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Posted By Thomas E. Ricks
Wednesday, September 15, 2010 - 5:52 AM
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Defense Secretary Robert Gates is going to need some radical solutions in order to realize the kind of budget cuts he wants. Here is one that will make the Air Force kick and moan, but I think the argument has merit.
By John Taplett
Best Defense guest columnistSecretary of Defense Gates is currently searching for ways to trim the Department of Defense's proposed $550 billion budget for next year.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are a perfect case study. They are significantly cheaper to purchase and operate than manned aircraft, and they do not require officer pilots. Officer pilots are necessary in manned aircraft because they make decisions independent of a commander's control, due to distance and communications limitations. UAVs remove these impediments. Today a team of enlisted personnel can remotely operate numerous aircraft under the supervision of a single officer. Currently, the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps all use enlisted personnel to fly some UAVs. Yet the Air Force insists on maintaining antiquated requirements that all pilots -- including of UAVs -- be officers.
A recent internal audit of the Air Force's UAV training pipelines found that if properly structured, the training cost could be decreased to $135,000 per pilot, an impressive number when compared with the more than $2.6 million the service spends to train a fighter pilot. Of the approximately 1,200 individuals entering the Air Force's pilot training pipeline last year, roughly half will pilot UAVs. It costs the United States Air Force Academy $403,000 per officer graduate, while it costs less than $45,000 to recruit and train an enlisted service member. If a switch from officer to enlisted UAV pilots were made in the Air Force alone the total recruiting and training savings could amount to over $1.5 billion each year. If all of the services were to begin replacing officers in flight training pipelines with experienced enlisted personnel, such programs could yield several billion dollars in savings each year.
These would not be one-time savings, as maintaining an officer on active duty costs far more than maintaining enlisted personnel. Last year, for the first time, a Navy Petty Officer First Class completed the basic flight standards course, the first step in the Navy's pilot training pipeline. Before flight pay, bonuses, and allowances this individual is paid $2801.40 a month, compared with the $5117.10 a lieutenant is paid for the same month's work. These soldiers, sailors, and marines complete highly technical operations with extremely high levels of efficiency and do so at a fraction of the cost of an officer.
It seems clear that some of the billions of dollars in budget savings for which Secretary Gates is searching might be found by more fully utilizing the talents of enlisted service members. UAVs present only one example of how thoughtful planning might be used to provide savings for taxpayers. Re-restructuring the four services by decreasing the number of officers and replacing them with highly trained enlisted personnel will decrease the burden on tax payers and improve the efficiency of our ever ready armed services. America's enlisted service men and woman are a highly intelligent and talented group who should be trained to rise to meet the opportunities that technology is providing.
John Taplett was a Navy officer on active duty from 2005 to 2010. He currently is studying at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. The views expressed here are his own and do not necessarily represent the views of the Defense Department, nor its components, or of Joe Torre.
As an army guy, where the majority of our pilots are WOs, I've always been curious about the AFs inclination towards all-commissioned pilots. The whole idea behind WOs is to provide the services with a well-paid technical expert who normally does not hold leadership positions. That would seem to be a tailor-made definition for most aircraft pilots.
I worked for one of the last USAF Warrant Officers back in the early 1980s in the California Air Guard; all the active duty WOs were retired by then. Personally, I think we could have fired a third of our Lt Cols serving at that time and let him do any of their jobs both better and cheaper.
It is my understanding that WO slots are counted against officer positions so for every W1 serving, you lose a 2LT, W2, a 1 LT and so on. The USAF has an institutional bias towards officers and has since it was the Air Service in WW I and pilots saw themselves as knights of the air and not some grubby peon spear carriers. There is also, I think, a salmon spawning metaphor in the USAF officer management policy; i.e., you throw as many 2d Lieutenants in the pool at one end and see how many survive and prosper long enough to make Colonel and compete for those silver General's stars. If you turn a couple thousand officer billets into WO billets, that reduces the number of LTs you can bring in.
.. the drone jobs to cubicles in Bangladesh. Just think of the savings!
