Air-to-air missiles make trained pilots a strategic target

Missile defense can destroy both an incoming platform and its scarce trained aircrew. That scarcity helps explain interest in uncrewed aircraft, which remove a pilot from the attrition equation. Governments may deliberately buy aircraft slowly to keep a production line open and preserve the option to increase output in a crisis. Experienced pilots and instructors cannot be expanded as quickly, making personnel rather than airframes the likely bottleneck. Early Second World War U-boat crew losses show the same problem: Germany lost sailors, officers, and noncommissioned specialists who could have formed the nucleus of its later submarine expansion. Attrition therefore compounds when today's casualty would otherwise have trained several future crews.