Subject: Rumsfeld and flying
From: Ed Rasimus
Date: 3/6/04 2:07 PM Pacific Standard Time
Message-id:

On 06 Mar 2004 20:26:41 GMT, (ArtKramr) wrote:


I think back to the days of my training in Texas. Every instructor we had
was a
combat veteran who completed his tour of duty and came back to instruct. My
Bombing instructor was a veteran of 25 missions with the bloody 100th bomb
group. He flew them from England to Berlin without fighter escort taking
horrible losses. He not only tought us our basic job, but he let us know
what
it acutually was like in combat and all during my tour of duty his training
resulted in the fact that there were no surprises for us in combat except
for the time we are attacked by an ME 262. I find it interesting that
Rumsfeld
was an instructor who had never been to combat. I don't see that as a change
for the better in flight training.


Arthur Kramer

When a maximum mobilization war is on, you've got a lot of combat
veterans available to put into the training business. It was US policy
to limit combat exposure and rotate people out of the operational
units. Some other countries didn't do that.

But, Korea, Vietnam and the intervening conflicts haven't been maximum
mobilization wars. That means there weren't enough combat vets to put
into training, particularly at all levels. Interestingly enough, I was
running Air Training Command undergraduate flying training assignments
from '70-'72. That was a period of drastic production adjustments as
Nixon's Vietnamization policy instituted in '68 was cutting
requirements for bodies to fill combat pipeline cockpits. The Navy
walked into Pensacola one Saturday morning and sent several hundred
pilot trainees home or to other duties. Some were within two weeks of
graduation.

The AF chose another route. We kept everyone in the training pipeline,
but reduced acquisitions--stopped recruiting and reduced opportunities
for ROTC and AFA graduates to enter flying programs. But, we had a lot
of folks in training who needed seats when they graduated. The answer
was for each command to take a % of grads equal to their % of total
pilots in the AF. That meant Training Command had to absorb 28% of
pilot training graduates--immediate plowback into instructor pilot
duty upon graduation.

It wasn't an optimum situation, but it also was workable. With combat
experienced leadership at the flight commander level, a properly
trained recent graduate could be an effective instructor pilot at that
level.

Similarly when I went through my first operational training course, a
lot of the instructors were combat vets, but a lot weren't. Graduates
were going direct to the war, while experienced in the airplane
instructors weren't getting to go.

When I was halfway through my first combat tour, guys who had been my
instructors in F-105 training were showing up in the combat theater. I
was the experienced one and they were the new guys.

Bottom line is, we can't always have the "ideal". And, even guys who
want to get to war can't always get there when they want.



Ed Rasimus
Fighter Pilot (USAF-Ret)
"When Thunder Rolled"
Smithsonian Institution Press
ISBN #1-58834-103-8


Interesting stuff. I remember that we had only one non-combat instructor at Big
Springs. But he wasn't a flying instructor he was a navigation (DR) classroom
instructor and he stood out as not having any battle experience. And he often
made the mistake of saying to us, "and that is how it is in combat" and an
entire class would say under their breath, "how the hell would you know? Those
who flew an fought just seemed to get a higher level of respect than those who
never fought. But there was a war on so I guess that explains it.


Arthur Kramer
344th BG 494th BS
England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany
Visit my WW II B-26 website at:
http://www.coastcomp.com/artkramer