No we don't need to pin a red bar on enlisted men and pay them 30% more to fly airplanes, enlisted men can fly them, like Chuck Yeager did as a Sergeant in WWII. Don't train recruits, but reenlistees after their first term, so they are more mature and have a track record.
There is no reason why we need two officers in larger aircraft. Half of flying positions should go to enlisted men, who needn't spend half their career outside the cockpit flying a desk. So a typical C-130 cockpit would have a Major pilot and a Master Sergeant co-pilot.
UAVs dont cost less. A Predator UAV costs around $20 million while a T-6 prop costs around $4 million, that is why the defense industry loves them and has its reps like Mr. Ricks tout them.
UAVs crash 10 times more often, are easier to shoot down, their signals can be jammed, and they provide far less capability than a pilot who can see 180 degrees and hear things. Their big advantage is standard long-range recon since they can fly much longer -- like global hawk.
Been There, Done That... Wouldn't Recommend You Do It Yet
I was a Platoon Leader for one of the Army's Shadow UAV Platoons in Iraq in 2006-2007. All my pilots were E-3-E-7 ranks. From direct experience, and the information I was able to pull from the tactical and small UAV community (that doesn't include the Warrior/Reaper/Predator programs), here's what I learned about what happens when you put Joe at the controls.
First off, a Soldier pilot can be a highly competent and professional UAV operator. I've seen several E-4's and E-5's who were absolutely capable of understanding the fundamental physics of flight and learning instrument flight rule procedures without the benefit of a college degree. The RQ-7 Shadow is a highly technical, complex and expensive piece of equipment, and the Soldiers I led flew and operated it with a high level of effectiveness. I've seen firsthand that Soldiers can be UAV pilots.
I've also watched them turn no fewer than three aircraft into lawn darts. They forget to put oil in the engine. They forget to disconnect the external power cable from the aircraft before launching it. They forget to program the "return home point" for the aircraft's auto-pilot in case the control signal is interrupted (I think Iran got a freebie due to that-- that wasn't us, though). You could argue that the men of manned aviation do the same things-- ramp strikes, missed arresting wires, failure to put gear down before landing, inattention to the fuel gauge, etc. Our adjacent Blackhawk unit was very leery of having us flying remote planes around and constantly said we were a threat. They shut up after one of their guys flew into a blimp... that was tethered to the ground... and had been there for a year. However, in most of these cases we're talking about mistakes made at a single point of failure-- the pilot. In the case of enlisted aviation, this is mishap by committee. Each UAV mission involves a crew chief, a mission commander, a pilot, and a payload operator. Four people are dedicated to this aircraft, and we miss things like dipsticks and power cords.
The community is fraught with things like this. I don't remember how many accidents the Shadow program racked up before the line accumulated 50,000 flight hours, but it was enough that the Army's UAV Program Management Office put out a message saying that it would have to start limiting the number of replacement aircraft units received based on how stupid the reasons for their crashes were. I don't think that's an indicator that this is a cost-effective strategy. As Secretary Gates said (I believe), "I look forward to many more microchips giving their lives for their country." There's wisdom in removing the pilot from the threat to the aircraft, for sure. But there's a difference in a sense of greater security reducing risk and a sense of complacency reducing attentiveness.
To caveat, the Army has in recent years put the habeus grabbus on the problem. Probably the silver bullet solution was to remove MI Lieutenants from the Platoon Leader position and instead put in Warrant Officers from the Aviation Community (followed later by Warrants specifically trained as UAV specialists). Again, though, that's not really a selling point for Soldier Pilots. What we essentially did was put in a supervisor who had vast flying experience and told him or her to watch the Joes like a hawk.
Now you've got a crew of four troops, plus a Warrant acting as the boss. Add up four E-5 salaries and a CW3 and tell me if it's as cost-effective as a LT and a Captain. I know there's more than that on a Predator mission, but I'll get back to that.
What if you want to reduce the number of personnel involved in this endeavor, say, take the warrant out of the equation? You're going to have to train the troops to be more proficient at what they're doing. That means more school. That means a more developed pilot. That means someone who thinks they're worth more money because of their skill-set, and apt to jump ship when their contract is up and take the lucrative offer being made to them by the guys from the contracting company who are helping to fly the planes because we have a shortfall in Soldier pilots. Cycles. They're vicious, no?
