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Reconstitution

At least parts of the RCAF are reconstituting.

This is great, would be nice if the RCN can do the same, vice talking about sending a ship without basics like enough lifeboats or a rudder out for an exercise, and waiting until the Friday before a long weekend to bail on it.
 
This is great, would be nice if the RCN can do the same, vice talking about sending a ship without basics like enough lifeboats or a rudder out for an exercise, and waiting until the Friday before a long weekend to bail on it.

The RCN is clealry more interested in making sure that the next CDS is Navy ;)
 
Lol, ugly pins, changed marches and performative changes for all! You don't need new pistols, here's some wifi in FOBs. Don't worry, totally safe to line the inside of LAVs and tanks with fancy plywood.

-future Admiral as CDS, probably

I'd be happy with a FORGEN on 'crossing the line' ceremonies authourized for things we self-identified as 'Equators' or 'Date Lines' ;)
 
This is great, would be nice if the RCN can do the same, vice talking about sending a ship without basics like enough lifeboats or a rudder out for an exercise, and waiting until the Friday before a long weekend to bail on it.

Good thing about aircraft is you can only defer maintenance to an extent it becomes an airworthiness issue, no one can put a gun to your head to sign off something. I don't know what it's like for the Navy and having ships be "Waterworthy".
 
The job is to march, sail and fly.

If you can't do that at some point someone is going to ask if your worth $26 Billion every year. Maybe if one can't maintain one's stuff, one should have a serious ask as to whether three or four thousand folks in Ottawa should be converted to three or four thousand folks in the workshops, hangers and docks around the country.

🍻
 
The job is to march, sail and fly.

If you can't do that at some point someone is going to ask if your worth $26 Billion every year. Maybe if one can't maintain one's stuff, one should have a serious ask as to whether three or four thousand folks in Ottawa should be converted to three or four thousand folks in the workshops, hangers and docks around the country.

🍻

That kinda talk won't get you invited to the wardroom old chap.
 
The job is to march, sail and fly.

If you can't do that at some point someone is going to ask if your worth $26 Billion every year. Maybe if one can't maintain one's stuff, one should have a serious ask as to whether three or four thousand folks in Ottawa should be converted to three or four thousand folks in the workshops, hangers and docks around the country.

🍻
Maybe if you have enough people and time to maintain 6 things, and you ask people to do 12, and then do that for 20 years it catches up to you for a while.

The CPF docking work periods are now doing 3-4 times the work the 280s got at the end of their life, with thousands of obsolete widgets that need replaced. That needs a lot of people working somewhere to find exciting things like gauges, valves, switches etc and figure out repair lines so it keeps going, and a lot of that happens to be in Ottawa.

If the big giant heads don't start tying up ships and giving the rest of the fleet time alongside expect to see a few early significant incidents, where hopefully no one gets hurt. You can't do 10 weeks of work in 4 weeks in a cramped space, regardless of how many people you throw at it.
 
Maybe if you have enough people and time to maintain 6 things, and you ask people to do 12, and then do that for 20 years it catches up to you for a while.

The CPF docking work periods are now doing 3-4 times the work the 280s got at the end of their life, with thousands of obsolete widgets that need replaced. That needs a lot of people working somewhere to find exciting things like gauges, valves, switches etc and figure out repair lines so it keeps going, and a lot of that happens to be in Ottawa.

If the big giant heads don't start tying up ships and giving the rest of the fleet time alongside expect to see a few early significant incidents, where hopefully no one gets hurt. You can't do 10 weeks of work in 4 weeks in a cramped space, regardless of how many people you throw at it.
That's actually my point.

All three services need more people assigned to maintaining their kit. Tying kit up because it can't be manned or maintained isn't the answer. The kit the CAF has has been deemed the least amount of kit necessary to meet our defence objectives. It and the services needed to keep it running have to be properly manned.

The CAF has grown its headquarters at a rate exceeding that of the operational elements. It's time to do a top to bottom review of the number of PYs sunk into Ottawa and reallocate a major slice of them to where it is needed to keep. The ongoing spiral will leave DND with nothing but a uniformed civil service at the rate its going. That's not worth $26 Billion.

🍻
 
Good thing about aircraft is you can only defer maintenance to an extent it becomes an airworthiness issue, no one can put a gun to your head to sign off something. I don't know what it's like for the Navy and having ships be "Waterworthy".
In Airworthiness, literally anything can be risk assessed and waived/deviated/accepted, at the appropriate command level.
 
That's actually my point.

All three services need more people assigned to maintaining their kit. Tying kit up because it can't be manned or maintained isn't the answer. The kit the CAF has has been deemed the least amount of kit necessary to meet our defence objectives. It and the services needed to keep it running have to be properly manned.

The CAF has grown its headquarters at a rate exceeding that of the operational elements. It's time to do a top to bottom review of the number of PYs sunk into Ottawa and reallocate a major slice of them to where it is needed to keep. The ongoing spiral will leave DND with nothing but a uniformed civil service at the rate its going. That's not worth $26 Billion.

🍻
This is what you get when you have a military for the sake of having a military rather than having a military that you're preparing to fight a war if necessary. It's a result of the generally secure and insular mindset of the Canadian public greatly amplified by elected officials that focus on the issues/spending that they think will get them elected and unfortunately reflected in the military leadership which goes along with the political flow.

This is why it will take the best part of a year to deploy a Squadron(-) of tanks to Latvia and why our fighters are not participating in a major NATO exercise. The threshold of enough Canadians speaking up and demanding support for the military is so low that it gets you the things that look like a military...we MUST have fighters, warships, tanks, etc. and people will speak out when we fall below that bar of "looking" like modern military.

Unfortunately however, the bar isn't high enough that people will also speak out and demand that those military capabilities be properly supported in order to be prepared for war. That means adequate manning of units, proper maintenance, equipment spares and reserves, adequate war stocks of munitions, sufficient modern comms and optics, AD and AT capabilities, air and sea transport, support vessels, etc., etc., etc..

It's only when we actually need to deploy our military into dangerous situations (especially those not of our choosing) that the holes show enough for the public to raise their voices about the issues enough for the politicians to hear them.

What's the solution? In part it is the military leadership making tough decisions on priorities and defending those decisions with the politicians. Part of it is the leaders of the main political parties rising out of the muck enough to agree that the defence of the nation/our Western way of life should be above day-to-day politics. I'd love to see at least bi-partisan consensus between the Liberals and Conservatives on a general minimal set of military capabilities we expect from our military and agreement to provide the funding required to meet those requirements regardless of the party in power. The Americans and Australians (and to a lesser extent the Brits) seem to have been able to achieve that.

I believe that if the parties were to do that it would have knock-on effects of raising the awareness of the military in the general public (possibly having a positive effect on recruiting) as well as better focusing the the decisions of the military leadership on operational effectiveness (possibly having a positive effect on retention).

I think all it would take to get the ball rolling on this would be for either the Liberal or Conservative leaders to stand up and say "Defense of the nation is too important an issue to be treated like a political volleyball. I propose that we strike a joint Parliamentary committee or commission to develop a bi-partisan Defense policy for the nation to ensure that our military is properly equipped and funded to perform the functions we as Canadians need it to do." If one of the two leaders proposed this I think the other would have a difficult time politically not agreeing to go along.

...and then I woke up from my dream :p
 

Animated GIF
 
I would not be surprised one bit if that (peer pressure) was a major reason units/formations aren't "reconstituting".

If the Army/Navy needs airlift, and the RCAF is trying to reconstitute, I wouldn't want to be the person telling them that their operations are going to be highly affected.

Actually, the more I think about it, this is the "crew rest" argument/peer pressure on a larger scale.
 
I would not be surprised one bit if that (peer pressure) was a major reason units/formations aren't "reconstituting".

If the Army/Navy needs airlift, and the RCAF is trying to reconstitute, I wouldn't want to be the person telling them that their operations are going to be highly affected.

Actually, the more I think about it, this is the "crew rest" argument/peer pressure on a larger scale.
Looks like we need strategic guidance with priorities…
 
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