Pilot Shortage

The Air Force is short pilots.

I'm going to suggest some heresy to help them.

A huge hunk of the prerequisites you have to have before applying to be a pilot are purely administrative and are intended to make the pool of applicants smaller.

Like being college educated.

Chuck Yeager wasn't.

If you're not getting enough inflow because of your administrative requirements, it's time to change them, because they've got fuck-all to do with the actual work of flying the plane.

The next piece of heresy is to suggest that we divide the AF into administrative, command and flying tracks.

There's guys who just wanna fly.  Let 'em!  The AF says they have a retention problem, how much you want to bet that a huge hunk of the issue is guys who want to fly aren't getting hours because they're spending most of their time doing administrative things or have to pay lip service to wanting promotions and command to keep flying (knowing that promotions and command will ALSO end their flying days).

There's scads of people who'd make poor pilots but great administrators, and there's no real reason for them to be officers or have command authority.  But it would take a massive paradigm shift to recreate technical positions for enlisted and making warrant officers where education is needed.

The US mil hates warrants.