It’s not hard to understand why pilots who’d been shot down became dip bombers. For a pilot the cockpit is an air-conditioned and familiar womb, but when he is about to go down and he blows the canopy, he’s jerked out of the womb into the real world of wind blast, noise, and if he’s flying at high speed, pain. The uncertainty as he floats down in his parachute quickly follows: Will I get rescued? Will I get injured when I hit the ground? Will I get captured by civilians and beaten to death with hoes and stones? Will I be captured by the army and spend the rest of my life getting tortured in jail? When your plane gets hit, you’re scared. Chuck Horner’s plane was never hit, but he has no doubt about how he would have reacted if it had been.

Why did the Air Force fall into this particular trap?

Partly for old-style ticket-punching reasons—to give every officer a chance for quality combat time in order to justify promotions. Worse, in Horner’s view, the Air Force felt that since the war offered an opportunity to renew the combat experience of the force, they wanted to offer that experience to as many pilots as possible. Since it really didn’t matter how good any of these pilots were, they could afford to send in the second team. In other words, playing the entire bench was more important than winning the game.

As far as Horner was concerned, the generals who led the Air Force should have resigned rather than put up with any of this.16 Instead, they should have found the best pilots, put them in fighters, and sent them off to war with the warning: “Don’t come home until you’ve won.” They’d have figured out how to win. If they’d extended that policy all up and down the military line—as was done during Desert Storm—they’d have had a solid chance of victory.

The Israelis have devised a system that allows an air force to put its best pilots into the best planes. It wouldn’t be at all difficult for the USAF to implement such a system. The Israeli Air Force has a ladder—a list naming the pilots: top of the ladder is the best and the bottom is the worst. The best pilots go to the best squadrons. There is also a ladder of squadrons: the best squadrons fly the top fighters, U.S.-made F-15s and F-16s. The next-best squadrons fly Mirages or F-4s, which are older fighters and cannot compete with the F-15s and F-16s. From time to time, the top of the ladder in the F-4 squadron will get orders to fly the F-16, and the bottom of the F-16 ladder will get orders to fly the F-4. Below the F-4s or Mirages are other, lesser aircraft, all the way down to multi-engine and helicopters. Conceivably, an F-15 pilot who loses his nerve or concentration could free-fall all the way down to being a chopper pilot.