Canada must divide its military resources along foreign and domestic lines - G&M

[Navy_Pete]

Wrt the reserve usage, if the care homes are spread out over the place, isn't it just logistically easier to use a local reserve unit then have someone come from further away?

Hadn't really thought of it as a second class thing, but figured it was more because it was faster/simpler then shipping in a lot of people from outside the area.  Being spread across the country in small groups is a massive advantage for a local domestic response compared to getting them from the few bases for something like this (I would think), especially if you can eliminate extra travel and the need to find local accommodations (for the most part).

I don't disagree there are some people that look down on reservists, but not really sure if that's the reason why they are doing the heavy lifting in this tasking. Not that defence commentators normally let facts stand in the way of their opinion pieces.

 

[FJAG]

Here's a thought:

For DomOps, the Feds can bill the province for the service provided by the military. Should they in this case and should the two provinces pass the bill on to the care homes involved? Discuss.

For bonus points discuss manslaughter charges.

op:

 

[Cloud Cover]

1. Yes with no discount.
2. Yes with a whopping huge COVID surcharge.

Charge? Without a doubt. Not just the facilities managers but the staff who breached their duty. None of this can be left to stand.

 

[blacktriangle]

Wrt the reserve usage, if the care homes are spread out over the place, isn't it just logistically easier to use a local reserve unit then have someone come from further away?

Hadn't really thought of it as a second class thing, but figured it was more because it was faster/simpler then shipping in a lot of people from outside the area.  Being spread across the country in small groups is a massive advantage for a local domestic response compared to getting them from the few bases for something like this (I would think), especially if you can eliminate extra travel and the need to find local accommodations (for the most part).

I don't disagree there are some people that look down on reservists, but not really sure if that's the reason why they are doing the heavy lifting in this tasking. Not that defence commentators normally let facts stand in the way of their opinion pieces.

The Reg F are getting paid regardless, whereas some Class A reservists might be out of work in their civilian occupations. Class C pays better than CERB or EI. I saw it as a way to help people out, while ensuring a surge in personnel available to cover tasks. Not to mention that certain parts of the Reg F were already tapped out pers wise before COVID even hit. Not everyone in the Reg F was just sitting around waiting for something to do. I get the sense that the author of that article thinks no one in the Reg F actually does anything. Also, aren't a large percentage of the medical personnel on LASER from the Reg F? Isn't the whole point of a reserve to be backup pool of manpower that is uncommitted, so that it can be mobilized or surged as needed?

The author argues that the work isn't sexy enough for the Reg F, but I get the sense that he simply thinks it's not "worthy" of the reserves. Seems like someone stirring the eternal Reg vs Res debate at a time when there are more important things to be focused on. Just seems petty.  Are there people that look down on PRes? Sure. Just like there are PRes senior leadership that don't view the Reg F as a "real job".

 

[GR66]

So if the Reg force has difficulty deploying without Reserve augmentation as it is and you then make the Reg Force the "go to" force for domestic deployments (to save the Reserves from getting stuck with the "dirty jobs"), then what happens if we need to deploy our military for, you know, like military things?

 

[Ostrozac]

Here's a thought:

For DomOps, the Feds can bill the province for the service provided by the military. Should they in this case and should the two provinces pass the bill on to the care homes involved? Discuss.

For bonus points discuss manslaughter charges.

op:

Whether provincial or federal, Defence budget or Public Safety budget, there's still only one taxpayer. Everything else is accounting tricks.

As to manslaughter? I don't think so. The ongoing long term neglect of these care homes actually works against manslaughter charges -- manslaughter requires a heat of passion component that seems absent in this case. This looks more like criminal negligence causing death.

Note: I am not a lawyer, nor am I available as an assisting officer.

 

[daftandbarmy]

I'm dead set against conscription by any means. Having been stuck in a environment I personally chose and hated every minute of it, I can only imagine how miserable you can be if your forced to do it.

Personally I am more of the carrot type of guy. Get rid of all university and college subsidies. Then offer free education for any who volunteer for the Reserves/maybe this civil defence idea. The hard part would be selling the public on it building the leadership, training, logistics and administrative infrastructure across the country (mainly in places that have very little of these things) at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars etc.

There, FTFY

 

[Jarnhamar]

I think Canada deserves a military with better representation of Liberal, NDP and Green members. If that means we conscript all male, female and other Canadian 18-22 year olds so be it.

 

[blacktriangle]

Conscription would definitely solve the diversity problem. That, and less people in the military would be drinking crappy Tim Hortons coffee.

 

[FJAG]

And we could pay them peanuts.

We'd also have to reconvert all those barrack blocks that we converted to headquarters buildings back to barrack blocks again.

op:

 

[lenaitch]

Wrt the reserve usage, if the care homes are spread out over the place, isn't it just logistically easier to use a local reserve unit then have someone come from further away?

Hadn't really thought of it as a second class thing, but figured it was more because it was faster/simpler then shipping in a lot of people from outside the area.  Being spread across the country in small groups is a massive advantage for a local domestic response compared to getting them from the few bases for something like this (I would think), especially if you can eliminate extra travel and the need to find local accommodations (for the most part).

That was my assumption.  Draw on GTA personnel for a GTA deployment (and similarly for the Montreal area).

 

[daftandbarmy]

And we could pay them peanuts.

If you pay peanuts, you get elephants.

And I've seen some of those elephants stumbling around in conscript forces with other countries' armies. We definitely do not want to go there.

 

[Kat Stevens]

We spent a bit of time doing gun camps and demo camps etc on bases full of French conscripts. in every platoon marching down the road there seemed to be 25 or so scrawny little guys, and two or three absolute giants. Not hard to tell who was beating crap out of who for their food.

 

[FJAG]

If you pay peanuts, you get elephants.

And I've seen some of those elephants stumbling around in conscript forces with other countries' armies. We definitely do not want to go there.

If we use bananas, do we get gorillas?

I've worked with both the German Army and the Italian Army when they had conscripts and I tend to agree with you but a lot of that had to do with the fact that their length of service was quite short and most of them didn't go far beyond what we would consider DP 1 training.

At the time when they took in conscripts, the Italians even selected a number of the brighter ones and sent them to NCO school where they came back as OR-5/E-5 sergentes although their OR-5 sergentes did the same job as our Canadian OR-6 sergeants, i.e command a gun detachment. My recollection is their rounds went down range the same as ours (although there was more excited shouting on the gun line than I was used to)

:cheers:

 

[daftandbarmy]

If we use bananas, do we get gorillas?

I've worked with both the German Army and the Italian Army when they had conscripts and I tend to agree with you but a lot of that had to do with the fact that their length of service was quite short and most of them didn't go far beyond what we would consider DP 1 training.

At the time when they took in conscripts, the Italians even selected a number of the brighter ones and sent them to NCO school where they came back as OR-5/E-5 sergentes although their OR-5 sergentes did the same job as our Canadian OR-6 sergeants, i.e command a gun detachment. My recollection is their rounds went down range the same as ours (although there was more excited shouting on the gun line than I was used to)

:cheers:

Conscript armies are enormously expensive, and a drag o the economy in other ways I barely understand connected with tying up all the 18 year olds....

 

[Ostrozac]

Conscript armies are enormously expensive, and a drag o the economy in other ways I barely understand connected with tying up all the 18 year olds....

I’m not so sure that conscription is necessarily a drain on the economy. Singapore, South Korea, Sweden, Finland and Switzerland all seem to be doing fine.

Conscription is a tool in the tool box. Conscript armies have worked fine for some countries. Professional armies have worked fine sometimes as well, but conscription shouldn’t be discounted out of hand, particularly since some of our declared priorities — specifically diversity — seem to point towards conscription, and the status quo doesn’t seem to be working right now.

 

[Throwaway987]

...conscription shouldn%u2019t be discounted out of hand, particularly since some of our declared priorities %u2014 specifically diversity %u2014 seem to point towards conscription, and the status quo doesn%u2019t seem to be working right now.

op:

Oh snap! I love this solution to address diversity. Instead of trying to address the root causes of why certain parts of the population are not interested in a career in the CAF (or choose to leave prematurely), it is easier twist their arm into joining!

It reminds me of the CRA decision to decrease telephone wait times by disconnecting callers after being on hold for a period of time...

Source: para 2.16 from http://www.oag-bvg.gc.ca/internet/English/parl_oag_201711_02_e_42667.html

 

[Blackadder1916]

I’m not so sure that conscription is necessarily a drain on the economy. Singapore, South Korea, Sweden, Finland and Switzerland all seem to be doing fine.

Conscription is a tool in the tool box. Conscript armies have worked fine for some countries. Professional armies have worked fine sometimes as well, but conscription shouldn’t be discounted out of hand, particularly since some of our declared priorities — specifically diversity — seem to point towards conscription, and the status quo doesn’t seem to be working right now.

