I belong to the Executive Forum at Cal Tech. it meets four times a year and is made up of some very smart people and me. I sometime get to sit next to Vern Orr who was the secretary of the Air Force under Ronald Reagan.

A few weeks ago I had an opportunity to ask him about the shake up at the top of the Air Force as a result of sending atomic bomb parts to Taiwan. If you recall two of the top generals were replaced as a result of the mistake. Vern agreed with the firing decision but told us a story about a much bigger air force problem. It is of course getting almost no attention yet. The army and the marines are using unmanned drones for close surveillance and increasingly for targeted attacks. But the air force has been left behind. It hasn’t supported the use of unmanned aircraft even though they are much cheaper to build and operate.

The reason for this, Vern explained is that all of the generals in the air force except for one are pilots. They therefore have an institutional bias against eliminating pilots and have missed one of the biggest changes in aviation. Stay tuned. The air force as we know it could become marginalized in much of their mission.