Reconstitution

[Halifax Tar]

I never had a RegF CO that didn’t do PT, 7 Patrica CO’s and 2 at 2Horse.
I did have one utterly lazy and useless Patricia CO, but he did go out for PT.

I had 4 PRes CO’s and never saw them do PT once. Two I think were half in the grave during their tenure as CO.

My experience in the RegF force Army would be onside with yours.

 

[KevinB]

Learning French is useful to techs as leaders so they can communicate with 20% of their fellow countrymen. Communicating with our Quebecois brethren is just as important as an other criteria for promotion, especially at the higher ranks.

I find the second language aspect to be interesting - given a lot of NCO's and even Senior Officers have a limited capability in using their primary language correctly. I also have a hard time understanding the time sink that is second language training given the fact that the same entities that are claiming they do not have enough bodies to get the job done and thus must forgo PT, seem to also want everyone to be proficient in both of Canada's official languages.

I do feel language training is important - although I would vastly prefer members to have Russian, Mongolian, Mandarin, German, Arabic etc before either getting French or English as a SL.

But there is only X of amount of time in the training day, as you stretch the training day to 10, 12 etc hours moral and retention will fall.

If you set 40hrs as the prescribed working week based on a 8hr day 5 days a week - then if you want to have a mentally and physically fit military you need to allocate time for PT and Educational Improvements (beyond Military Courses), and some limited personal admin (because at the end of the day there are a lot of things that require business hours to accomplish - and no getting a hair cut isn't one of them).

So now the 40hrs you had has lost 5-10 for PT and 5-10 for EI. So you now have 20hrs to do the job.
Of that 20 hours you also go on leave - so let's say 15hrs a week for 52 weeks is available.
So you need basically 2.5 PY to do the 40hrs of work.

It really is not hard to bake that into the Military - it is simply something that needs to be supported by the chain of command.

 

[OldSolduer]

I did have one utterly lazy and useless Patricia CO, but he did go out for PT.

And???

 

[KevinB]

And???

You know who it is

 

[OldSolduer]

You know who it is

ummmmm MD the initials?

 

[OldSolduer]

ummmmm MD the initials?

Thought so. A$$hat.

 

[daftandbarmy]

I never had a RegF CO that didn’t do PT, 7 Patrica CO’s and 2 at 2Horse.
I did have one utterly lazy and useless Patricia CO, but he did go out for PT.

I had 4 PRes CO’s and never saw them do PT once. Two I think were half in the grave during their tenure as CO.

So I'm guessing that you've never had the pleasure of leading a ruck march where the CO, trailing along behind in the Jack Wagon with the medics, uses the safety vehicle to bring the drop outs back to the front of the marching company only to have them drop out again, and again, and again....

He was clearly a great leader because they promoted him and made him Bde Comd the next year

 

[MilEME09]

I had 4 PRes CO’s and never saw them do PT once. Two I think were half in the grave during their tenure as CO.

sounds about right, even now the army has mandated that if the reserves are doing a full training day in garrison, 1 hour of PT is mandatory. With the exception of my OC who asked to run a PT session, there wasn't anyone above Sgt out at unit PT last time we did a full day

 

[Navy_Pete]

Yes and no, outside of specific training aspects, the majority of the time when I did that schedule was at least for the noon swims, on my lunch break, and after hours for the PM sessions. I generally joined every think I could (except Hockey - and I was a hockey player before I joined the Army) to get out of group PT.

I don’t accept that anyone can’t afford to take 1hr in the am for PT in an office or garrison setting. The CAF needs to account for that in its personnel decisions.

If your arriving at 0700 - set 1hr for PT, and have 0800 the start of the office day on times when the schedule is tight, or 0900 on days that it isn’t as bad. You can get a pretty decent workout in 30-45 for most people, and 15 min to shower and get into uniform.

That is a major senior leadership issue. Physical fitness is a major issue for the long term health of individuals. You can’t jam 15lbs of shit into a 5lb bag, and that seems to be what many units or elements do to their people. As members of the CAF there should be clear lines (outside a shooting war) of what the accepted work day is, and PT and a reasonable amount of pers admin should be factored into that.

No unit is running 3xPT periods a day (outside of some courses), some may run 2, but that’s a rare occurrence. 1-2hrs of PT isn’t infantry training, that’s just maintenance PT for everyone’s health and wellbeing.

I see that as a leadership failure. It appears a lot of trades are trying to get blood from a stone.

Again all I see a senior leadership fail. As there hasn’t been a proper accounting for the actual work hours to get tasks done.

Operational requirements come first is so often used as a cover for bad leadership. Sometimes there are legitimate reasons- sitting by a plane at 5 min NTM, is obviously a legit reason not to do PT, but during that time at least from the GIB perspective you are either trying to sleep, or ensuring all your kit is GTG.

But when the operational requirements seem to occur day in and day out, sometime is very very wrong.

I agree it's a leadership failure, at the high level operational planning side to not scale back operations to what people we actually have. I agree with you, but the RCN is all about jamming 15 lbs into a 5 lb bag just to do peacetime cruising, so there is no surge capacity left, and we routinely sail ships that don't meet commercial SOLAS requirements that would keep cargo ships alongside to even do that.

But it's been common for my whole career where they give you 5 weeks to do an 8 week work period (competing with 3-4 other ships for priority), while at the same time trying to give people annual leave, career coursing, refresher training. That was doable on the older ships where you actually had a 70-80 person MSED, and bigger FMFs, but that's the story of the past. The CPFs should have 60, most ships are running around 30, and the AOPs started with a skeleton crew. When the FMF/ISSC shows up, you need people to support them, and usually that taps people out with support from other departments.

PT is encouraged, but at the end of the day, it's 2nd string to getting the ship ready for the next sail, and pretty normal to be scrambling to find enough people to just do that. I used to do occasional PT at 0600 (if I got off the ship before 2200 and could get 5 hours in the sack at home), sometimes at 1800 or later. But from 0730 until 1800 or so would be flat out most days.

YMMV with different departments; some people worked out everyday alongside, but it's a very uneven distribution in a crew who has the capacity to do that. No real challenge to figure out which trades are healthy and which ones are so short they keep having to create new colours after red.