Unless DEI siphoned a billion dollars from O&M last year (Coles Notes: It did not), it's not the problem. Chronic under funding of both O&M and capital procurements (as well as their glacial pace) is fueling the decline.
From my view, the problem with DEI initiatives is that they eat away at your most important commodity: Time.
There are 365 days in a year or broken down in to hours, 8760hrs in a year. Given a standard work week of 40hrs or (8hrs x 5days), you've only got 2080hrs of those 8760hrs available for whatever it is you want done.
I've been out for sometime now but I do remember quite a bit of institutional effort being dedicated to DEI initiatives in both time and resources. Mandatory DLN courses & Briefings, Workshops, Mandatory Reading Materials, etc. Ball-park figure I would use is it probably added up to a full 40hr work week with the amount of material that was expected to be digested....
So 40hrs of work on DEI initiatives per serving regular force member. Publicly available information states that the Regular Force strength is roughly "60000ish" and is about 15% short of the establishment strength.
40hrs x 60000 people = 2,400,000 work hrs.
That's over 2 million work hours of time spent on DEI, that provides no objectively measurable output to the bottom line of the CAF.
This isn't even accounting for the personnel that have been repurposed from their real jobs to new organizations stood up like the Chief Professional Conduct & Culture. This reallocation is happening in an era of scarce resources as well.
My Thought: Perhaps things wouldn't be moving at such a glacial pace if the institution got its priorities straight?
nationalpost.com
