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And...there is the other end. My brother is a pilot and was retired by the Air Force because he had been in so long...so out he goes. Now he is a contractor flying drones for them getting paid 3x as much while drawing a hefty retirement. My brother loved the Air Force and wanted to stay...now he gets to stay and get paid a boat load more. Air Force brass not very smart.

> Now he is a contractor flying drones for them getting paid 3x as much while drawing a hefty retirement.

Contracting him could easily still be cheaper than having him still be in.

Not in this case. He's already going to get retirement benefits. Now, he's being payed a lot more, and part of that pay is for an additional retirement benefit.

Contracting is really for short term needs. You pay short term wages (which bundle in insurance, retirement, profit, etc) for contractors. However, if the organization will continue to have that same need for several years, then paying people short term wages for that long is very expensive.

But now he doesn't fly planes, which saves them a lot of money, and I doubt he'd have voluntarily transitioned within service from jets to drones, no?

,,,voluntarily transitioned within service...

My impression is that very little about the military is voluntary. If they need pilots to fly different craft, the pilots will fly different craft.

Large job changes like that aren’t forced in my experience. If the person isn’t happy doing it the results are unlikely to be good, so they always try very hard for volunteers. It’s a volunteer service after all.

Hi, have you heard of the NCORP? It's how the Air Force levels out enlisted career fields. Since the Air Force sets force-wide promotion rates, some career fields end up with too many folks in some of the NCO grades.

When that happens, they take the most junior folks in the grade and force them to retrain into another career field. They give you a short list to choose from. Most of the jobs are special operations and aircrew. You have a short period of time to make a choice and submit a package. If you don't act, they pick one for you. They picked airfield management for me near the end of an enlistment that earned me a 5.0 SRB when I re-upped as a 3C072. I self-promoted myself to Mr, instead. This was in 2008. The Air Force has been bad at staffing for a long time.

Once you have volunteered, the needs of the service are what matters. They attempt to accommodate, but in the end if they need you somewhere they're going to put you there.

> force them to retrain into another career field. They give you a short list to choose from. Most of the jobs are special operations and aircrew.

How can that possibly work? How can you force someone to retrain into special operations? How does anyone build the motivation and determination to pass the qualification courses for that when they don't even really want to be there? Why would special operations even want someone who wasn't remotely a volunteer?

The big hurdle is volunteering to be in the military. Once you have though, you can’t quit whenever you want and can’t skip without serious punishments.

No courses like those for special operations specifically let you voluntarily withdraw even for people already serving as they only want volunteers.

The military isn’t all sir-yes-sir as people think - if you don’t want to be there then they don’t want you to be there either.

You can only pick the ones you're qualified for, and the special operations jobs all require pre-approval to retain into. Similar with aircrew, if you want an aircrew job you have to get medically qualified before you can select it. If you don't pick a new job you just don't get to re-enlist. They don't force you into a job you don't want as far as I'm aware. I'm sure they have the authority (and your agreement when you signed the enlistment paperwork) to do so if they really needed to, but when I went through they just gave you a re-enlistment eligibility code that would prevent you from serving beyond your current obligation if you declined the jobs they selected for you. I'm sure it'd put you high on the list for force shaping if that was going on, too.

E: forgot special duties were an option, too. If you applied for and were selected to be something like an MTI, MTL, or recruiter then you didn't have to retrain. I'm not sure what would happen after the special duty was done. Usually you would return to your career field once you're done, but I don't know if that's the case if you do the special duty to avoid NCORP retraining.

Yes, this has been a thing forever. (Former 33S/17D here) I went through two separate instances of reductions in force (aka "force shaping") - 2006 and 2010 - but there were others as well. (I chose to separate in 2010) They believed they brought too many officers on board in the 2001-2004 timeframe and were looking to trim down, especially because of budget cuts. I remember hearing about your situation as well (letting ROTC accessions off the hook). Yet the USAF periodically seems to cycle through "we have too many"/"we are way short" phases and this has now come back to bite them for their most critical asset, pilots. (Cyber retention is an issue as well - how do you keep them from getting out and working as contractors? The incentives don't line up)

> had pollen allergies on a form and was instantly disqualified (like you would ever be breathing pollen at altitude).

Any form of rhinitis (nose irritation or inflammation) after age 12 is disqualifying (allergic, nonallergic or vasomotor).

The reason for this is because anyone who has rhinitis has higher risk of getting the reaction at least sometimes from changes of humidity, barometric pressure, irritants like chemicals, dust, stress, etc. Having runny nose or puffed eyes is no-go for fighter pilot in a breathing mask. Spending millions to train someone who has a change of not being able to fly is not a good investment.

It's the same for the eyes. They estimate how the eye conditions develop for the rest of the career. Small things that don't matter now can become problematic later.

Hay fever causes problems with wearing the oxygen mask.

Edit: Downvote me if you like, but that's the reason I was given when I asked an Air Force pilot.

Aren't you breathing super pure oxygen/nitrogen mixture in a fighter jet?

I believe the F-22 uses air that is oxygen-enriched by a mechanical device that does some sort of filtering/diffusion process.

Picture this:

It's time to go fly. The alarm is going off, and you need to get in your jet. Boogers are streaming down your face, and you are experiencing sneezing fits that have you bent over with your eyes closing and tearing up. You can put on a mask with nice clean air, but it'll take an hour before you are in condition to fly. Sitting there on the runway waiting for your allergies to stop acting up is not acceptable.

