Eye In The Sky
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Operational experience is significantly devalued in the CAF. Mandatory DLN trg is where it’s currently at…
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- Thread starter Halifax Tar
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Operational experience is significantly devalued in the CAF. Mandatory DLN trg is where it’s currently at…
MilEME09
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Operational experience also varies given how few days you need to get a medal now
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To the credit of the RCN, lots of sailing isn't part of a named deployment, so there's no medals awarded.
Plus even in the most routine of sailings, the ocean actively tries to kill everyone.
Plus even in the most routine of sailings, the ocean actively tries to kill everyone.
Jarnhamar
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Thanks that makes a bit more sense. Weird to have missed named deployments but maybe it's just a lot of regular sailing.
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daftandbarmy
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She has a silver SSM, indicating between three and four years underway. That's pretty reasonable these days, given that for a a few years between 2011-2016 only a few ships were at sea at any given time.
Jarnhamar
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Does that mean 3 to 4 years worth of sailing time?
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3-4 years being on a ship that is not connected to the shore. Sea days are counted based on days the ship is "underway", not just days posted to a ship. For example, in five years posted to the left coast, and having done four deployments in that time, I only have 794 Sea Days, or just over two years. For someone to get to between 1095 and 1461 days at sea means they have done some time on ships actually being a sailor.
TacticalTea
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According to a credible source, the LCdr reported himself almost immediately after the incident.
Eye In The Sky
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In some cases, yup.
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It's still counted as "24 hour days at sea", right? So if a ship sails for a week, Monday and Friday (assuming those are the dates of departure and arrival) don't count?
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Foreign port days might count, too. It has been many years since I cared what colour my SSI badge is…
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Yes, as @Furniture pointed out that means a large amount of time posted to a ship. It makes sense, for most hard sea trades you'll have your initial trade OJT and subsequent S1 time onboard. Then you'll have to come back as an MS. Then again as a PO2, a PO1, and CPO2. Assuming a posting time of 2 years or so that's 10+ years of time on ship, usually 12+ years. Over that time you'll rotate through ships that are coming and going from high readiness with varying amounts of time at sea. Some postings might be thin for sea time and others you're never home.
I can never keep this right. If you leave on Monday morning and don't get back until Friday evening both Monday and Friday count IIRC. They are more than 8 hours attached to a longer continuous time at sea in between.
If you left Monday morning and came back end of the same day it wouldn't count. 8+ hours are not connected to a longer sail in between. Or something like that. I'll look at the reference Monday and let you know properly what it is.
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I think I have something like 450 odd days of sea time that aren't part of a named deployment. Honestly that was more work/riskier than the other 200 days for the Op Reassurance and NATO time; the ships sail in a better repair state for deployments with more people, where you will limp out with a minimal crew for the rest.
The times I've been genuinely worried were always 'routine standard readiness' type sailing from A to B, (like when we spent several days on a single generator caught in a major storm during an Atlantic crossing trying to get another one going). Conversely for the NATO we left with everything meeting/exceeding SOLAS and enough people and time in the schedule to do maintenance (actually hit 100% for a while, which made us a unicorn).
Similarly you are trying to get ready to go with a portion of the crew so it's nuts to prepare for as well. People who have a high portion of their sea time on HR ships actually have it easy in comparison (for most trades). Wander down to a ship trying to reactivate after a DWP with a skeleton crew and see what I mean; hard to get IPMS up and running with no IPMS tech, and can be a fight just to keep the hotel services running.
RIMPAC is a pretty typical example of a long sail with no medals attached where the ships aren't at full high readiness, and there are a few equivalents on the East coast where you will be gone for 2-3 months doing exercises with the USN or the UK. Know a few people who had the gold medal but a similar lack of medals; some people are just always bridesmaids that spend a lot of time sailing without a deployment.
Jarnhamar
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I'm humbled by the info thanks all. Glad to see my assumptions were wrong.
Missing a soldier or two out of a rifle section can really impact performance, it seems criminal to keep hearing how under-strength the navy is and how you still sail. Having leaders constantly in the news for inappropriate behavior probably doesn't help morale very much either.
For me personally I can handle dangerous environments, shitty living conditions and regular army bullshit (wash the vehicles so a general can see dust free vehicles in the middle of the desert). Leaders with double standards for themselves (behavior, performance) cause the most stress.