There's no greater example of this concept than the Army's Hunter UAV program. Sure, Soldiers fly the planes. But because there's no pneumatically-powered slingshot to launch them with and no arresting cables strong enough to mitigate a run-out landing requirement, someone has to conduct takeoffs and landings just like a regular plane, as well as communicate with the local air traffic control tower. Soldiers don't have those qualifications. So Warrants wind up doing it. When there aren't enough Warrants, we use contractors. Count up the money.
So now you want to save the costs associated with extra personnel and aircraft losses. You need proficient pilots. Like I said, Soldiers can do it. They can also not do it. How do you separate the pilots from the plummets? Conventional wisdom says a college degree is a good metric. The Army's used Warrant Officer School with great success, so there's a precedent for making it cost-effective. Warrant ranks are the absolute lowest pay-grade threshold, though, because now you get back to the composition of those Air Force UAV missions.
I have a friend in the Predator community. He's miserable. He's also afraid he's going to lose his career every time he gets behind the computer screen. Every time his crew flies, he prays they don't find anything or get asked to shoot something. This is the downside of the "courageous restraint" mentality, that we hammer guys for shooting the wrong things, even when local battlespace commanders give them release to shoot. You're looking at a black-and-white screen showing an infra-red camera image, and forced to tell if a guy is Bin Laden or not. The fear that's gripped the community is so substantial that all kinds of ROEs and supervisory controls have been introduced in the last year. You now have two captains flying the plane, multiple personnel managing the sophisticated signalling architecture, and O-5's on both sides of the Atlantic looking over these guys' shoulders deciding whether they should pickle the round or not. All this time and training and money, so we can worry about one rocket.
So regardless of whether it's an E-5 or a CW5 behind the controls, an O-5 still has to get involved. I think Tom just posted something about supervising people into oblivion. In this case, your Warrant pilot would be turned into a trained monkey. I watched an E-3 melt into a puddle in a Brigade TOC because two O-4s harassed the crap out of him with questions about a Shadow video feed. You can argue the relative amount of training and pay involved all day, but there's a certain advantage to giving the pilot the sense that he actually is in control of the aircraft, and nothing helps that mentality like a . Who's more likely to tell the doc in Milgram's experiment to jump in a lake-- the LT or the PFC?
If you're going to take the O's and CWO's out of the cockpit, then you have to accept that you're putting someone in there who's rank and level of authority are incongruent with their level of responsibility. That's always a recipe for disaster. To borrow from Top Gun, you just wrote a check their body can't cash. The patch to that is to put in a supervisor. At that point, it's questionable whether two heads really are better than one, and debatable that the cost of two lower ranks save that much off the price of a higher one.
What timing! I was just pondering this very thing on my morning drive. It's not just flying-- let's take a look and see if having a 2 (or 2.5) class structure really makes sense in today's world. I like what Jim is suggesting, moving to more job specific requirements and universal standards rather than just saying an O is an O and a E is an E and never the twain shall meet.
After all, what is the difference between an E-3 with a college degree and an O-1 besides a different type of military training, expectations, pay, and tradition? Or the difference between a non-commissioned officer or warrant officer or commissioned officer. It's certainly nothing inherent in the person anymore. Our officers no longer purchase their commissions nor do they come exclusively from the upper class. The corporate world doesn't segregate their employees to the degree that the Army does. Do we really need to have two seperate methods of acquiring & retaining people? Perhaps a contract for an initial period with extensions for schooling or assignment, after that allow requests for resignations by any rank.
Thinking about the post a couple of months ago on lateral hires in the Army-- we already do that everyday with a O-1 coming in to supervise people with 5-10 years of experience. Maybe everyone should come in as a E-nothing and promote up the successful people.
Two points:
The first one is that the aviation community is hell on enforcing standardized procedures and checklists. Rigid compliance with these is the reason aviation entities, airlines etc don't have the misadventures your unit experienced. In fact they used to suffer from those problems in years past before all those things were widely used.
The second point I would make is that a college degree is absolutely not required to be a good pilot. This opinion is based on 36 years of experience.
