Originally Posted by
Maxibon
I’m not convinced there are enough OF5s out there. I’d add an emoji but I’m genuinely surprised by the pointless senior officer job creation. It was never deemed necessary when we had a half-decent sized Air Force in the 80s.
Part of the difficulty is the perceived need to maintain a pyramid leading to CAS+. That requires a reasonable number of candidates in each lower rank from which to select a promotee. And a diminished aircraft inventory means fewer aircrew forming the base of their ‘pyramid’, leading to a very thin ‘shard’.
I recall many years ago the small Fighter Control Branch had a problem with insufficient suitable candidates for promotion to sqn ldr/wg cdr, and had to ‘import’ aircrew to fill some senior appointments. And ATC had a distorted pyramid too ... from the 1* downward ISTR it was approx 1:5:32:150:500, which led to its own problems.