AURORA, Colorado — The Air Force announced this week that it is bringing back warrant officer ranks, but officials clarified Tuesday it is not looking at developing aviators through that training — despite an ongoing pilot shortage and other service branches using warrant officers for those types of missions.
The service will instead focus on information technology and cyber operations for those ranks, and not pursue pilot tracks, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin told Military.com during a media roundtable at the Air and Space Forces Association’s Warfare Symposium conference.
“We believe that there’s something specific about this very precise career field, this technologically oriented career field where the perishability of it and the requirement of it to maintain at the cutting edge is more along the lines of what we’d expect in a warrant officer track,” Allvin said.
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On average, the Air Force has brought in around 1,300 new pilots each year for nearly a decade, short of its goal of around 1,500 annually. Recent shortages have been attributed to a range of issues, such as delays in getting new engines into T-38 Talon training jets, a lack of instructors, and holdups in getting new airmen into the training pipeline.
A document detailing the change to bring back warrant officers, a plan first…