Updated Army Service Dress project

[FJAG]

It’s not a failed experiment, it’s our daily work environment. An infantry Bn can have Navy Log Os, Air Force clerks and vice versa. There is logic to ensuring they all have similar rank insignia. I don’t think that’s an attack on identity so much as it’s the logical response to the reality.

Their rank insignia is mere fluff. It really doesn't matter. It's not rocket science to learn what a PO is.

The real issue is why have a Navy LogO? There are significant underlying levels of experience that all personnel need to have to do a proper job at the next level. Someone who came in as a Log Lt and worked for a half dozen years in a Navy environment has a distinct disadvantage when posted to a bn as it's QM. The same is true for many of the purple trades.

There are clearly some advantages to elements of common training for the three services (there. I've said it. The "three services." Burn the witch) but there are none in bouncing people around from one environment to the other. The whole scheme behind integration/unification was about cutting costs by eliminating three systems for a common operating one. Costs didn't get cut but ballooned as the central headquarters became a self licking ice cream cone. In 1965 we had some 69 or so GOFOs capable or running around 126,000 personnel. There are now 145 managing a military half that size. And remember almost all of them come with a herd of staff and processes that gum up the works.

Operational jointness is important but it isn't necessary to integrate and unify an organization to achieve that. It is quite likely that Hellyer's remuster from the air force to the artillery in WW2, and having to take a recruit course twice, was the seedling that sprouted the concepts in his head. Fundamentally, the army, air force and navy are different as night and day. They each need their own support structures which are trained and fully experienced in their own fields. Centralization of the management of unlike entities is the enemy of flexibility and the birth place of a bureaucratic rather than an operational culture.

The sad reality is that things like changing rank names and uniforms is merely putting lipstick on the pig. The real rot comes from the massive, constipated, central headquarters bureaucracy that grew out of integration/unification and that has become a sacred cow that one fiddles with at his peril.

 

[MJP]

Their rank insignia is mere fluff. It really doesn't matter. It's not rocket science to learn what a PO is.

The real issue is why have a Navy LogO? There are significant underlying levels of experience that all personnel need to have to do a proper job at the next level. Someone who came in as a Log Lt and worked for a half dozen years in a Navy environment has a distinct disadvantage when posted to a bn as it's QM. The same is true for many of the purple trades.

There are clearly some advantages to elements of common training for the three services (there. I've said it. The "three services." Burn the witch) but there are none in bouncing people around from one environment to the other. The whole scheme behind integration/unification was about cutting costs by eliminating three systems for a common operating one. Costs didn't get cut but ballooned as the central headquarters became a self licking ice cream cone. In 1965 we had some 69 or so GOFOs capable or running around 126,000 personnel. There are now 145 managing a military half that size. And remember almost all of them come with a herd of staff and processes that gum up the works.

Operational jointness is important but it isn't necessary to integrate and unify an organization to achieve that. It is quite likely that Hellyer's remuster from the air force to the artillery in WW2, and having to take a recruit course twice, was the seedling that sprouted the concepts in his head. Fundamentally, the army, air force and navy are different as night and day. They each need their own support structures which are trained and fully experienced in their own fields. Centralization of the management of unlike entities is the enemy of flexibility and the birth place of a bureaucratic rather than an operational culture.

The sad reality is that things like changing rank names and uniforms is merely putting lipstick on the pig. The real rot comes from the massive, constipated, central headquarters bureaucracy that grew out of integration/unification and that has become a sacred cow that one fiddles with at his peril.

You are fiddling to nothing.


No RCN Log O is working in the the CA less a few (mostly purplish) exceptions.
There is larger issue of logistics folks being spread among environments but officers are largely exempt but CA LOgO are CA DEU

 

[FJAG]

You are fiddling to nothing.

The LogO example was only in response to @markppcli's example - and I read your response to him. There's a much wider issue though than the rank thing which is really what my post was about.

 

[MJP]

The LogO example was only in response to @markppcli's example - and I read your response to him. There's a much wider issue though than the rank thing which is really what my post was about.

Yea I saw the whole exchange. It is a nothing burger. Environment doesn't play an issue for LogO we largely stay within environment. Other RCLS trades maybe have different employment patterns but that is usually NCMS but that is a different conversation.

 

[Kilted]

I really wonder sometimes if we need as many Navy and Air Force people in certain purple trades when so many of them seem to end up in Army units. This also seems even more weird when you get Air Force or Navy people in positions that will put them in the field.

I'm wondering if one day we will finally get rid of unification completely. Unification is always talked about like it was the darkest day in Canadian Military history.

 

[Eaglelord17]

You are all missing the biggest advantage of the purple trades. When the casualties start stacking up in war you have places you can pull from who are similarly trained. Considering we lack basically any redundancy in peacetime this will be critical for us in our next serious war.

I have never understood why people believe unification can’t work. I just look as the US and the Navy/Marines and see it can function just fine as they fit all three branches in there why do we believe we are so special that it can’t here?

I think the real issue is we don’t want unification to work and have actively undermined it since day one trying to better the ‘element’ over the CAF in a selfish ego protectionist manner.

 

[Rifleman62]

KevinB on rank badges:

Silver Canadian Goose: Col

Anyone else see the humor in that?