Pilots get buried with their mistakes, and the only way to avoid these fatal missteps is through constant practice. It's called "flying time," and the less you get the more pilots you lose, especially in combat.

Even with the recent Yugoslavia aerial campaign, American pilots are getting less and less flying time, and are leaving the armed forces in droves as a result.

The lesson was learned in World War II. The more hours a pilot spent in the air, the better his chances of surviving. This was true in all air forces. American pilots got a lot more flying time than their Japanese and German opponents, and this was a major factor in American air superiority.

The U.S. armed forces have spent over $30 billion to train each of their thousands of pilots. It's an attractive career, if you get to fly. But the end of the cold war brought with it tight defense budgets. It's expensive to let each pilot spend 20 hours a month flying his or her $50 million aircraft. So training has been cut back.

NATO standards call for at least 100 hours a year per pilot. U.S. pilots often got more than twice that, and this was one reason American aviators were considered the best in the world. But as flying time has declined year by year, pilots have noted the trend and turned to the more lucrative commercial aviation jobs.

Many of these pilots remain in the reserves, where they can still spend a few hours a month flying their fast movers on weekends. As a result, most reserve squadrons have more experienced pilots than active duty units. To deal with the increasing exodus of experienced pilots, more and more people are run through flight school.

It isn't just the pilots who are leaving, but the ground crews as well. It's harder and harder to recruit the young men and women needed to maintain the complex combat aircraft. As a result repairs and maintenance take longer. Fearful of accidents, senior officers keep more aircraft in "non-operational" status until the work of the inexperienced ground crew can be carefully checked by the few experienced NCOs and officers still around. With fewer aircraft available to fly, fewer pilots get the kind of airtime they need to survive. It's a vicious circle.

Since the early 1990s, little has been heard of this problem. Under pressure from their political superiors to "keep things under control," the readiness numbers have been creatively recast to make things look better. Nothing new with this approach, it's usually exposed in detail after America gets into a war and the public demands to know why things have gone so badly.

Between the lack of money, the political pressure to "make it work," and the current custom of not taking any casualties at all, the usual solutions were put into play. First, you simply cut back on operations. The fewer pilots in the air, the less chance for ill-maintained aircraft flown by inexperienced pilots to get into trouble. If there are combat operations, like patrolling the no-fly zones in Iraq or bombing Belgrade, you take the experienced pilots and ground crew you do have and send them all to where the action is. If this means the same people going back to these overseas assignments again and again, so be it.

These constant overseas assignments are another reason so many good people leave the services. But this policy also means the many other squadrons back in the United States are much less capable if they are sent into harm's way. You can go on with this sleight of hand indefinitely if there is not a major war. Should a big fight show up, your pilot losses will be heavy. Not necessarily from enemy pilots, America still has the best-trained aircrew in the world, but from the inexperience of flying high performance aircraft into difficult combat situations.

Oh, excuses will be made. "Combat is inherently dangerous." But because of leadership failures in the 1990s, combat has become more dangerous. And American pilots are voting on that policy with their feet as they leave the armed forces.

"Dirty Little Secrets" is syndicated by: