Companies have to adapt to manning issues in the real world. Take a look at the airlines. Southwest dropped its requirement to have a 737 type rating...and then a year later dropped its requirements for 1000 turbine PIC.
Do you think they did that so they could “give everyone a trophy”??!!! Absolutely not. They did it because the airlines are facing a manning crisis.
To make that statement is completely ridiculous. It has nothing to do with giving everyone a trophy and everything to do with finding a solution to a pilot manning issue.
When people say stuff like “everyone gets a trophy” or “snowflake” etc then it prevents actual discussion into the issues and shuts people down without ever collaborating to find a solution.
Take the emotion out of it and realize that, with enough training and time, anyone can do our job. We are not special.
I think you might be misunderstanding the Navy's manning problem. It's not an insufficient number of qualified college graduates willing to join up and fly airplanes, it's an insufficient amount of training assets and personnel to keep the pipeline flowing. Reducing the quality of the applicants would only exacerbate the problem, as more training would then be needed to get them to the minimum standard, further throttling the already over-strained pipeline.
I also disagree that "anyone" can do our job. Many people might be able to, but we've all met people who had no business flying airplanes professionally. We've also met people who were naturally predisposed to be truly amazing pilots and officers. That isn't to minimize the benefits of training- everyone needs to be trained. But what makes people special in this business is that they have the right mix of work ethic, abilities, and judgment to be able to ultimately use their training to handle ALL aspects required by the job to a minimum standard. That's what tests like the ASTB are for, and it turns out to be pretty good as a predictive tool. The required mix of traits is not something everyone possesses. You can not train just anyone to be a successful naval aviator. For starters, there are people who do not possess sufficient mental capacity, hand-eye coordination, or focus. I've seen people given multiple second chances, both in the TRACOM and the fleet, and some got to a point where they just could not show improvement, and were shown the door. Your point about "with enough time and training" may be true in many cases, but at some point, the Navy needs to be able to cut its losses. People need to be trainable within a reasonable amount of resource expenditure- we can't spend years and millions of $ on an individual who is not showing promise. Especially when, again, there isn't a shortage of recruits who might show promise.