Your experience does not sound like a good one. Perhaps the unit lacked leadership. I am a former USN SEAL and Vietnam Veteran. I am also the father of a former SEAL. SEAL enlisted men are taught from day one that they will be required to function in any situation regardless of the circumstances. Many SEAL ops were and are led without the presence of an officer. Warrant Officers and Senior enlisted often have far more combat and operational experience than the officers. To be honest I believe that the armed forces puts far to much emphasis on the officer corps. In the end the enlisted personnel really are what makes the mission a success or a failure. Officers move on to staff positions and have little actual operational or combat time under their belts as they rise in rank and move behind desks. Enlisted men are often in the thick of it from the time they are E3s until they retire as E9s or Warrants. While officers have the juice they may not have the experience or know how. Why shouldn't we have enlisted and warrant officer pilots? After all their are enlisted men in Tier One Spec Ops units who are able to flly many types of aircraft. While I was fortunate to serve with officers who were not closed minded and full of themselves, I know that outside of Spec Ops that is not often the case. Maybe it's time to reexamine the role and need for the Officer Corps. Perhaps every officer should have to serve a minimum of 2 to 4 years as an enlisted man or women prior to being accepted into an officer training program. Let Enlisted men and women fly UAVs.
Mr. Gourley has written a very good piece highlighting the fact that aviation operations are a complex system. In complex systems, we know from systems theory that any change may achieve the intended effect, but it will certainly also have unintended consequences. So, operating UAVs/UASs involves a complex system of maintenance, communications and flight crews. Changing the rank of the operator at the console will have system wide effects, which is essentially what Mr. Gourley has illuminated.
Keep in mind also that one reason for rated officers being in charge of combat aircraft is to keep the rank, and hence compensation, commensurate with the risks and responsibilities of the activity. A Predator or a Global Hawk is a big aircraft, and needs to be operated by a fully qualified pilot of whatever rank. For example, it took a very, very long time to convince the FAA that Predators could be safely operated within U.S. airspace to monitor the southern and northern borders. A Predator or Raptor pilot is firing ordnance at insurgents in theater. If you have an enlisted operator at the controls, you will probably end up having an officer supervisor in order to make the targeting calls, and you will then end up eliminating the proposed savings.
There is no doubt that talented enlisted members or warrant officers could be trained to fly UAVs. There will, however, be system effects and the command and control and Rules of Engagement required by the system may easily negate any hypothetical cost savings.
SEAL76,
I appreciate your viewpoint. I agree with it. There's one problem why it doesn't work, though.
Like I said, a 12-man A-Team is often just as effective as a 150-man infantry company. Why don't we just make more A-Teams or SEALs?
Because they're SPECIAL operations forces. That means you need SPECIAL individuals. If I could make every enlisted guy out there a SEAL, then we'd all be special. You know as well as I do that not everyone is special.
You worked with the cream of the crop, hence the "Tier 1" designation. Quality takes a pyramid formation, and you were at the top. Once you need more quantity, your quality starts degenerating. Enlisted guys in your world could have done anything they wanted, and that's half of why they wound up in your world. You've watched a lot of guys try out for that world over the years, I'm sure. Not all of them make it. Where do they wind up?
Some fly helicopters. Some fly UAVs. Some guys work in the chow hall.
Incidentally, I've always believed that with the qualifications guys hold at the Tier 1 level, an E-7 there ought to be making as much as an O-4 in the conventional world. I'm not sure if they're able to work those kinds of things for those guys with "special" pays, but they should. I know most of those fellas do it because they love it, but while the government is at it, they could pay them what they're worth.
I am not a defender of the Air Force's personnel policies. Even after 60 years of experience in trying to balance pilot supply with pilot demand, the Air Force continues to fall short. However, a wholesale replacement of fighter aircraft with UAV's is ill-advised.
UAV's with their long loiter times and superior technology have performed admirably in Iraq and Afghanistan. Why? Good weather, no significant enemy air defenses, and a few widely scattered targets. When these variables change, UAV's are no longer the best choice.
