Originally Posted by
Flyhighfirst
This is a silly comparison. There may be a few hundred in the country that could perform to the standard you set in football. I hate footballers by the way.. but there are literally hundreds of thousands that would pass the standard tests to be a pilot, and a fair few of them would make the cut.
The challenge is to get people to apply in the first place, and then to retain them.
Nobody goes into the military to become well off. They may go into it to get a skill that they can use in the private sector , but who blames them. There is only so many air marshals, a good few are expected to leave.
You can’t have pay that is good enough to retain everyone as there is no room for everyone. You need turnover. In times of war you can call on these to return.
The challenge is to make the salary good enough to bring people in, but not good enough to keep them. Except for the few that go on to the top.
don't necessarily disagree with the point about footballer pay. However - the rest of your argument is pretty flawed here.
A) if you have a training system capable of outputting 12 pilots a year, and your system insists on having a fairly broad * rank structure, who exactly is going to fill those posts if 3/4 of your cohort leave? (Debate whether this is a bad thing!)
B) pilot training is *really* expensive. If you have a choice of retaining a trained pilot for 6 years (i.e. to end of return of service) or keeping them slightly happier and retaining them for 9, you've just saved quite a lot of money, whilst still retaining a sensible demographic. Your turnover argument is more valid in areas where training cost is lower. If you want evidence for this the USAF commissioned a study on recruitment Vs retention relatively recently and was told in no uncertain terms that they were smoking crack to not be paying money to retain aircrew in general.
C) No one goes into the military to be well off, but no one goes into the military to live in a house with asbestos ceilings collapsing into their children's bedrooms either... If you fail to deliver in some areas (infrastructure, QoL etc) then you have to over-deliver in others (i.e. pay). As a simple example, if you can't deliver decent quarters, you have to pay enough for folks to afford decent accommodation on the outside.