Air Force in Crisis, Part II: How Did We Get Here?
Mike Benitez
March 8, 2018
“The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution.â€
-Albert Einstein
The U.S. Air Force is 2,000 pilots short, and the shortage is getting worse. Part I of this series outlined the importance of retention. Now, to answer why retention fell, it’s best to first understand when it fell. The Air Force hopes to retain 65 percent of pilots eligible to leave, yet the service last met this goal in 2013. While that tells a story, it’s not necessarily the right story. Like most generalizations, this statistic suffers from a flaw of averages. In this case, these annual metrics are snapshots — the shortfalls are additive. Of the 2,000 pilots the Air Force is currently short, 1,300 of those are fighter pilots. Since the Air Force produces roughly 300 fighter pilots a year, simple math says it took more than a few years of shortages for this crisis to manifest. Distilling internal Air Force retention data by flying community reveals the true crisis: the Air Force has not met its fighter pilot retention goal in 10 years.
https://warontherocks.com/2018/03/air-force-in-crisis-part-ii-how-did-we-get-here/