No current technology is able to see through thick clouds. The sensor and weapons operators need to be able to see the target in a dynamic, troops-in-contact situation. Yes, GPS guided weapons are effective for stationary targets, but if the target moves, someone has to see it to hit it.
UAV's are slow targets for enemy air defenses. Even relatively accurate, inexpensive, low-tech AAA can down a UAV. Fighters are more maneuverable and because the pilots are able to see more of the world than can be displayed in on a computer monitor, they should be more aware of enemy air defense systems.
Finally, the fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, from an air perspective, has generally been hours of boredom separated by moments of sheer fury. There has hardly ever been more than 10-15 separate targets in any area. When there has been a high number of targets, as in Operation ANACONDA or Fallujah, even fully loaded fighters and bombers could hardly keep up.
If the US needed to exercise military force in North Korea, UAV's would not be as useful as combat platforms. Bad weather, accurate air defenses, and the largest force-on-force battles since World War II would tax even America's most capable manned aircraft.
Clearly, there will be a role for UAVs in technologically advanced air forces in the future. The USAF could probably better manage the system so that a single officer pilot could manage multiple UAV's during those hours of boredom, and technological advances will eventually obviate current UAV limitations.
What will not change is the political element. When the fog of war causes a soldier or Marine to mistakenly shoot a civilian, the "blame" is largely localized on a single person or team. When an American aircraft mistakenly bombs the incorrect target the headlines read "America bombs Chinese Embassy."
There is no doubt that well-trained, well-educated enlisted Airmen could operate a weapons system with as much skill as an officer. When the political tide of war can change with a single bomb from the air (consider the German-directed bombing of fuel tanker trucks in Afghanistan), officers should be tasked with the responsibility to exercise American power...and they should continue to be held accountable when it goes wrong.
On the capabilities of planes there actually isn't much to stop us from making the fighters autonomous and remotely controlled as well. When you think about how much faster a computer can react than a human it will probably happen anyway.
For a bunch of conservatives...
The military sure does believe in unions.
Look at any military career field and you'll find a lot of places where officers just aren't strictly necessary. One might even suggest the entire class-based officer-enlisted concept is an anachronism well past it's due date. But the fact remains that a lot of communities have officers for bureaucratic reasons. They need someone with rank as advocates and to act as sh!t shields. There have been several communities in the Air Force that developed officer cadres for precisely that reason.
Then again, Jim Gourley's arguments are something to be listened to and heeded. Pay and benefits matter and your kidding yourself if you think an E-4 or E-5 is going to stick around and do the same thing a Major or LTC does with none of the financial and other benefits that come with membership in the officer class.
VERY good point on invoking the oak leaf as a fecal umbrella. Pararescue started out as an enlisted-only club, and relied on their associated "Special Tactics Officers" to hook 'em up with funding and supplies. They wound up having to establish their own brand of officer, and now STO's are distinctly either CCT or PJ.
I don't know what "Other Ranks" took from my comments, but I definitely wasn't proposing anything that he talked about. I kind of DO think "an O is an O and an E is an E." Rank has its privileges, they say. Well, that's because rank also has its burdens. Again, we're very confused about things these days. You have to get back to fundamentals.
I put a guy in charge of 38 other guys. He's obviously got to be higher ranking, because you don't want a guy questioning orders instead of taking them. Put a guy in charge of 750 guys, and his rank needs to be higher, of course. It doesn't matter if the first guy is part of that 750 or not. He's the smaller unit. Unless there's some kind of extenuating circumstance, his power shouldn't outweigh the guy with the bigger unit. Why? Because his responsibility isn't greater.
It's geeky, but Spider-Man said it best. "With great power, comes great responsibility." The military just applies the principle backwards. Your power should always be great enough that you can address your responsibilities, and not great enough to hinder someone else in addressing theirs. When you're talking platoons vs. battalions or frigates vs. nuclear powered carriers, these things are pretty simple. So what kind of rank is associated with a $750,000 UAV with an IR camera on it? What about a $2million one carrying hellfires and top secret doodads that can see what brand of toothpaste Ahmadinejad uses?
