The Ace Paradox: The dynamics of expert pilot replacement and the demise of the Luftwaffe 1940–1945

Paradoxically, the Second World War air forces with by far the highest-scoring “aces” lost the attritional war. The Luftwaffe had a slowly declining group of aces replenished by poorly trained novices who rarely survived to become experts themselves. Allied aces, in contrast, had much lower kill tallies but were routinely rotated into training roles, thereby improving the quality of newly deployed novices. We begin with the historical background and then assess whether aces are “born” or “made.” Having established the latter, we resolve the paradox with a dynamical model in which the development of novices into experts is facilitated by the latter’s transfer into training roles. The model has a single globally stable equilibrium, with two distinct regimes separated by a bifurcation. In the “ace” regime, with low transfer of experts into training, the equilibrium has no experts and a rapid turnover of novices. In the “learning” regime, a higher transfer rate leads to a stable mixed cohort consisting mostly of experts, with vastly greater fighting strength. We discuss the implications, including for the training of drone pilots. The general conclusion is that combat experts should be transferred into training at a substantial fraction of their loss rate.