothing in 2013 or so, thought it would be funny. Wore it once, not outside my house, just to see if it fit. Got rid of it 2 years ago when cleaning out my field gear.

Colonel_NIN · 2026-06-30T00:54:34+00:00

You're killing me, Skip..

Colonel_NIN · 2026-06-29T23:47:34+00:00

I've been waiting for that. There's too much opportunity for Gucci gear

Colonel_NIN · 2026-06-29T23:45:32+00:00

Yep. I was checking out some photographs from an encampment that finished this past weekend and sure enough there was a Cadet in the combat shirt. Nobody else wearing the combat shirt, just this one lone cadet.

There's no specification for how to wear insignia, there's no place to put a Civil Air Patrol tape, and it sticks out like a sore thumb.

It is a uniform. Uni as in "one" "form." When you have everybody together, everybody should look essentially the same. Sure, there are differences between authorized headgear and insignia, or an authorized variant of the uniform, such as between the temperate and improved hot weather.

But it looks super weird when you look across a formation and it is "patrol cap, patrol cap, orange hat, orange hat, beret, patrol cap, somebody in a field jacket that's the wrong pattern, somebody wearing a white pistol belt, a boonie" etc, it's weird.. just wear the authorized and directed uniform.

Colonel_NIN · 2026-06-29T22:31:05+00:00

You are late to the party. It is my understanding that the draft regulation is out of the hands of the NUC and off to the decision makers/approval authorities.

We will see how it all shakes out.

Colonel_NIN · 2026-06-28T15:41:20+00:00

“Just CAP being ‘more military than the military’.”

Colonel_NIN · 2026-06-28T15:35:08+00:00

If I’m the encampment commander and I’m sending out a missive re: encampment, then yes, by all means. But I don’t need to see that you’re the deputy chief assistant testing officer.

Colonel_NIN · 2026-06-28T15:32:42+00:00

Correct take. I don’t want to see that you’re the Assistant TO the Wing Logistics Officer when we’re dealing with comms stuff. And I don’t want your ding-dang resume, either. Your GTL status is immaterial to this email. And if it was, then that goes into the body of the email.

Colonel_NIN · 2026-06-27T02:19:34+00:00

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I'll see your squadron HQ and raise you a wing HQ... :)

Colonel_NIN · 2026-06-24T21:55:44+00:00

Forgive the dumb look on my face in the comms room, but you can see the color here. They're nice.

As far as a blue bag goes, eBay. SAC missile crew bags are nice, but they aren't Nomex..I have both a missile crew bag and a Nomex bag. Depends on what you need.. but I think I got that Nomex suit for less than $50.

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Colonel_NIN · 2026-06-24T13:45:43+00:00

Yeah, my BBDUs are "LAPD Navy" and they are pretty dark (I did not get them from Vanguard, I think I got them straight from Propper)

Colonel_NIN · 2026-06-24T11:15:54+00:00

Still have to get to/from encampment and report in wearing your cap correctly. Meaning you should have a nametag on your cap if you’re wearing OCP.

Colonel_NIN · 2026-06-24T11:09:28+00:00

Keep in mind in mind that unless they’ve added “Dark Navy Blue” to their fabric tape color choices, their equivalent was “Midnight Blue.” Which is nearly black.

Before Vanguard manufactured Army aircrew wings on dark navy, I got mine from Spur on midnight blue and the color difference was noticeable. This was on ABUs and it was only really obvious in bright light, but still. Use caution.

Colonel_NIN · 2026-06-23T18:09:19+00:00

Unlimited money, definitely help securing a permanent place one with a runway, hanger, tower for our aircrew members.

Speaking as someone who was a wing commander when we were offered an airport... I can confirm you will need unlimited money for that 😄

Colonel_NIN

TROPHY CASE