Missing a soldier or two out of a rifle section can really impact performance, it seems criminal to keep hearing how under-strength the navy is and how you still sail. Having leaders constantly in the news for inappropriate behavior probably doesn't help morale very much either.
For me personally I can handle dangerous environments, shitty living conditions and regular army bullshit (wash the vehicles so a general can see dust free vehicles in the middle of the desert). Leaders with double standards for themselves (behavior, performance) cause the most stress.
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The West Coast hasn't historically done much in the way of deployments. They would do what used to be called WESTPLOY which is literally just sailing around the Pacific visiting other friendly Countries.
Having done a PROJECTION I can say I would never want to do it again. Boring as all heck, didn't really feel like we actually accomplished anything.
Now going to the Middle East, that was way better. I felt like we should have just skipped most of PROJECTION and spent an extra 2 months in the Gulf/Indian Ocean actually doing operations.
I can't imagine doing nothing but RIMPACs and Force Generation sails my entire career. What a boring existence.
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For context, I was talking to someone pretty recently trying to reactivate a ship with about 20 people out of the 50 they are supposed to have in the department. On a normal day, you'll be down a few at the get go from duty watches, plus courses, leave etc.
Crews are doing the best they can, but they are criminally under crewed with no real adjustments to the schedule, and then the BGHs are surprised when a lot of items still aren't fixed when they are doing the safety conferences to see if they go to sea.
The common sense approach is to prove the ship is safe before sailing (ie meets basic commercial standards). The RCN approach is to risk assess things, which is not really feasible to do properly when you have 1000+ defects unless you look at the overall impact. For example, you can have a pool of diesel in a cold area with no sources of heat be low risk, you can have some kind of ignition source (hot pipe?) in an empty area also be low risk, but if those two low risk items are in the same spot you have a problem.
That process is pretty handraulic and can't be automated to catch the compounding impacts. On the commercial side they avoid that by having things as red lines that just get fixed or the ship doesn't sail. We just talk it until it's yellow and hope nothing happens.
Getting completely off topic though, so apologize for derailing things.
Really frustrated by situations like this where they don't give details. I know they said it wasn't sexual misconduct, but people will still assume the worst. There will be a lot of assumptions, recriminations etc and then even if they announce the results of the investigation will be accusations of a cover up later on.
Crews are doing the best they can, but they are criminally under crewed with no real adjustments to the schedule, and then the BGHs are surprised when a lot of items still aren't fixed when they are doing the safety conferences to see if they go to sea.
The common sense approach is to prove the ship is safe before sailing (ie meets basic commercial standards). The RCN approach is to risk assess things, which is not really feasible to do properly when you have 1000+ defects unless you look at the overall impact. For example, you can have a pool of diesel in a cold area with no sources of heat be low risk, you can have some kind of ignition source (hot pipe?) in an empty area also be low risk, but if those two low risk items are in the same spot you have a problem.
That process is pretty handraulic and can't be automated to catch the compounding impacts. On the commercial side they avoid that by having things as red lines that just get fixed or the ship doesn't sail. We just talk it until it's yellow and hope nothing happens.
Getting completely off topic though, so apologize for derailing things.
Really frustrated by situations like this where they don't give details. I know they said it wasn't sexual misconduct, but people will still assume the worst. There will be a lot of assumptions, recriminations etc and then even if they announce the results of the investigation will be accusations of a cover up later on.
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My non-operational sailing was probably more 'exciting' compared to the operational tour, but probably varies by department/trade. If I was an operator I'd want to do as much HR as possible. As an MSE type the operations were the break and recharge time after being driven into the ground in the preceeding year up to it, and honestly it was kind of boring at times to just have everything working and available, with proper support when it broke (unless the coast was being stupid and telling us we didn't need equipment essential to what we were doing, because they weren't reading our actual mission updates and thought were were doing rounds of cocktail parties in friendly waters).
FG included a few missile shoots, a lot of gunnery shoots, operating with fast air and submarines etc. Conversely spent weeks on the NATO just patrolling a box in the Med/Black sea and doing some very basic TG things with some allies. Could have been more exiting, but we had no ROEs to do boardings, and doing 'intelligence gathering' as a ship is interesting to about 10 people onboard and just tedium for the other 240.
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That is not a risk mitigation strategy...
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