Our DS has his wisdom teeth, he has had his FAA physical, and also the DoDMERB flight physical for about 18 months. He is at UPT and leaves for IFS in 2 weeks, when he returns from IFS he has 1 week down time before starting UPT.
He has all of his wisdom teeth. That being said. His 4 wisdom teeth came in just fine, thus they left him alone. Dentists can see very early on if they are coming in impacted.
Bullet flew for 21 yrs and only had 1 or 2 of his teeth pulled, not all 4. For some their wisdom teeth do not erupt until 21 or 22, which is why they are being pro-active since in the xrays at 17 they can see they will not come in straight. I didn't have mine pulled until I was 23 because that is when they came in, and still only had 3 of the 4 pulled. As you can see for me they would have done it earlier since if I was in the program it would have impacted flying. You can dry sockets from wisdom teeth extraction, and pulling any g is not going to be good. Your xrays can show if it will be a problem. In the OPs case the dentist is saying already they are eventually going to be pulled, the diagnosis is not maybe, or we will wait and see, it is we will be pulling.
OBTW the flight physical he took was at Wright Pat., and it was a 3 day TDY, included everything from EKGS to dental to ENT. It was only for UPT selected ROTC cadets with flight surgeons as the docs. Had this been an issue, they would not have DQ'd him without the extraction. They even remarked he was one of the lucky ones that they came in perfect otherwise they would have pulled them at that time.
As raimius said the key word is THINK, it is not a must. I do know there have been some that got tripped up on this, and I think it might come down to the fact that I believe AFA cadets do not go through the 3 day flight physical, instead they have the short physical like the one to get in to the AFA and the FAA. It really is a 3 day physical 6 hours a day, and the results are not official for about 4-6 weeks because it goes up and down the chain, with lots of eyes looking over everything. Delaying a UPT student is not something they ever want to do when it was under their control at a much earlier point.