The personnel hierarchy made officers the normal unit commanders while NCO and enlisted pilots had little room for advancement, even when they possessed far more flying experience. During the war, losses sometimes forced whole units onto the NCO cadre, making the destruction of those aviators especially damaging. Some pilots at Pearl Harbor had already spent decades in naval aviation, experience that could not be recreated quickly. The deeper force-generation failure was keeping too many experts at the front instead of returning enough of them to training establishments to pass on their knowledge.
Notable Point · 29:19-32:03
Front-line experts were not recycled into training
Japan's irreplaceable NCO pilot cadre stayed concentrated at the front instead of being withdrawn in sufficient numbers to train a larger successor force.