FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Air Force Has Too Few Fighter Squadrons to Meet Commanders’ Needs.

The U.S. Air Force says a shortage of fighter pilots has become so dire that it is struggling to satisfy combat requirements abroad.

“We have too few squadrons to meet the combatant commanders’ needs,” Major General Scott Vander Hamm, the general in charge of fixing the fighter pilot crisis, said in an exclusive interview with VOA.

The Air Force is currently authorized to have 3,500 fighter pilots, but it is 725 fighter pilots short. And with fewer pilots, the number of fighter pilot squadrons have also dropped, from 134 squadrons in 1986 to 55 in 2016.

As a greater percentage of the force has needed to be deployed over the past 10 years, readiness — the ability to accomplish missions at home and abroad — has dropped 20 percent.

Perhaps the most serious part of the problem is that fighter pilot training hours have dropped from a Cold War average of 200 hours a year, to 120-150 hours.