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Logistics Officer Occupational Analysis

The bullshit artist consultants promising transformation and total enterprise visibility of everything, everywhere all at once without noting the data cleanup and ongoing data maintenance costs enter the conversation...
 
One challenge is that such a change would likely require significant PY investment, would still need people to fill the purple positions, and is in an environment where ever system change is seen as an excuse to further cut uniformed support PYs.

All while the CAF trained effective establishment is already too large a proportion of the maximum paid strength to ever be filled.
What are those significant PY investments? I do agree that moving to this model means there needs to be some realignment and more oversight on managing folks but generally posns would stay the same. It just proposes that RCN posns on RCN bases would be filled largely by RCN DEU'd personnel, ditto for the RCAF & CA. Purple posns can usually be filled by anyone. It also doesn't stop people from moving to a base that isn't their DEU when required. The largest officer Trade Log O does it ok enough so it can work.

There will be challenges of course, one of the largest at the onset is that currently there are many folks with DEU that don't match their base of employment. It would take a few posting cycles and DEU changes to make it become viable. There are lots of other issues that would have to worked out fo' sizzle

But, there is no appetite for this change so we will continue to think a newly promoted PO2 Sup Tech that matriculated in the RCN will be able to be a effectively operate in a CA Svc Bn (and vice versa) for years to come.
 
Rank to rank ratios would need to be balanced across three environments. That would be a significant investment.
 
Rank to rank ratios would need to be balanced across three environments. That would be a significant investment.
Yea there will be some adjustment of the ratios and some environments would lose some folks and some would gain. We aren't adding posns for the most part just potentially moving them to ensure if I am understanding you correctly.
 
There are already stresses occupational structures (poor rank to rank ratios); splitting into three would potentially exacerbate those existing problems.

To say nothing of the fact that the CAF's current structure is under resourced for support.
 
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Rank to rank ratios would need to be balanced across three environments. That would be a significant investment.

Can you expand on this as I dont think I understand.

Using the RCN as an example we already have XXX billets for MMTS, and rank ratioed "appropriately". What would you see needing changed ?

Keep in mind trades now go from S1/Pte - CPO2/MWO as CPO1/CWOs are now their own occupation.

Genuine questions I'm interested as I know you have a good view of things like this.
 
The coming split has also done something else that may have unintended consequences. It has created a career path on the finance side that will slowly move them away from any true need to do operational, uniformed work, and thus making it easier to justify civilianizing that portion of the trade.

They already don't. The reality is most FinOs are trained as FinOs from day one and from day one occupy jobs where they literally will never go to the field, not even in their first few years of employment. They're put in purely office jobs.

That actually makes sense since the proper place for a Finance Platoon is no further forward than the Division Support Area when we're talking about conventional warfare, which should be the CAF's bread and butter and should be the baseline starting point for how it operates. Their jobs in theatre are office jobs as well - theoretically replaceable by a civilian, the problem being convincing a civilian to deploy to a theatre of war for 6 months, even if it is back two or three tactical bounds from the war, in a safe country nearby.

As someone who went into Finance after 5 years as an Infantry O, no one will tell you more about how useful that prior experience was. But I was also well-educated in accounting, doing my CPA, and miles ahead in accounting than the other finance staff (military and civilian). The reality is that the finance group is completely incompetent at everything to do with finance (from the Communique: "core competencies in budgeting, financial management, financial services and policy, and personnel administration") so if a choice needs to be made between getting them more field experience and more core competency training, I would recommend starting with the latter.

The coming split has also done something else that may have unintended consequences. It has created a career path on the finance side that will slowly move them away from any true need to do operational, uniformed work, and thus making it easier to justify civilianizing that portion of the trade. When you think about it, other than providing some actual military bearing into the finance world, why do we need uniformed finance officers? What tasks in the field or on a deployment require someone to be in situ, rather than sitting in an office somewhere with a reach back capability?

It is a good point although in my last deployment

That no one* can provide an answer that question is not necessarily a good argument but rather evidence of the CAF's own operational/managerial incompetence - the answer exists but the CAF including it's most senior serving leaders, are oblivious to the answer. The reality is no one actually knows what a finance officer or a financial services administrator is supposed to be doing including those who should (i.e. ADM(Fin), CAF Comptroller, L1 Comptrollers, L2 Comptrollers, Base Comptrollers) it's one of those "you don't know what you don't know" scenarios. All they can think of is fin codes and claims.

*Besides, of course, me :)

one of the most useful ppl on the ground was the FinO as they literally held the purse strings and could react to the situation on the ground as needed by TF. That level flexibility couldn't be achieved with reach back in the same way.

Tenets of sustainment - provide it as far forward as possible.

In conventional warfare it would not be worth the risk of having them that far forward but in most of the current operations, the CAF would benefit immensely from good comptrollership, sadly it no longer knows what that looks like.

All you need as evidence is the news article about soldiers in Poland whose families were taking out loans in order to feed them. That was purely a failure of financial services that the folks in purple above were responsible for. That issue literally could have been fixed in a lazy afternoon by any competent finance officer, obviously it was hard to find one.
 
CAF has no comptrollers, they have low quality budget managers.
Don't need budget managers if you zero fund the budget! Follow me for more CAF life hacks.
You Betcha Quentin Tarantino GIF
 
An update from RCLS Secretariat:
Fellow Logisticians,

This is an update on our progress with the Logistics Officer Occupation Specification (Occ Spec) and the Military Employment Structure Implementation Plan (MESIP).

Rear-Admiral Sutherland, in his capacity as our Occupational Authority, signed off on the Occ Spec and MESIP at the end of September. This was accomplished after four years of hard work beginning with a Problem Definition Paper in 2019. Numerous consultations and revisions happened along the way on our path to achieving a framework for what the CAF needs from us as Logisticians in all environments.

As most of you already know, this resulted in the creation of a main occupation, Logistics Sustainment Officer (LSO) and a sub-occupation, Logistics Finance Officer (LFO). The new framework also mandated that LSO become better generalists in order to meet modern sustainment challenges.

Work to create new courses for both LSO and LFO is ongoing. It is a very significant task to create new courseware and many dedicated Logisticians are working to build new materials that will frame the foundational subjects Logistics Officers will need to understand going forwards.

We will proceed carefully and deliberately with the election and selection process, starting with those LCol/Cdr who wish to move from Logistics Sustainment Officer (LSO) to Logistics Finance Officer (LFO). The intent is to conduct separate Selection Boards for LSO and LFO at the LCol/Cdr to Col/Capt(N) ranks in the fall of 2024. Once the process has demonstrated itself to have been successful at the LCol/Cdr level we will progress with successive rank bands. Proceeding in this manner will allow us to better align the election process for the other officers.

Although there is still much to do, and the process will take time, we are on the right footing to move this project along. Thank you for your continued support.
 
This is way outside my wheelhouse, as I don't know enough about the Logistics trades to have an informed opinion. So, please, correct me if I am out to lunch. However, starting at the top and working your way down seems like a dumb way to build a trade.

Once the process has demonstrated itself to have been successful at the LCol/Cdr level we will progress with successive rank bands.
That sounds like the LCol trade refresh will be declared a success, no matter what. That way (untested) changes can quickly be made to the ranks feeding this process.
 
This is way outside my wheelhouse, as I don't know enough about the Logistics trades to have an informed opinion. So, please, correct me if I am out to lunch. However, starting at the top and working your way down seems like a dumb way to build a trade.


That sounds like the LCol trade refresh will be declared a success, no matter what. That way (untested) changes can quickly be made to the ranks feeding this process.
It is a bit silly as at that rank band minus a few very specific positions most folks are generalists and already in either the Fin or Log streams by virtue of their career streams. There is not a lot of bleed over in those worlds, Fin stays Fin and Log stays Log. The same logic would apply for LCdr/Maj but I suspect that there is a bigger picture things at play here as the split between LSO & LFO already exists from 2Lt to LCol as a matter of practice.

I suspect this is more to formalize the promotion criteria, streams, personnel and who/how they are managed for pers that fall under each stream. In that case you would need senior leaders to be identified first to be able manage the new stream (LFO) as the current model has every Log O under their purview.
 
I would expect the issue is that there are several Col Finance positions opening up next FY that they want to ensure are filled with individuals who have a hard Fin background, without the need to skip other non-Fin individuals higher on the merit list, and thus needing to promote past the required number.

By starting with the LCols, this also starts a cadre of senior officers who can mentor, brainwash, guide other Logisticians to either stick with Fin, or move over to LSO. It also adds some rank to the decision makers to keep the LSO side from dumping individuals into the FSO side.

But truly, it is the first step to just converting them all to FIs and being done with it.
 
I would expect the issue is that there are several Col Finance positions opening up next FY that they want to ensure are filled with individuals who have a hard Fin background, without the need to skip other non-Fin individuals higher on the merit list, and thus needing to promote past the required number.

By starting with the LCols, this also starts a cadre of senior officers who can mentor, brainwash, guide other Logisticians to either stick with Fin, or move over to LSO. It also adds some rank to the decision makers to keep the LSO side from dumping individuals into the FSO side.

But truly, it is the first step to just converting them all to FIs and being done with it.

One issue we have on the engineering side of things is we accept people in with science degrees and some other streams, which is no issue becuase of the training and job tasks.

The civilian equivalent ENG PS jobs though need an engineering degree (which is weird because you can get a P.Eng with demonstrated experience, even with a diploma), so more then a few cases of people retiring from the CAF who aren't qualified to do their job as a public servant.

All that to say is if they want people dedicated to finances they need to start at the end goal (ie Col) and work their way back to much earlier so that the training, qualifications etc would actually qualify them to do the work.

One thing I've noticed with a lot of our NATO allies is for specialist jobs they will train someone up and then just leave them for 10-20 years, or transition them deliberately into a public service permanent job. I think there are probably a lot of trades where we could do the same, instead of having a one size fits all model for trade progression and posting cycles. My counterparts in the Scandinavian countries and some EU countries are all in uniform but have been in their jobs for 10+ years, which definitely is a big advantage in jobs that have a big learning curve and a lot of long term work, and imagine that would be good for something like finances where you need to go through an entire FY cycle from Jan one year to May/June the next to see the things that feed into it, which is essentially most of a standard 2 year posting.

Glad there are bean counters who like that sort of thing though; I don't know if I could take even a short posting doing that kind of job full time.
 
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