Don't you find an element of conflict between those two thoughts?
Nope.
Yes, youngsters wanting to go bang-bang might be put out by escorting little old ladies from flooding basements. On the other hand the skills you need for those occasions are the skills you find in 101,102 and 104 logistics brigades, together with those of the engineer and medical brigades. The same brigades you say you wish we had.
There are plenty of folks who want to do things other than go "bang bang in the woods"
every day. They like being mechanics and medics and logisticians and fin clerks because they find those jobs interesting, finds it helps them to get a civilian job, lets get to hang around with people like them and drink beer and - every once in the while - get to go into the woods and go "bang bang" and drive big trucks.
I've done flood fighting and firefighting and its basically scut work for the vast majority of the people called out. You do get a level of satisfaction from being out there and helping people but quite frankly it takes little training and preparation. Sure some of the toolsets for LUSAR take some teaching and practice, but it's not a job where you will intellectually challenge someone for long. Sitting around waiting for your annual fire season or flood season quickly becomes tedious.
Disaster relief work would be much easier if provincial emergency measures organizations had enough of the right sandbagging and barrier laying equipment and fire fighting equipment and bigger civilian volunteer organizations and municipalities would stop approving the building of subdivisions in flood zones and on the slopes of hills filled with kindling. It's not climate change that's complicating things - its our unbridled expansion onto land that's dangerous to build on.
I've got nothing against disaster relief work, BUT as a secondary task that you get called into when it actually happens when all civilian resources are exhausted. The military reserves' primary job should always be war fighting and in my books being in a maintenance company or transport platoon or a fin clerk or a cook in the military is war fighting. More importantly, on the day that you actually need to fight, you'll never have enough maintainers and truckers and fin clerks and cooks unless you have them in the reserves.
Maybe not everybody is focused on the "destroy" bit. Perhaps we can encourage both tribes to join the club.
You are way off base if you think the reserves are a "destroy" force. Even if they had their crap together.
The issue is having a credible force for defence and a properly organized reserve force provides a part of a credible force at a reasonable cost.
The reserves are not a club (regardless of how many of D&Bs former COs think it is). The military is an organization that is the last resort for a nation to use when nothing but violence will do. We're not an organization that needs to bring the snake eaters and the tree huggers together in a rousing chorus of "kumbaya". But, as a military organization we do need to bring together a wide variety of people with a wide variety of skill sets.
Sorry, mate. Let those for whom civil defence is
the priority form their own club with their own gear and their own songs. Instead of trying to find kinder, gentler raison d'ĂŞtre for the reserves why don't we get back to the purpose of the Canadian Forces as established in the NDA:
14 The Canadian Forces are the armed forces of Her Majesty raised by Canada and consist of one Service called the Canadian Armed Forces.
There's a reason why the term "armed" is in that sentence. And do you want to know something else - there's no provision anywhere in the NDA that says that the reserve force will be the unarmed, or less-armed component.
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army.ca
www.dailymaverick.co.za