I see a strong correlation between this subject and the one of micro-managed subordinates. If you have to have an O-5 oversee a Predator mission, then eliminate the two Captains and just give the stick to the LTC. Here are your savings:
- One guy trained instead of three
- Faster decision loop
- Better coordination between decision maker and actor
- If the O-5 makes the wrong call, you only ruin one career
Again, it's about fundamentals. How many times have we tried to do things on the cheap and had them blow up in our face? Iraq invasion, much? We're trying to do more with fewer people, here. There's a precedent for that in SF teams. You hear all the time about how twelve guys on an A-team can do as much as two platoons in the Korengal Valley. Maybe so, but the training, the gear, and the sunglasses needed to look cool while accomplishing all that SF stuff are going to cost about as much as the infantry company by the end of the day. SOF constantly hearkens us to their mantra of "quantity over quality", but regardless of the model you adopt, the price is still the same.
Yes, we can put a lower-paid, lower-ranked, lower-powered person behind the controls. You'd also have to lower your expectations though, albeit only in certain dimensions. In our case, we've adopted a strategy of high expectations-- kill the one enemy guy, preserve all the innocent civilians standing around him. We have committed ourselves to a campaign of surgical operations. That means surgery. You probably want a surgeon for that, and those guys don't come cheap or easy.
Sunglasses need to look cool?! LOL! Unrelated true story - my first tour in Iraq everyone in my unit wore their pistols down on their leg in a drop holster, Han Solo-style, because, you know, that's how the SF do it. When a real SF team actually showed up in our AA (with coolguy sunglasses naturally), they were all wearing their sidearms high up on their belts. Within 24 hrs, everyone started wearing their pistols on their belts. Gotta love combat fashion.
"I don't know what "Other Ranks" took from my comments, but I definitely wasn't proposing anything that he talked about. I kind of DO think "an O is an O and an E is an E." Rank has its privileges, they say. Well, that's because rank also has its burdens. Again, we're very confused about things these days. You have to get back to fundamentals."
I should have been more clear. I was speaking to your paragraph on separating pilots from from the plummets or as I see your question, how do you select the person for the position if not blindly by rank? Qualifications & screeening? I do think that has wider possibilities to rethink how we assign other positions. Too often the bandaid solution is to throw rank at a problem rather than fixing the underlying fault. Getting back to fundamentals (as if those were ever left) is great but let's take a look to make sure we're not blindly following tradition as to who does what just because that's how it's always been.
As to Andy's comment about pay & benefits-- the corporate world handles that problem by paying for both technical abilities and supervisory responsibilities, or to lump it into one, pay based on the specific position rather than solely on time & title. You can pay highly trained engineers at a rate to keep them without making each one a senior VP. Likewise you don't have to pay an engineer the same as the mail clerk. This isn't new to the Army, the technician and later Spec 5+ ranks were an attempt to bridge that gap.
Bright enlisted men would stay in the service if its officers were honest about how much everyone is making. An E-4 makes more than the average college graduate in the USA. http://www.g2mil.com/pay.htm
Note those are DoD figures. This is when someone pays dumb and responds that only basic pay should be counted.
Thanks Jim for pointing out that its not as easy as just saying that the AF can replace O's with EM's flying UAVs. Nevertheless, I don't see any reason why the AF doesn't assign WO's. Well, except there are no WO's in the AF. But that could change pretty easily I suppose. UAVs are so new and so dynamic as a field, I think this will shake itself out in the next few years.
The AF and Navy senior leaders are led by pilots.
Army pilots are Warrrants and usually better than AF pilots.
Navy and Marines barely have a mission anymore. They try to do army's mission as Army is underfunded and hence the Sea Services in Iraq and Afghanistan. Confusing chain of command. when the Marines try to embarass the Army .. We really don't need this with tax payer monies.
AF and Navy senior leaders are led by the President and SecDef.
The Army has officer and warrant pilots.
To say Army pilots are usually better than AF pilots or Naval Aviators is ridiculous. Each service give their pilots a wealth of training and experience. It is an individual pilot's skill level which determines if he or she is better than another. Pilot training is joint today, AF and Navy pilots train at the same bases using the same aircraft and the same instructors. AF and Army helo pilots train at the same base using similar aircraft and the same instructors.
