During the Red War, ace pilots quickly stood out as one of the most strategic assets of red humanity.
This was not too different from how they were treated in the previous age, but the Red War raised their importance up a notch.
The native aliens had a lot of phase leaders under their sway.
Sure, many of them were lesser phase lords who managed to luck out and not die when they transcended the limitations of their mortal bodies, but that still left a lot of aliens who gained the power to fight against mechs barehanded.
Many major alien races managed to spawn a lot of phase lords over a long time. Certainly, phase lords were not immortal and some of them eventually died from old age, but there were still lots of them available that were in the prime of their transcendent lives.
Many of those phase lords had begun to accompany the fleets assaulting human space.
