that's well outside of any expertise I have.

Grossman, in "On Killing" (p.182), offers this "tease bit" - the context is his discussion of the statistic (apparently from Gwynne Dyer) that 1% of Army Air Corps fighter pilots had 40% of the kills:

Several senior U.S. Air Force officers have told me that when the U.S. Air Force tried to preselect fighter pilots after World War II, the only common denominator they could find among their World War II aces was that they had been involved in a lot of fights as children.
That piece of hearsay upon hearsay is, of course, consistent with Athens' construct in Violent Encounters. I looked briefly for an AF source, but came up empty.

BTW: Accepting what you say as fact ("feeding" the enemy to selected pilots), two questions: (1) what % of kills came from "feeding" vs individual hunting; and (2) the selected shooters were selected by what criteria ?

More broadly, is the same phenom observed in infantry combat ?

Regards

Mike