No, I'm not joking. Since they're air vehicles, when they crash they fall under our flight safety system. So if we're going to do the paper work on the crash, we want to implement some of our know how (we have been doing it for 80 years, and the army hasn't done much flying since 1968). The tactical stuff is a very small part of aircraft ops, can the UAV drivers tell me anything about thunderstorms, or wind shear? Those are pretty significant factors beyond the tactical stuff that's required, weather will put a 747 into the ground and is even more significant to lighter aircraft. Us guys in blue are all a little curious as to why the army would take a guy that's done battle school and let him fly UAVs when air force pilots take over 2 years to train. Are we doing something wrong? I don't think we're doing anything wrong considering out of 300+ aircraft in our inventory, we haven't had 6 crashes in the past 2 years vs the 6 or 7 or whatever UAVs that crashed in doing 100 sorties. I'm not getting into why they crashed, that's a whole other discussion.
Also, there's no difference in training required for what we do to support the army/navy, we don't just do things our own way, we do them to support you guys. So putting pilots in green uniforms isn't going to change their employability, it's the same as him wearing a blue uniform. The problems lie in the way we co-ordinate between the 2 command structures, you still need to train a pilot to be a pilot, the colour of his uniform is not important. In MH, we have no problems integrating with the navy and supporting them, I can't speak for the TacHel crews.
Cheers