Originally Posted by rickair7777

Others have answered the question, but the way you ask it leads me to suspect that you're not familiar with how military pilots are hired and trainined...

The first available slots and the majority of all slots go to service academy and ROTC students, who are on full-ride scholarships, largely in technical/scientific fields and have had to maintain a certain GPA to keep the scholarship. The scholarships were competitive so we're talking about HS scholar/athletes as the starting point.

Remaining slots go to off-the-street hires, who must have a degree and are more competitive with a technical degree and good grades. This process is long and daunting and requires a lot of motivation just to jump through all the hurdles. At this point in time time there is essentially zero tolerance for any history of criminal activity or drug use (even very minor history, like D&D). It wasn't always that way, but seems to be the standard now.

Then you do OCS/OTS which isn't fun to put it mildly, followed by aviation indoc/ground school (also not really fun).

Once you start flying, you jump right into turbo-prop equipment and are typically expected to solo around ten hours IIRC. Every training flight is a graded event, and you are allowed a very limited number of repeats. Aerobatic and formation flying is part of the package...most civilians don't touch that until they have at least hundreds of hours (if ever). Once you complete that, you're off to another airframe type usually a jet trainer of some sort. Final step is you report to a training or operational squadron to qualify on your assigned airframe.

You can't buy more training if you need it and the typical instructors' bedside manner would get them fired from a civilian school. Washout rate is high, historically well over 50%.

The airlines could do something like this but it would cost them dearly...not just the training, they'd probably also have to pay higher entry-level wages to attract the kind of folks who could complete such a program. Might be financially feasible for the majors, but totally impractical for regionals.

The european/asian ab initio model falls far short of our military training...they hire kids who are good at taking tests, and train them to operate simulators and complex systems...their training/experience in actually flying airplanes is very limited and we've seen the results of that a few times.