BEB,
Questions: Is the same level of leadership required to fly an E3D? . . . If so, do you need commissioned 'leaders' to fly those kind of aircraft.
Having some little experience of E3, I have been chauffered in 3 type of them, I suggest that they do need a commissioned leader.
The Tactical Director has quite enough on his plate organising and running the mission.
The Flight Director, drivers airframe, or whatever has a much less demanding job - on orbit. OTOH the task of Captaincy, looking after the well-being of the crew, really comes to the fore on the ground. To lead such a large crew as on an E3 requires leadership skills.
It is true that the second pilot does not need any of these skills and could be a NCA. However the E3 Captaincy gene pool is already small. To remove the copilot feeder stream would require suitable ME pilots to be fed in from other types who would also have fewer able candiates as their training pool would also have dried up.
Does the system stream those pilots to that type due to a perceived lack of some abilities?
Put bluntly, quite probably.
Not everyone has the aptitude to fly the most demanding aircraft. Even those that do may lose that ability later on in life. Eyes dim, reactions slow, medical conditions may intervene.
One of the first ex-Lightning pilots I met had served 12 years on the Lightning and enjoyed every minute of it. He was now enjoying every hour as a Britannia captain.
No, as I said, different air force. Lots of units - Spitfire, Meteor, Hunter, Javelin - lots of pilots - large gene pool.
In the early 1960s the aircrew pool had an intake of 1200 per year of which perhaps 1000 were would be pilot and this did not include the Cranwell intakes of career officers. Many of these aircrew were on SSC of 5 or 8 years with the rest on 12/16-38. They were the ones that could have been NCOs.
What is the pilot requirement now?
With an aircrew intake of about one tenth the number of potential leaders will be much slimmer. If that was further reduced to 30 or so with the balance from NCA then we really would be putting lots of eggs in one basket and the hands of the recruiters.