...and then end up with the grumpy ass salt of the earth IPs who have been there for decades and can tell you about the "old days" but can't shoot a GPS approach? Similiar to our contract sim instructors now?
Are you high?
I wish.
You've got a looming commercial pilot shortage and therefore military pilot retention issue that only the Air Force has publicly started to acknowledge and tried to get ahead of. So far they've come up with:
1) offer more money in retention bonuses and
2) petition congress to do away with Restricted ATP minimums for military pilots in an effort change market demands to make it more difficult for guys to get out.
We know those solutions won't do anything to stop the attrition of pilots when the Major airlines are retiring and replacing 30k pilots over the next 20 years.
The services already do some flying with GS and Contractors so another solution is to shift more manning over to civilians in areas where there is a known stable demand which frees up Military personnel to meet less predictable operational demands (aka the surge capability referenced before). It has already started happening and has only been increasing. The Navy has this awful habit of trying to copy what the Air Force does to save costs (in money or personnel). Unfortunately the Navy usually executes poorly when they do.
The Navy is in denial about its rentention issue thanks to longer MSRs keeping 90% of pilots in through their first look at O-4 but Marine Corps has just started noticing retention issues with its fixed wing pilots. Aside from automatic career continuation for 3 years for selected fixed wing MOS, unless declined, another solution has been to reduce orders to MATSGs feeding the VTs in order to keep guys flying grey jets. Great opportunity for more Helo guys to get fixed wing hours and transition to the airlines, which creates another rention problem. When the retention crunch is in full swing, the priority for each services personnel command is going to fill fleet seats, as it should be. The byproduct of that will be a reduction in avenues for military pilots to gain flight hours to more easily facilitate their transition to civilian aviation.
The services can't produce military pilots without a cadre of Active Duty and reserve instructors right? The Air Force and Army don't think so, and neither does the Navy and they already have a civilian cadre of pilots in place at parts of the training pipeline. There's no reason they can't expand that using current fleet aviators as a testament that those civilian portions of aircrew production don't negatively affect the final product.
Good portions of NFO/CSO training is conducted by GS and Contractor pilots- that can easily be expanded to encompass more.
Primary flight training is JPATS, so if the Air Force goes to a reduced Military footprint for pilot training in UPT, much like it does for its CSO pipeline, in order to keep its pilots in grey aircraft, the Navy will take that step in unity.
The Army doesn't think advanced multi engine training requires active duty personnel to conduct. The guys at FSI et al. instruct FAA certified type rating courses to FAA ATP standards. You can be they know how to shoot a GPS approach. There's little in the Navy/Marine Corps/Air Force multi engine syllabus that a civilian instructor couldn't do.
Citing lack of a replacement airframe for the TH-57, folks in some circles have been calling for consolidating Navy helicopter training with the Army and Air Force.
These are areas with low hanging fruit. The military industrial complex is more than willing to help DoD with manpower issues as seen by contractors filling the gaps in capabilities ranging from pre-deployment training to mission support rolls in Iraq and Afghanistan, allowing the number of Active Duty personnel to be greatly reduced while the number of bodies in country remained relatively stable. This all comes at a cost in $ to save on manpower #s. Government Contractor solutions to their own retention issues is to throw $$$ at the problem and pass those costs off to government on the backside.
When the government outsources production metrics to contractors it generally only montors that those production metrics are being met. Unfortunately quality tends to be a second consideration as long as the final product meets the bare minimum of listed requirements.