If your potential adversary can take a piss standing in their country and have the full stream land in yours then it may be necessary to maintain a large standing army (commensurate with population and threat) or a reserve force available for "immediate" mobilization.  Otherwise, what is the need for conscription, particularly in Canada?  How would forcing every 18 year old into uniform for two years, if it was "universal" conscription, accomplish "diversity" or would it be "selective" national service and then having a quota of diversity selections?  That would surely make career military service attractive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnmOQGOgjzg

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40172-015-0026-4

The long-term effects of military conscription on educational attainment and wages

Abstract
This study investigates the long-term effects of peace-time military conscription on educational attainment and earnings by exploiting a policy change that exempted a complete birth cohort from military service. We find that compulsory military service decreases the proportion of Dutch university graduates by 1.5 percentage points from a baseline of 12.3 per cent. In addition, being a conscript reduces the probability of obtaining a university degree by almost four percentage points. The effect of military service on earnings is also negative and long-lasting. Approximately 18 years after military service, we still find a negative effect of 3 to 4 per cent. The effect of conscription on educational attainment does not fully explain the wage reduction.

. . .

Conclusions
This paper investigated the long-term effect of military conscription on educational attainment and wages by exploiting a policy change that exempted a complete birth cohort from military service. We compare the educational outcomes and earnings of the exempted cohort with the outcomes of men from adjacent cohorts. This local approach yields estimates of the societal costs of a system of military conscription and estimates of the private costs for individuals that had to serve in the military. Our approach is related to previous work by Imbens and van der Klaauw (1995), who investigated the effects of conscription on wages of conscripts until 1990.

We find that the system of compulsory military service decreases the proportion of university graduates by 1.5 percentage points from a baseline of 12.3 per cent. In addition, being a conscript reduces the probability of obtaining a university degree by almost four percentage points. Our estimates also show that the system of military service reduces average societal wages by 1.5 per cent. The private costs for conscripts are higher; they lose approximately 3 to 4 per cent of their wages by serving in the military. The fact that the average man in our sample served in the army almost 18 years before suggests that the negative effects of military service are long-lasting. Finally, we find that the effect of conscription on educational attainment does not fully explain the wage reduction. This suggests that conscription also reduces individual earnings capacity through channels other than a reduction in human capital.

This study provides a new piece of evidence about the hidden costs of conscription. Our estimates show that military conscription has long term negative consequences for completion of university education and for individual earnings. This implies that the costs of conscription are substantial, both at the societal level and at the individual level. Moreover, the private costs of conscription seem to be long-lasting.

 

[Brad Sallows]

"diversity"

Comrade Black/Gay/Female Person! The Army is not diverse enough! You will serve two years before entering medical school!

 

[FJAG]

Not a statistician so having troubles following the Dutch analysis but will concede right off the top that it seems obvious that those taken in for national service will have whatever education and/or career retarded by an equivalent period of time as the length of their service.

I'm not a fan of national service mostly because of national reluctance against it but also because it creates a schism between the rank and file and the leadership from the NCOs on up.

I'm much more in favour of a system of voluntary service whereby the enlistment is totally voluntary but some of the elements of training are mandatory (and wherever possible to fit into the educational summer vacation periods) and the periods of initial and subsequent service are fixed at the time of enlistment and re-enlistment to coincide with a unit's annual training cycle with no voluntary releases allowed.

For example let's make annual unit training cycles from 1 Sep to 31 Aug. An enlisting university student could be hired at any time of the year but his DP1 training would start with a depot training battalion at the beginning of the summer (say 1 May) and continue for four months in year one, and be completed in the summer of year 2 by 31 Aug. At that point the individual is transferred to his unit effect 1 Sep and serves, say, 2 annual training cycles. His enlistment would therefore be for 40 months at which point in time he has the option of releasing or re-enlisting for a further set number of annual unit training cycles (enticed by a re-enlistment bonus).

One could lengthen enlistment periods (and increased recruiting) if one offered education enhancements like paying for university tuition or specific civilian trades training and adding on additional annual training cycles as obligatory service.

Annual unit training cycles should have a set number of mandatory collective training days (IMHO, 10 monthly weekends and one three week exercise for a total of 48 mandatory days per year) which would be neither onerous on the individual's family nor employer. All subsequent career progression training would be strictly voluntary and occurring at a time that does not interfere with mandatory unit training which is the system's priority. Similarly additional voluntary employment opportunities would be made available to individuals but again with the proviso that it does not interfere with the individual's attendance at mandatory unit collective training.

IMHO this type of system helps garner recruiting by offering periods of full summer employment as well as assistance with education (during the early parts of his service) and a mandated and predictable requirement of ongoing service which facilitates unit collective training, family time and very limited civilian employment interference throughout his time of service.

The fact that throughout this system the individual has the ability to carry on with a normal education stream and family life (and for the most part lives at home and doesn't need R&Q and pay while not "on duty") ensures that there is little impact (except maybe a positive one) on his chosen profession and family life and limits the cost burden on the department (we already have some funding for some of these elements save for re-enlistment bonuses)

:cheers:

:cheers: