dapaterson said:
Dumping equipment on the Reserves without ensuring support is a recipe for disaster. In the current NDHQ environment, however, combat capability magically appears and magically sustains itself, since support is a four-letter word.
Absolutely true but that's exactly the type of thinking that leads to bean counting defence planning.
The fact is that if there is any expectation to fight anything in the nature of a near-peer force we need not only equipment in place but trained forces (including maintainers) to use it.
I can think of a hundred ways of keeping the capability within the forces using a sliding scale of costs. Purely as an example, most of the guns and associated tracked vehicles could be put into long term preservation while a few are positioned in a few limited locations for training purposes. Those locations would be where both reg and res force maintainers are available.
The key leadership decision has to be to keep the capability alive and not to throw it out with budget cuts. Reserves are a cost effective way of keeping expensive systems available (take for example the ARNG in the US which maintains M1s, Bradleys, and M109s). I sometimes think that the real problem is not so much the finance side of things but that our reg force leaders no longer see our involvement in a serious conflict as a possibility and have long ago convinced themselves that the reserves are an institution which needs be endured rather than one that can be built on. They'd much rather spend untold billions on maintaining a robust headquarters structure.
When I started serving in the sixties we had 138 serviceable guns with the regular regiments and at least another hundred and twenty with the reserves and more in stocks. We've come down a long way, baby, and so have the infantry and the tankers.
IMHO the DND structure needs a radical rethink from the middle to the top. :2c:
For those who watch NCIS you'll be familiar with Gibb's rule # 5 "You don't waste good." Again, IMHO, we've been wasting good soldiers (both reg and res) for years by applying short sighted defence priorities based on false economy budgeting.
:cheers: