August 30,
2008: The U.S. Air Force has been using
combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan to get as many of their combat pilots
some combat experience as they can. This ensures that the air force will end up
with the largest number of combat experienced pilots for over a decade after
the fighting ends. It's a big deal, for a pilot, to earn combat wings. And the large number of
these pilots has changed the way the air force fights, and trains new pilots to
fight.
Pilots who
have been in combat know, from experience, exactly how all those standard
procedures, drummed into new pilots, or practiced endlessly by peacetime
pilots, should really be carried out. Combat clears away a lot of
administrative deadwood and dangerous busywork. This knowledge, once passed on
to a new pilot, or one who has not been in combat, makes that pilot much better
once they do get into a combat zone. All this is nothing new. Back in World War
II, it was discovered that training new pilots for combat, went much better if
the instructors were combat veterans.
The World
War II experience made a lot of how much more effective new pilots were, the
more hours they had spent in the air during training. That was because it was
so easy just count the hours of air time, and combat performance, and do a
regression analysis. It was harder to quantify the combat experience of the
instructors, but starting in the 1960s, after the unexpectedly dismal showing
of U.S. pilots early in the Vietnam war, the combat pilot community learned how
to quantify combat experience, and how to use it when available.
