Bob,
You are 100% right with this, remember I took a direct commission and Armor Branch immediately wanted me to take a command. I had to put up with Armor Branch, and it cost me a military career. I was placed into an Armor Battalion with all but three officers there were graduates of the WEST POINT FINISHING SCHOOL. I was one of two Direct Commissioned Aviators, and the third Officer was the Battalion Commander who had graduated from the Citadel. I got every shit duty in the battalion until the second Aviator arrived, then the shit duties were divided between us. I was a Warrant Officer's Commissioned Officer, I supported the Warrants. The RLO's did everything that they could to get rid of Warrant Officer Directs. Only the Warrant Officer Directs who remained in Aviation survived the RIF. I retired from a non flying job in the Reserves.

Professional Aviators would help the military, but the system fights the possibility of having those professionals. If Professional Aviators had looked at the UTTAS the way we did we would not have an aircraft like the UTTAS. Professional Aviators would have trained crews as a crew, but if you look at today's military, they train the pilots to be "Gods" that do not listen to their crews, and they have gone so far that they do not allow Army Aviators and Crews to fly together routinely. The crews do not know each other, and they don't talk in the aircraft. The Aviators who accepted the UTTAS had actually flown something other than a desk, we would not have had this aircraft. Yes, the aircraft has a lot of improvements and a lot more physical capability, but without the crew functioning as a crew, they do not have the capability of our aircraft in Vietnam. The crew can not clear the tailboom or the underside of the aircraft from the crew position, and the aircraft does not have the capability of hovering close enough to a slope to drop off a team, so everything is done by a fast rope which we both know takes a lot more time to perform than a direct insertion where the team off loads basically before the aircraft hits the ground.

Today we have excellent airfield to airfield flight crews, and in order to land they virtually have to have a ground team to guide them to the ground, the crew can not function to get the job done. The amount of "Lessons Learned" from our little venture into Southeast Asia is far exceeded by the number of "LESSONS LOST AND FORGOTTEN", and it is primarily because of the aviators who fly desks.

None of the services today have a truly professional set of flight crews. The Warrants of today seem to have lost the balls of the Warrants that flew in Vietnam. They cower from many of the RLO's, and the few that don't are generally run out of the military. The few that have survived in the military are now getting out of the military because they are too damned old and they are being forced to retire or take ground assingments because their bodies are no longer young and spry enough to "Keep Up" with the new way of thinking.

A permanent Warrant force in all flying services would help the military if we could do away with many of the RLO's who are so much better than the Warrants that they feel that they don't need to learn something from someone who has been there and done that!

We are running around the same tree here, but I had to get this off of my chest. There are just too damned many "Gods" in the current military!