For those knowledgable about miltary matters

[Vahn]

What rank are the pilots for fighters in the Air Force? also how many ships comprise a fleet? Thanks!

[Spokavriel]

I haven't heard the actual pay grade nor rank but I heard all pilots are officers more than once. Because of them being more or less in authority over the support crew for the plane or something like that.

[iiradned]

All pilots in the US Air Force are officers up to the rank of Colonel. Once they make general, they are limited to flying nothing more than their desks in an official capacity.

Named fleets are currently nothing more than administrative units for purposes of managing personnel, pay and logistics.

Groups of naval vessels operating together are currently called task forces, and their size varies depending on the mission. For example, the anti-piracy patrols of the coast of Somalia operating under a NATO umbrella number about a dozen ships from about half a dozen member nations. They are not a fleet but an ad hoc task group whose size varies as ships join or leave the group.

[Spokavriel]

Isn't fleet more of a generic term for the naval resources of one particular government in a given area? Like the Pacific Fleet?

[Screwball]

Isn't fleet more of a generic term for the naval resources of one particular government in a given area? Like the Pacific Fleet?

Currently, yes, although it's really only the US and Russia that separate their navies into fleets nowadays; they're the only people who have permanent large deployments in geographically dispersed areas, and even then, in Russia's case, it's entirely because they've got widely separated sea boarders. Hence things like the Black Sea Fleet (that, AFAIK, is actually a fleet in the older sense of the term). The US uses fleets as administrative units, rather than combat formations.

Traditionally, up until WW2, fleets were distinct combat formations. So, for example, Britain had the Home Fleet in the British isles, but also had the Channel Squadron and the Fisheries Protection Squadron and a bunch of other smaller units that weren't actually part of Home Fleet. Likewise, the Mediterranean Fleet operated in the Med (surpise!), but there were a bunch of other, smaller units not actually part of that fleet and the Eastern Fleet didn't include the Hong Kong Squadron, AFAIK. The US, of course, had the Pacific Fleet and the various numbered fleets, WW1 Germany had the Hochseeflotte, Russia had the Black Sea/Baltic/Far East fleets and so on, all of which were actual combat formations, not simply administrative. That sort of thing has vanished because there's basically nobody to fight a major fleet battle with anymore. The US could take every other navy in the world in a stand up fight, and all of the second tier navies belong to US allies as well.

Additionally, the US is the only country with enough ships to make retaining that level of organisation worthwhile: Russia, as I said, does it for reasons of geography. Everybody else doesn't have fleets, or, more accurately, just has a single fleet that encompasses their entire navy, from which ships are detached to task forces or independent deployments.