[magduf]

Sounds to me like the military is simply shooting itself in the food with its "up or out" policies. Why force highly-trained and experienced people to leave just because they've gotten to a plateau in their career where they're both competent and comfortable?

Do foreign militaries also have these policies?

[ohyes]

Seems like part of it would be to ensure that you will always be training new pilots.

If you have a lot of 'comfortable' pilots, you have less need to do the training, so when you fight a war and start losing pilots, you have less bandwidth to create new ones.

So there's a couple of things:

You could always recall and retrain the ones you've released if you're low on pilots, that's pretty straightforward for a wartime government if they're desperate.

It is much harder to scale the recruiting / training pipeline if it is insufficient to comfortably replace the losses you're taking. So you run your pipeline at a higher rate than necessary so that in wartime you can maintain your forces.

I think this also explains why the US would allow Boeing to sell things like advanced air-force fighters to other countries. At the surface, it makes no sense to give away your best stuff to another country. But if you think about it, it lets you run your pipeline at a higher rate, and the other guy can't replace his stuff when it starts getting blown up, you get priority. So you get to run at closer to a wartime production rate, with maintenance subsidized by other countries.

It may be cheaper to do the pilot training another way, but the last thing you want is to end up with a shortage of pilots when you actually end up needing them. It is not about cost so much as it is about winning wars and the supply chain therin.

I suspect a lot of countries don't have this policy because they have a grand total of 22 planes and no way to replace them, so if they get blown up there's nothing for new pilots to fly.

tldr; think about them resources that get expended and that you will inevitably have to create more of, rather than as highly skilled professionals

[secfirstmd]

I've always thought the most fascinating part of such sales is if and where backdoors would be put into aircraft and other military exports and how they would be utilised in a scenario. It think I read somewhere about France doing this at one point with fighters.

For example there is no way I'm gonna believe a Saudi F15 doesn't have something that the US could manipulate to its advantage if it chose to.

Of course building a backdoor would mean if an event found it, then could also utilise it. And it would be bad for business if it was found.

[HideousKojima]

In WW2 Germany specificallydidn't take skilled pilots out of combat. This is why lists of WW2 aces are dominated by the Germans, but it also had the side effect that those experienced pilots weren't around to train new pilots, contributing to the degradation of Germany's air capabilities towards the end of the war

[chipsa]

Because they clog up slots that could be used by someone ambitious. If you've got 500 Major slots, but 400 of them are occupied by people who don't want to get promoted, then you only have 100 Majors who can get promoted. So they either have to spend less time in the job than you really want, because you need a certain number of Majors to get promoted to Lt Col each year... or you don't get enough Lt Col promotions, so you don't promote to Colonel as fast as you should. Repeat for every other rank.

That said, of late in the USAF, the promotion rate for every rank below Lt Col has been 95%+. And I think Lt Col has been fairly high as well. The issue isn't kicking them out once they reach a rank, but rather them deciding to get out before then.

[na85]

Because those pilots theoretically move "up" to being staff officers, and then a few of them reach the highest levels of command, with the benefit of a diverse background.

It turns out that being Erich Hartmann, Maverick, or the Red Baron doesn't really translate well into being a good executive leader, and while western militaries want officers who have experience "at the sharp end", the also require leaders who understand how a headquarters works, logistics, politics, etc.