Posted on 10/21/2017 11:21:10 AM PDT by be-baw
The United States Air Force could recall as many as 1,000 retired military pilots to active-duty service to address an acute shortage in its ranks.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Friday allowing the Air Force to call back to service up to 1,000 retired aviation officers who wish to return, the White House and the Pentagon announced.
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
I’m sorry that is simply not true. As an example the Air Force Academy offers both engineering/science and liberal arts degrees. The only differentiation on posting selection is by class rank and physicals. The largest screen out is that no one without 20/20 (even if corrected) can be a pilot.
This is true at USNA as well.
Yes they encourage more technical degrees, but it isn’t a requirement to be a flyboy.
Had a tour during my USAF career as an Air Force ROTC instructor. There is no link between engineering degrees and becoming a pilot; your AFOQT scores and physical qualifications are much more important.
One reason you see a lot of engineers in the cockpit is that the Air Force Academy curriculum is weighted towards that discipline, and ROTC (historically) awarded most of its scholarships in engineering and the hard sciences.
The last pilot to retire from active duty with multiple kills was Colonel Cesar Rodriguez, career F-15 pilot who was a business major at the Citadel. The lack of engineering knowledge certainly didn’t hamper his dogfighting skills.
One other comment I’ll make - the draw down in the early 90s gutted both the Navy and AF pipeline for years to come.
Add on that there are more admirals then ships in the Navy and likely more Generals than AF Bases in the AF and you quickly realize that we have gone from performance jobs to administrative bureaucracy from a structural force standpoint.
Op tempo is up, equipment is aged, personnel are fewer, maintenance is a nice to have, and new programs take forever to deliver.... Stinks of the 1920s/early 30s. Took time to build back up then...be harder now.
Perhaps not, but neither could the US military at the start of each of those particular wars, or any other war. It took years of buildup, training and outfitting to do so. D-Day was almost 2 1/2 years after Pearl Harbor. Different battle landscape and technology today. Think back though to the buildup during Desert Shield prior to Desert Storm. It took time to spool up for that. If that became a protracted ground war, we would have prevailed, but it would have taken more buildup in personnel, materiel and time. We can’t afford to maintain a “war time” military in “peace time”, but the technology and ability to project force in many forms still gives us an advantage.
Naturally you are right, but the problem is that WITH today’s technology and weaponry WWIII could be over before coffee was done and drunk.
The Old joke is thar we know what the weapons of WWIII will be. After that, the prime arms for WWIV will be stick and stones.
You have it right. That is how I became the Avionics Maintenance Supervisor for the 509th Bomb Wing.
It is too difficult to separate the young ones from their phones.
The Navy pilots, particularly the Marines, will come get you out of trouble no matter what is going on.
That seems to be the view from the ground.
...and they don’t want to fly the A-10s, nor let the Army have them.
Few young people are interested. Look at general avaition now, one nearly has to be wealthy just to own/maintain and park a small Cessna. The only way for most of the young to get involved in aviation is to join the service, and most have no desire to do that either. Bottom line, flying became very expensive.
“...the Blue Angels did a show at Westover ... they were doing what I assume were practice maneuvers in the area and they were flying full speed (or so it seemed) ...
Not even close.
The F/A-18 has a max speed close to twice the speed of sound. Military aircraft are barred by law and regulation from exceeding the speed of sound within the boundaries of the lower 48 states (except for special-use restricted areas).
Flying above the speed of sound has little value from a military point of view.
In an air show, a machine breaking the sound barrier goes by so fast the spectators cannot really see anything. Poor public relations. Quite apart from the broken windows the shockwave causes.
The only way to fly that fast is by using the afterburners, and the dash cannot last long. Fuel flow at these power setting is so high a fighter-size aircraft runs out of gas in less than five minutes. There are a couple exceptions (F-22, B-1B).
An aircraft running on afterburners causes a signature in the infrared spectrum the size of a searchlight on a dark night. Impossible to hide from IR search systems or heat-seeking missiles.
60 years ago afterburners afforded a manned aircraft the chance to run away from some threats. Missile technology has advanced since then: for over a generation, it has not been possible for a manned aircraft to outrun or out-turn a pursuing missile.
We trained tens of thousands of pilots in the months after Pearl Harbor.
Money is a part of it. The AF does not have the infrastructure to train as many pilots as they used to . Many of the Undergraduate Pilot Training, UPT, bases were forced to close and then all the draw-downs during the Obama administration created this problem.
The AF does not have the money to bring back UPT bases, as well as getting Instructor Pilots, so they can't make up for all the manpower loses during Obama's reign of terror.
Army pilots are all rotor-heads. Even though some AF pilots are it is still apples vs oranges.
Exactly ...... never saw anything but friendly joking rivalry ...... Still I think USAF rotorwing training is at Ft Rucker anyway.
I went active duty AF in 1976 and there were three Warrant Officers left.
“......and they don’t want to fly the A-10s, nor let the Army have them.”
The public perception persists, that the A-10 is some miracle machine that USAF is wilfully under-utilizing. Not the case.
The A-10 is an overspecialized design from the late 1960s, reaching the end of a service life that cannot be extended much further. Its avionics cannot be upgraded to modern modular digitized systems, so it cannot be integrated into any network-centric employment concept (conceded by anyone who knows, to be the road ahead). Its night capabilities are very limited.
It can haul a decent warload, but it is slow and short-legged. Despite all the spectacular footage of battle-damaged A-10s limping back to base, survivability is already severely in doubt in the modern battlespace, and worsens month by month. The most-admired subsytem on board, the GAU-8 30mm gun, is the least-capable, shortest-range system of all.
A-10s performed a small minority of close air support sorties in Afghanistan. The largest fraction in relation to the number of airframes deployed was performed by B-1Bs: very long loiter time, coupled with extremely large individual munitions capacity, coupled with the shortest response time of any platform. Just sweep back the wings to 65 degrees and dash at high speed to the troops in trouble.
And USAF cannot give the A-10 to the Army. By public law, the Army is barred from owning and operating fixed-wing warplanes.
Don't say that to the Warthog jocks. They'll gladly shake hands with you with their wings tips after they "BRRRRRRT" the tanks that were giving you trouble. I do know that back in the days of SAC the BUFF pilots would give a person a pretty good haircut if that person was on one of the training routes.
“The Air Force pilots are the ones that don’t want even sand scratches on their pretty planes. ... The Navy pilots, particularly the Marines, will come get you out of trouble no matter what is going on.
That seems to be the view from the ground.”
This is true only from the worm’s-eye view of someone stuck on the ground.
Infantry is not the “final answer.” Truth be told, ground troops contribute less to the fight in terms of lives risked, munitions carried, and enemy forces negated, compared to any other “system.”
It was not even true 240 years ago: during the American War of Independence, the Continental Army did not beat the British toe-to-toe, man-to-man; it simply avoided one disaster after another until the French intervened, using their own sea power to block Britain’s Royal Navy from supporting Charles, Lord Cornwallis.
Military endeavor has advanced somewhat beyond the individual footsolider so beloved of the American public.
“there are more admirals then ships in the Navy”
>Sounds like you assume admirals are senior officers on ships in the Navy. Destroyers, for instance, have Lieutenant Commanders that are captains of ships, hardly admirals. An admiral may be over a squadron of destroyers, and ride a flagship, but they are still not the captain of the particular destroyer they are on.
Not sure about admirals on larger ships, like aircraft carriers. Maybe somebody from an aircraft carrier could tell us.
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