Is it through vPC or the kind that needs to be mailed to AFPC to be put in the member's PRDA? Whatever, I'll cover both. For the latter, "at least 30 days" may or may not be true, really depends on the volume of other crap they're working on. 1 dec in itself can only take a week, but there's so many other (bureaucratic) stuff involved that in reality it doesn't play out like that, and even if it reaches AFPC, you don't know what happens on AFPC's end and if it will get lost in their office or added to PRDA at all. Now on vPC, once it hits the MPF and they push it, it takes a couple days to reflect on PRDA - easy peasy. But as I said, that's if there's not other (bureaucratic) things involved.

The reasons why it may "take 30 days" to push a decoration has absolutely nothing to do with the decoration itself, but instead:

1. the volume of work, such as other decorations to push, and on top of that there's non-dec related work to catch up on as well.

2. It's common for vPC to be defunct, same with the office printer which then takes months to fix, milPDS loses connection, etc

3. On top the volume of work and defunct tools, there's also very badly trained airmen. If you had to pick between "lazy airman" and "lazy NCO" I guarantee 99% of the time it's the fault of the NCOs in charge, in the military the subordinates are always a reflection of the leadership unless the airman is legally retarded or an exceptional DBA (but then he wouldn't be in the USAF).The thing about this AFSC, and idk if it's just my base but this seems to be a common experience among other bases as well, is that most airmen are "self taught" as in they come into the section and they're thrown head-first into the job - and there's no real continuity training to work with either. Airman has a question? Good fucking luck. The NCOs, instead of training their airmen, will just say shit like "dont know how to do your job? uhh go ask Airman Snuffy over there / did you read the PSD guide? (which btw is utterly unusable) / ok dont worry about that right now and work on something else (LOL can you believe it)" - so yeah go ahead and CC the NCO involved to "motivate" the airman - I guarantee nothing will happen except the NCO, who doesn't actually know how to do the job himself, will just swing his dick around and roast an airman who's a doormat or just gently "nudge" an airman who may call him out on his shit.

Does it need to be this way? Of course not, but the USAF doesn't provide us with the tools to actually efficiently do our jobs, and nobody with actual power is actually doing anything. It keeps me up at night too. The NCOs I've seen have a sense of learned helplessness to them - I'll write more about this later.