Forrest,
I hope this doesn't sound too negative because military flying is awesome, but I really don't want you being suprised by stuff your recruiter won't tell you. Also, remember that this is stuff that is happening "now" and "tomorrow", not "next year" or "a few years from now". The whole personnel and manpower situation has changed several times in the last few years and it will probably keep changing in the forseeable future.
First though, getting in as an officer does not guarantee becoming a pilot. When I say that becoming a pilot is "competitive", that means that for every 1 pilot training slot, there may be 20 people who all want that slot and are reasonably well qualified. The screening will include things like how good your grades are, how good your eyesight and physical condition is, your natural hand-eye coordination, and any talent you may have in understanding spatial relationships. So you will have to be better than a whole lot of other people who also want to be pilots. If you want it bad enough, go for it. But if you don't make it, you could just as easily end up patrolling the streets of Baghdad or handing out ketchup packets at the chow hall in Iceland.
Also, the outlook is getting worse for pilots from a personnel management perspective. The USAF recently released a bunch of notices that basically say that although the USAF doesn't have enough pilots to do staff work that requires a flying background, it has more pilots than it needs to fly the aircraft in the inventory. The initial look is that they'll reduce pilot production in the short term and hope that existing pilots will stick around the USAF in non-flying jobs.
That has opened up a huge personnel management problem. They intend to fly new pilots for a few years to get them experience, then shuffle them to non-flying jobs. But many will simply get out if they can't fly. They can't increase the number of new pilots because they already have too many, but with a lot of mid-level experienced pilots leaving they'll end up with a bunch of old pilots who haven't flown in years and a bunch of new pilots who don't know anything. It's a mess, and plans to add a lot more UAVs into the mix makes it even more difficult to manage the personnel.
After saying all that, if I had to do it again I would still go for it. I would have made a few different decisions along the way as far as individual assignment preferences, but I never wanted to be anything but a fighter pilot so it was an easy choice for me to go for it. But along the way, I also made sure I had a backup plan because there are no guarantees.
