All the talk about the RPVs and their necessity in a modern Air Force has got me thinking.

If things go like Secretary Gates wants, and the Air Force moves more and more away from manned aircraft, won't that create a problem for airliners and other aviation related corporations that rely on the volume of military trained pilots to fill their employment vacancies?

Reality is that flight training is really expensive and most people couldn't afford to pay out of their own pocket to get tons of flight hours which are necessary to be a commercial pilot.  Airliners employ a huge percentage of former military pilots (I don't know how many), and they will be hurting if the Air Force stops producing 1,000 pilots/year due to RPV dominance.
Sure they could raise commercial aviators' salary, but last I checked that industry as a whole is suffering and raising pay seems unlikely.

So, I realize this is futuristic thinking, but still, do y'all think a slow down in volume of military pilots could cause big shortages in the civilian world?

I think it will have an effect, though I'm not sure how measurable it will be. Right now, Congress is looking to pass a law that increases the amount of time a co-pilot must have to fly for an airline. The current minimums is a commercial certificate as long as the pilot-in-command (PIC) has an airline transport pilot (ATP) cert and several other boxes checked. I don't know all of the details, but in a nutshell, the pool of would-be airline pilots will shrink as a result of an increase in requirements and, like you explain, because of a decrease in military pilots. I submit to you that the latter won't be as noticeable when the former goes into effect.

As far as pay in concerned, a lot of people don't think (or don't want to think) the laws of supply and demand apply to jobs, but they do. As the pool of airline pilots (or applicants) gets smaller, their compensation will increase and airline tickets will get more expensive. Combine that with cap and trade and the airline industry will really have some issues to tackle.

Thinking this through a little further, I wonder what this will do for run-of-the-mill flight training at local airports. If more hours are required to get an airline job, that might create a surplus of instructors, which then might decrease training costs. That, in turn, would make it easier for aspiring military aviators to get flight time. Bringing this full circle, cheap flight time will raise the "unofficial" requirements making military flight slots even more competitive.

Perhaps the last part is just rambling, but I think the rest can be expected.

Currently only 40% of commercial airline pilots are from the military. That's down from nearly 75% back in the 1990s, so you can see the way the trend is headed...that's a result of a lot of different factors, both in terms of military pilot production trends as well as civilian pilot production.

There will probably be a reduction in demand for airline travel in the future anyway. Think of all the other prestigious transportation jobs of the past that have been overcome by technology and development. Ship captains and train conductors are two that come to mind immediately.

The leaps in videoteleconferencing and other technologies -- which are much cheaper than airline travel -- have all ready meant enormous cuts to business travel. Don't forget that the business travellers were the ones propping up those ridiculously low couach fares back before 9/11. Even in the AF I have seen meetings and conferences that used to be conducted TDY be replaced by secure VTCs. And that's just today -- who knows what technologies will appear in the next 10, 20 years. Hell, 15 years ago companies didn't list website addresses in their advertisements...or even really have websites.

So, while there "may" be a supply issue with a reduction of military-trained pilots, there will probably be a corresponding decrease in the demand for them, too.

That 40% statistic surprised me. I would have guessed much higher. Still, that is a huge percentage and a cut back in that 40% supply would show up in airline labor economics.

I guess we'll have to wait and see how much RPV's cause a cut back in pilot slots to really know if it'll have any effect. Also Chris has a point that any minimum qualification requirements passed by congress will likely have a far greater effect than any military reduction unless it was far more significant.