Picking Pilots

There's a bit of a brouhaha in the DoD over pilot promotion opportunities for manned versus unmanned pilots, especially as pertains to Air Farce (officer) versus Army (mostly enlisted) pilots:

Actually, there's not much at stake in this dispute, other than possibly settling the decades old controversy over whether all pilots (most of whom are highly trained warriors, not leaders, which is what officers are supposed to be) must be officers. At the start of World War II the army air force (there was no separate air force yet) and navy both had enlisted pilots. These men were NCOs ("flying sergeants" or "flying chiefs" in the navy) selected for their flying potential and trained to be pilots. Not leaders of pilots but professional pilots of fighters, bombers, and whatnot. Officers trained as pilots would also fly but in addition they would provide the leadership for the sergeant pilots in the air and on the ground.

As the Army Air Corps changed into the mighty Army Air Force (2.4 million troops and 80,000 aircraft at its peak), its capable and persuasive commander General Hap Arnold insisted that all pilots be officers. Actually, he wanted them all to be college graduates as well, until it was pointed out that the pool of college graduates was too small to provide the 200,000 pilots the Army Air Force eventually trained. But Arnold forced the issue on pilots being officers and the navy had to go along to remain competitive in recruiting. When the air force split off from the army in 1947, the army went back to the original concept of "flying sergeants" by making most pilots "Warrant Officers" (a sort of super NCO rank for experienced troops who are expected to spend all their time on their specialty, not being diverted into command or staff duties). Many air force pilots envy the army "flying Warrants" because the Warrant Officers just fly. That's what most pilots want to do, fly a helicopter or aircraft, not a desk. But a commissioned officer must take many non-flying assignments in order to become a "well rounded officer." Many air force pilots don't want to be well rounded officers, they want to fly.

I can vouch for this: every pilot I met in the Corps and in the Army was very casual about rank. Quite frankly, they didn't give a crap what was on your collar. They're like race car drivers: it's all they're interested in, and every other concern is secondary.

Career infantry officers, on the other hand, tended to have a broomstick shoved so far up their ass it was tickling their larynx. Rank snobbery was the order of the day, with only a few good officers rising above it, (Captain Leipold was a stand-out example, here).

I think it's long past time Hap Arnold's mistake -- and it WAS a mistake -- be corrected. Let people with the aptitude for flying do so, and those with the talent for leading be commanders. The military is robbing itself of many talented recruits by clinging to an outdated structure that was created for purely political reasons.

In the end, of course, it won't really matter. Thirty years from now a "pilot" will simply be an operator who keeps the commit button depressed while the autonomous aircraft does the flying and fighting at a speed several times faster than human reactions can duplicate. The future of high-tech warfare is that humans will become nothing more than the "kill switches" -- in more ways than one.