I wouldn't want to be dealing with itchy eyes and sneezing when I need my full attention managing the airplane in combat. The hay fever drugs make one dizzy (and it says on the label to not take them when operating machinery). (I have hay fever. One nice thing about getting older is my hay fever symptoms have steadily declined. They were rather bad when I was fighter pilot age.)

You'll also need a HEPA filter to filter out pollen, just a dust filter won't do it.

Not all allergies are like that. I would wager the vast majority are pretty mild symptoms easily treatable with anti-histamines. I myself have allergies, but I never even notice because the air at work is filtered and I'm not outside long enough for symptoms to manifest as I travel to and from my car.

Maybe the case could be made for fighter pilots (though I still think it's a non-issue for 99% of people with seasonal allergies), but what's the excuse for disqualifying for all aircraft? Airline pilots can have allergies and fly. How is that much different from a heavy cargo plane?

> How is that much different from a heavy cargo plane?

1. Deployed environments are often less than pretty. There's pretty much no comparison between a peacetime US/Europe life and wartime, even at airbases.

2. In the military, aircrews are expected to go down behind enemy lines, regardless of how often it happens against terrorist groups. They want to maximize your probability of survival after the crash/shootdown. Medical preconditions of any kind don't really help that.

Well, all that's going to do is create an incentive to lie about your medical history so you don't get DQ'd and/or artificially limit the size of your pilot candidate pool, thus creating an even bigger shortage.

Non-pilot millitary personnel get deployed and are on the ground in war zones 10x more than pilots (especially in the army) and they aren't disqualified for having allergies.

It's just not a big deal except in the most egregious of hay fever cases

While I don't agree with the initial assertion of Oxygen masks being incompatible with seasonal allergies I will say that the Docs are looking to disqualify you as early in the pipeline as possible, reason being: $$$. In addition, the only times I've heard of specific pipeline disqualification is if you "anthro out" of certain aircraft, i.e too big or too small for the cockpit.

Source: Marine Pilot.

Antihistamines make you sleepy. That's why they are usually on "do not fly if you're taking it" list, even for commercial and private pilots.

I have seasonal allergies and have never had issues with nor heard of this.

Canadian Air Force, but same issues with the overly stringent medical requirements. A minor form of scoliosis disqualified me from ever using an ejection seat. Although I wanted to fly transport planes, the training required the use of an aircraft with ejection seats.

Eyesight for me. Didn't join, but part of me still wishes I'd joined anyway and had them pay for school.

Now I learn they actually started allowing laser surgery corrected vision some time ago.

C'est la vie.

If this was around 10 or so years ago, my understanding for the stricter pilot requirements was that same glut of recruits. The Air Force flip-flops on how strict or lax they are on some of those based on the need for pilots at any given time. When there's a deficit, suddenly someone with 20/70 vision can get a slot as a heavy (cargo or bomber) pilot, but when there's a glut they want everyone to have 20/20 vision. It's an arbitrary discriminator because they don't have more effective methods.

And the long-term consequence of that is that even if they relax the requirements later, a large number of people who might have considered it as a career simply wrote it off.

I know that's what happened with me. I heard nothing but nightmare stories about how hard it was to get a pilot slot, so I let that go and went to college instead.

That's interesting. I'm curious how much of your college costs that ROTC participation covered. Just tuition, or housing too, or also a stipend?

When I was accepted into the Army's ROTC program in 1998 (which I ended up declining), they were willing to pay up to $14,500 per year. I assume the other programs were about the same.

Sure, I ask because some programs, like the Navy uses for nuclear engineers, offer a much higher number. I'm somewhat curious how much the US government gives away due to poor planning, where the candidate is released because there's no spot for them at the end.

Currently, ROTC cadets who are offered a scholarship (not all are), receive:

1) Full tuition and fees OR $10k/year to cover room and board. Cadet chooses. I'd expect at most schools the tuition+fees is worth more, but some cadets have other scholarships that might cover all or part of tuition.

2) $1200/year for textbooks

3) $300-$500/month (depending on year) living stipend

Actually it looks like the Air Force offers scholarships in 3 tiers: https://www.afrotc.com/scholarships/high-school/types/

In addition to the offer I described above, it looks like a "Type 2" scholarship is the same, but with tuition+fees capped at $18k/year, and "Type 3" is the same, but with tuition+fee capped at the in-state rate at a public university.

These tiers are ridiculous. The only reason I am not in the Air Force is that ROTC would not give a type 1 for a two year scholarship to a prior active duty at Harvey Mudd. The remaining cost was too much, so I went elsewhere on academic scholarship.

Yea afpc decision making is always short term 3year scale thinking with real consequences rarely analyzed, just number crunching whether or not current training pipelines are optimized for minimal idle time of trainees.

When a t34 rudder issue it a fleet in the navy pipeline, numbers for 92T slots dropped accordingly, so the marker for pilot qualification is as much luck as it is merit

> looking for people to voluntarily leave with no commitment/obligation - seemed like a good deal

How’s that a good deal? Presumably you wanted to join and now that’s something you’d never get to do?

ROTC paid him for some amount of college without him ever needing to join.

The deal is that when you join ROTC, the military agrees to pay a certain amount of your your college costs (depending on scholarship, could be most of it), and in return, you agree to a certain number of years of service.

Even if OP did really want to be in the Air Force, having an obligation washed away like that with no penalty sounds like a pretty good deal.

The key word being voluntarily.

If they really wanted to join for the sake of joining they weren't going to be forced out. Otherwise you get free college (worth up to 200K in the US) for a small amount of weekly training. That's an insanely good deal.