Concur. Saw an alert crew of 0-3's pulled and a group of 0-4's sent in when the call came from TAO that the alert 15 Prowler was going to launch to support an adhoc strike the first night of ODS. I was not one of the alert crew in either case but IMO it was poor leadership on the Skippers part. You put a crew together and you have the Mission Commander designated and trusted to be up to task so, you don't pull them.
Same Skipper pulled my pilot and replaced him with an 0-4 for a deep strike in ODS, in fact, the deepest strike during that dust-up by gulf side carrier based jets was our section of Prowlers escorting Tornado's and Buccaneers on that strike. My crew trusted our pilot and would have preferred he go , if you can't trust him to fly the jet and do the mission he shouldn't fly any of them.
That Skipper was a nice guy and a great stick but really undermined the crew integrity and confidence of some good folks on that cruise.
I guess I just don't understand this "every qualified pilot is the same" mentality that some folks on here are espousing. You can draw an analogy to sports if you'd like: When you're team is comfortably ahead, you can afford to put in your second or third string guys, but when the chips are down, or the game is tied, the clock is running down, and you've got only one shot, you put in your superstar players to get the job done. Now, who those superstar players are is going to vary squadron to squadron, and it's not always going to be the front office or DHs.
Selective scheduling is a part of writing every flight schedule or weekly - it's called common sense (or ORM). You don't set guys up for failure by putting them in situations where they're wildly in over their heads just for the sake of "toughening" them up - that's a stupid and dangerous way of training people. Maybe it didn't happen as much back in the day (or maybe you old timers just didn't realize it), but as some have pointed out, our mishap rate today is a fraction of what it was 40 years ago, so if that's the price for a couple bruised egos, I think we can all live with that.
Brett