Air Force facing severe pilot shortages needed for future wars: Report

The U.S. Air Force doesn’t have enough trained pilots to win in a conflict against a peer adversary like China or meet the nation’s other national security requirements, according to a survey by a Washington-based think tank.

The recently released report by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies said the Air Force has been plagued by a persistent shortage of about 2,000 pilots for over two decades, with most of the shortfall coming from the fighter pilot ranks.

The report warns that the Air Force lacks both an adequate number of planes and trained pilots to fly them. American military airpower is on the verge of collapse from both an aircraft inventory and human capital perspective.

“The pilot crisis is a chronic problem. While our adversaries grow in strength, the Air Force continues to grapple with an unsustainable pilot shortage,” said Heather Penny, a senior resident fellow at the Mitchell Institute and author of the report, titled “Want Combat Airpower? Then Fix the Air Force Pilot Crisis.”

“The service desperately needs more pilots, but it also needs to retain the experienced pilots it already has in the force. The United States cannot afford the problem that persists if we are to effectively posture ourselves for the demands of great-power competition,” Ms. Penny said.

In a recent essay for Breaking Defense, an online publication that covers the military and the defense industry, Gen. David W. Allvin, the Air Force chief of staff, said the service has been on what can only be described as a wartime footing since Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990.

“Today, our aircraft fleet is smaller and older than at any time in history, and the gap between our high-end combat training and that of our pacing competitors has closed dramatically,” Gen. Allvin wrote. “The post-Cold War demands for efficiency, coupled with the effects of sequestration a decade ago and an inability to keep up with personnel costs which are rising faster than inflation, have left us with a force already 20,000-30,000 short of our requirements.”

Addressing the challenges would require the Air Force to increase its inventory of aircraft and expand its pilot corps in both the active-duty and reserve ranks.

“The [Reserve Component] represents the bulk of the nation’s experienced combat pilot corps, as many of the seasoned pilots who exit the Active Component continue to serve in the Air National Guard or Air Force Reserve,” according to the Mitchell Institute report.

Plans in Washington to decommission Reserve squadrons in the Air Force risk losing the vital experience of the pilots, the report warned.

The Air Force had more than 400 bombers and well over 4,000 fighter aircraft in its fleet during the Cold War when it last confronted a fellow superpower in the Soviet Union. While it faces a more complex array of threats today, the service’s combat inventory is the smallest that it has ever been: roughly 160 bombers and about 2,000 fighters, averaging nearly 50 and 30 years old, respectively, according to the report.

Lt. Gen. Adrian Spain, the Air Force deputy chief of staff for operations, told the Air Force Association’s Air, Space, and Cyber Conference in September 2024 that solving one piece of the personnel puzzle isn’t the answer.

“You have to actually tackle all of the things that contribute to it to get to a holistic solution. That’s what we’re really trying to work on now — how do we look at this problem from all the angles,” Gen. Spain said.

The Air Force is pursuing a variety of measures to increase the number of pilots, including partnering on training with civilian flight schools and increasing retention bonuses to keep more active-duty pilots in the service. Gen. Spain said the initiatives stopped the bleeding, but have not substantially increased the pool of candidates.

“They just kept it from getting worse,” he said. “We’ve got to continue to find a way to innovatively look at new methods and means, holistically, to try to tackle this problem for the future.”

Air Force senior leaders are responding to the shortage of pilots by keeping more of them in operational squadron positions, which prevents them from receiving education opportunities and training that are key to promotions, according to the report.

“This also reduces combat pilot presence on headquarters staff — a major risk given the importance of combat pilot perspective when it comes to decisions regarding procurement, strategy and force design,” the report said. “Pilots increasingly voice their frustrations from serving as high-demand, low-density assets in constant hard use.”