What the Navy and Marines have is a capability. When the DoD needs something done they match a capability with a tasking and then the unit goes and does it. This is why Navy attack aircraft can bomb land targets and the AF can attack targets at sea. They have the capability to do so.
PSWEENEY,
You missed the point of Texan's post. He was stating that a large number of he AF and Navy's senior leadership are chosen from among their officer pilot pool. Also, while I don't disagree that Navy or AF pilots are "worse" than Army pilots, the fact remains that Army WO's have one mission: to fly planes. They aren't side tracked by the office politics or management requirements that are piled on a commissioned officer's plate. Therefore over time they end up better trained and capable to handle the machines with which they are entrusted.
On the flip side, the significant time and effort AF/Navy pilots place on maintaining proficiency with their equipment makes them ill-prepared to handle the job of leading men and women. I'm not saying all AF/Navy aviation officers are not up to the task, but, between an Army/Marine CPT who has spent 4-5 years leading platoons and companies with between 20-150 men and an O-3 pilot who is probably just 3 years out of a 2 year long flight school...well I think you the point; they have already begun their officer career at a significant disadvantage.
The AF and Navy senior leaders are chosen from the pilot pool because they understand how to employ airpower. Ground commanders historically do not do this well, they tend to subordinate airpower to ground objectives, which is why the AF is a separate service from the Army. The Navy understands that airpower is an important part of their power projection and promote officers who understand how to use it.
AF pilots do spend a lot of time maintaing proficiency, however the comparison to an infantry officer is apples to oranges. AF pilots are not asked to lead 20-150 men as on O-3. They lead a flight of 4 aircraft and associated crews. They are well prepared for that and at no disadvantage to a warrant with who went through the same training.
The British were able to have the best of both worlds many years ago by creating Pilot Officers. I don't expect us ever to do anything so sensible but it worked well for them when combating the Luftwaffe.
Believe you will find an RAF Pilot Officer is just a 2 LT by a different name. What that RAF does have, in exchange for no upward mobility past Squadron Leader (Major), is the chance to stay in the cockpit for a 22 year career and not have to do staff or "career broadening" tours flying a desk. Perhaps there is someone who can elaborate further?
The AF tried that back in the early 80's. They took a survey of officers who would go that track and peak at Major to keep flying instead of going on to command positions.
They had to nix the idea because too many pilots indicated they'd stay in the cockpit. Personnel branch did the math and figured they wouldn't have anyone qualified for General within eight years.
True story.
It's about Strategic Flexibility
In the article, Mr. Tappet writes "...Officer pilots are necessary in manned aircraft because they make decisions independent of a commander's control..." This requirement doesn't go away just because the cockpit is on the ground. Even with the best comm links in the world, a operational-level commander cannot control multiple tactical missions. The pilot-in-command sitting in the left seat of a ground control station still has to make pilot-in-command decisions.
The Army with their Hunters and Shadows can get away with putting young enlisted troops in the GCS because they always bring layer upon layer of supervision. The Shadow pilot is being supervised by the Mission Commander (an NCO in the TOC), who is being supervised by a Battle Captain (a field grade officer, also in the TOC) to make sure the Shadow pilot stays at the tactical level. The Army can do this because whenever they deploy, they bring the whole division.
But the reason we have an Air Force is to provide strategic flexibility. The Army would never send a single tank or helicopter by itself, thousands of miles behind enemy lines, to attack strategic targets. But that's the Air Force mission (even if we spend a lot of time these days providing close air support). The Air Force simply isn't big enough to have one group of aviators to fly direct support missions and a seperate group of aviators to fly strategic missions--that would erase any savings gained by using enlisted pilots.
The Army recognizes this as well. For the Grey Eagle (really an MQ-1 Predator), they plan to place the weapons control authority in the front seat of the nearby Apache helicopter where a rated aviator has the final say. Apaches stay within a brigade AOR, so Warrent Officers are appropriate.
So the Air Force is actually saving you money by insisting that we use officers as RPA pilots. The proposal to use enlisted would drive a requirement for increased levels of supervision and a bigger price tag.
-Killjoy
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