Your Ten Year Old and the Future U.S. Air Force

One of the stories behind the story of the demise of the F-22 Raptor fighter is the “developing story” of the increasingly important role unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are playing in today’s and certainly in tomorrow’s Air Force.

In my story behind the story of the F-22 demise, I quoted Fred Kaplan’s comments that, during the most intense period of the Cold War, “much higher status was given to pilots of nuclear bombers.” Then, the Vietnam War “paved the way for the rise of the fighter pilot.” However, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are now demanding a new Air Force culture—part of this new culture are the UAV “pilots.”

Also, about how those who “fly” the UAVs will no longer have to be pilots, and about the prediction by C. R. Anderegg, the Air Force historian, that “just as the generals of the 1950s and ’60s were predominantly bomber pilots, and the generals of the 1970s and ’80s were mainly fighter pilots, so a lot of the generals in the coming decades may be UAV joystick pilots,”

Anderegg: “It’s going to be pretty hard for a promotion board, picking the next one-star generals, to pick a colonel who hasn’t commanded a UAV wing over a colonel who has. The UAV commander has the experience, and he has a larger, less insular view of the battlefield than, say, an F-22 pilot at Langley.”

One of our readers of my F-22 story commented:

UAVs. I KNEW the military would be customized to fit the Nintendo Generation somehow!

LOL

My eight-year old could be a Colonel in the Air Force by the time he’s ten.

Well, while 10 is perhaps a relatively young age to achieve such a high rank in today’s Air Force, chances are that many of today’s “Nintendo generation” may in fact be the colonels in tomorrow’s Air Force.

An article in yesterday’s Christian Science Monitor tells us that last week the Air Force graduated its first class of pilots without flight training.

The class consisted of just eight officers trained to fly and control the MQ-1 Predator UAV.

According to the Monitor, Lt. Gen. David Deptula, deputy chief of staff for Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance, calls the graduation a “transition point” for the Air Force in terms of the way it trains the kind of pilots that are needed today. “It’s a departure from how we’ve selected and trained pilots for remotely-controlled planes before,” he says.

Unlike most of the service’s other UAV pilots who have undergone 12- to 18-month pilot training for their various aircraft, the eight officers have never flown Air Force planes. And they may never do so. The new training program is four to six months and includes basic flight screening and equipment training.

This training underscores Secretary Gates’ determination to institutionalize the doctrine and capabilities to fight irregular warfare across the Defense Department.

Finally, according to the Monitor, “The Air Force has a short-term goal of flying 50 remote-controlled planes over Iraq or Afghanistan at any one time by 2010. Currently, the service flies about 36 remote-controlled airplanes over the two war theaters.”

In my previous post, I mentioned that the White House’s defense-budget request for fiscal 2010 includes approximately $3.5 billion for unmanned aerial vehicles.

So, parents, grandparents, next time you see your 10-year-old child or grandchild engaged in a ferocious dogfight across the skies of some far-off country, keep in mind that you may be looking at the next Air Force UAV pilot.

Image: Courtesy General Atomics Aeronautical