USS John S McCain captain relieved

[Halifax Tar]

But in essence, aren’t you making it into a specific trade?

That sort of stuff needs frequent practice and if the trade isn’t willing to give up the time to let people do so, then their skills atrophy. I’m not sure how the Naval Boarding Party does it but are you thinking of that model?

No I'm thinking of it as a posting for a definite amount of time.

 

[Loachman]

He probably didn't see that coming.

Or maybe he did, but it just looked further away.

 

[KevinB]

No I'm thinking of it as a posting for a definite amount of time.

I’d suggest that a training unit be created that goes across the CAF running courses.

Down here AWG used to do that, and a lot of cadre for that Squadron was from units that had an exceedingly high deployment rate and to reduce burnout those NLI entities sent folks there for a year or two.

 

[dimsum]

No I'm thinking of it as a posting for a definite amount of time.

I guess, but that just makes the churn every 3-4 years instead of giving said folks a chance to really specialize in that sort of thing.

Not sure what most training currency regulations are like, but in my world if you’re gone for a posting and you return to your community, you’re likely re-doing the Operational Training Unit from scratch. Or at least I would feel that I would want to, because I’ve been gone that long and things would have changed.

 

[Navy_Pete]

I think the RCN has been doing a better job of training the 'special teams' folks in weapon handling by bringing in outside folks and doing things like leveraging secret squirrel type riders when embarked, and that tends to raise the general level of competence in real terms.

I get the 'everyone is a soldier first' thing, but when you add on 'everyone is a sailor first' it leads to a lot of common training to stay current on that you may never get to actually practice (or get ROEs to do anything more than self defence), so is kind of a waste of time IMHO. It also leads to dilution of actual specialist skills that we actually need more of in real world shipboard operations.

I think people should have some basic competence to recognize things like the scope being backwards, but we're spread pretty thin with not enough people/time to do everything, so something has to give.

Hard to take the RCN force protection policy seriously in home port when they got rid of the force protection boom around the base that would have guaranteed a standoff distance for any boats in the water. Now any idiot can paddle, sail, jetski or boat right up to any of our warships or submarines in the water a lot faster than we can go from normal duty watch to force protection response alongside, so having everyone ready to do FP is kind of a waste. In foreign ports there is a FP component largely made up of boarding party and others (as well as DC and engineering components made up of smaller pools of people with more experience/training), so maybe would make more sense to just have some people do different streams to achieve the end goal with a certain level of competence, vice having everyone be able to do everything (poorly).

 

[dimsum]

I think the RCN has been doing a better job of training the 'special teams' folks in weapon handling by bringing in outside folks and doing things like leveraging secret squirrel type riders when embarked, and that tends to raise the general level of competence in real terms.

I get the 'everyone is a soldier first' thing, but when you add on 'everyone is a sailor first' it leads to a lot of common training to stay current on that you may never get to actually practice (or get ROEs to do anything more than self defence), so is kind of a waste of time IMHO. It also leads to dilution of actual specialist skills that we actually need more of in real world shipboard operations.

I think people should have some basic competence to recognize things like the scope being backwards, but we're spread pretty thin with not enough people/time to do everything, so something has to give.

Hard to take the RCN force protection policy seriously in home port when they got rid of the force protection boom around the base that would have guaranteed a standoff distance for any boats in the water. Now any idiot can paddle, sail, jetski or boat right up to any of our warships or submarines in the water a lot faster than we can go from normal duty watch to force protection response alongside, so having everyone ready to do FP is kind of a waste. In foreign ports there is a FP component largely made up of boarding party and others (as well as DC and engineering components made up of smaller pools of people with more experience/training), so maybe would make more sense to just have some people do different streams to achieve the end goal with a certain level of competence, vice having everyone be able to do everything (poorly).

Wait what? Why did they get rid of the booms?

 

[brihard]

Why’s he relieved? What was he stressing about?

 

[Good2Golf]

RCN bases are conveniently co-located with Army units, staffed with trained small arms instructors and staff who can run ranges, and who run various range exercises for their own units every year.

Just sayin'

…when not trying to support their own reenaction of the 6-6-44 Normandy amphibious landing, well AWAY from the RCN…

 

[Navy_Pete]

Wait what? Why did they get rid of the booms?

Cost too much to open them up and close them back up for the constant movements (because we don't really have enough effective jetty space for different evolutions so lot of ship jenga). Also took a bit of time so was inconvenient. May have been gone for 10 years or so?

I think they are supposed to go back in place at elevated FP levels, but that might be too late and anyone with a dinghy can row up to them.

There are plenty of harbour cams and building cams that overlook the Halifax dockyard anyway, so this is something anyone with the interwebs can look at in open source, and you can also see it from the street, ferry, the Casino etc. Hammering the sailors for OPSEC for ship movements is kind of dumb when you have things like that, or major departures or returns are PR events in the paper.

All that to say makes FP (and weapon handling for everyone) all that seriously, especially when we are also down on people and training for core shipboard skills like fire and flood response. That's less theoretical and more of a near weekly event, which is a pretty banging record when you consider how small our fleet is.