Arbour Report - Recommendation #29: Future of Military Colleges

[Kat Stevens]

So Corporals??

Bite your tongue, heretic! That kind of talk will get you an appointment with the rack.

 

[OldSolduer]

I wouldn't go so far as to say I feel bad for these leaders getting in shit ("duh I didn't know better" ) but when you think of it our culture in the CAF creates a lot of these "rank has privileges" types who routinely don't practice what they preach. They're brought up through the ranks getting away with "cause I'm a *$#@in sergeant major" or "cause I'm the CO" double standards.

I can imagine the rank privilege is so ingrained in the people that they're genuinely surprised when they get in shit for something.

The whole rank has privlage is a cornerstone of our culture problem.

Rank has responsibilities, and each step up you take they become far more serious.

 

[ArmyRick]

How would you determine who would be an officer then?

Design an "officer selection" to take place after basic training. Check for mental and physical endurance, integrity, performance and thinking under stress, problem solving, etc. Make it 2-3 weeks long. You should be able to quickly find those with the abilities and traits neccesary

 

[SupersonicMax]

Design an "officer selection" to take place after basic training. Check for mental and physical endurance, integrity, performance and thinking under stress, problem solving, etc. Make it 2-3 weeks long. You should be able to quickly find those with the abilities and traits neccesary

It’s easy to see abilities. Far more difficult to see potential. You can’t base your assessment on abilities for 16-20 years old kids.

 

[Jarnhamar]

Require testing in order to promote people combined with a subordinate/peer/supervisor review.

 

[The Bread Guy]

Rank has responsibilities, and each step up you take they become far more serious.

In a perfect world, and not just in the military, a higher standard is expected because one is expected to know better the higher up the food chain one gets.

 

[daftandbarmy]

We need thinking officers. If there are ways to find and develop those people other than using a university education as a proxy, run with it.

The "credentials" based model has to remain to the extent that it ensures officers are competent to do staff and command work commensurate with rank/appointment. Most staff officers don't have to "lead" anything; they have to be intelligent, educated, industrious, objective, and detail-minded.

Rowallan Company enters the chat

"Develop character first and military leadership will follow." Lord Rowallan, 1943

The Rowallan Company was a British Army training course based at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst (RMAS) which existed from 1977 to 2002. Its gruelling 12-week programme was designed to improve leadership ability and toughen up borderline candidates from the Regular Commissions Board (RCB) in preparation for the 1-year Commissioning Course.[1] Rowallan cadets were given the pay and grade of a soldier recruit, not an officer cadet, and existed under a far harsher regime than the latter. Physical punishments and restriction of privileges were the norm, and training was largely based around field craft and adventurous training in adverse conditions and forbidding locations such as the Brecon Beacons. Despite a high dropout and failure rate of c50%, the course was successful in increasing the in-flow of candidates to RMAS, and many ex-Rowallan Cadets have gone on to have successful army careers and achieve high rank. Rather than being a black mark as a 'failed RCB candidate', ex-Rowallan cadets view it as something of a badge of honour to have survived this arduous training. Rowallan Company was disbanded in 2002.

Rowallan Company

en.everybodywiki.com

 

[Navy_Pete]

Just throw out there that might make sense for some officer trades but not all; for the engineering, health care etc the degree is part of the background knowledge required for the trade.

On the Navy side we used to do NOAB screening after the initial recruiting centre screening. Was only a week long, but screened out a number of additional candidates, either by the Navy deciding they weren't up to par or the candidates deciding they didn't want to continue after getting to sea for the day. That got canceled but I think saved a lot of time and effort, and was more Navy appropriate than field craft or building a tripod with a small team.

 

[dapaterson]

Precious few of the CAF's engineers engage in work that requires professional engineers. That's a workforce design issue.

 

[McG]

Precious few of the CAF's engineers engage in work that requires professional engineers. That's a workforce design issue.

... but a deliberate workforce design that was influenced by a few engineers (of various types) who discovered that it's much easier to make jobs for themselves as project managers. Most of those PM jobs should be made civilian, and the uniformed engineers can get back to focusing on technical work.

 

[dapaterson]

... but a deliberate workforce design that was influenced by a few engineers (of various types) who discovered that it's much easier to make jobs for themselves as project managers. Most of those PM jobs should be made civilian, and the uniformed engineers can get back to focusing on technical work.

Heretic.

 

[Navy_Pete]

Precious few of the CAF's engineers engage in work that requires professional engineers. That's a workforce design issue.

Professional Engineering certification is provincial anyway, so doesn't apply to the CAF. But we definitely do comparable work that you can apply the same principles to, as a lot of it is simply professional ethics vice straight design work.

Project management is a legitimate part of that as well, and what a lot of P.Engs actually do. It's a lot easier to effectively manage a complex technical project when you understand the details.

A lot of the PM jobs are civilian, but useful to have a good mix so we take into account how things are in reality, vice how things work on paper. We're buying new ships that are built to commercial standards, which is based on commercial practices, and a lot of those are different from how we actually operate, or respond to emergencies. All of that is pretty relevant when you are doing a review or picking equipment.

Making the jobs civilian would increase the SWE envelope and mean a whole bunch of releases to fill the positions anyway; typically the civilian equivalent to the military ranks is a 5-10% raise, plus you get things like overtime and acting pay, plus the GoC will actually pay things like the P.Eng fees.

 

[dapaterson]

And your pension point is later, and there's no military training cost, and there's no uniform costs, and the EBP is less than half... lots of valid reasons to downsize the military cohort where they are not required.

 

[Navy_Pete]

There is already a pretty natural bottle neck in a lot of the engineering trades at the Maj/LCdr rank, where you only have a small number of positions above it, and really get out of the technical work anyway.

The changes to the hiring process make it a lot easier to transition into a civilian job so there is a natural feeder into it. Think it's a win/win, as it keeps people with the experience/training in, and then gives stability for the different jobs instead of changing them out every few years.

It's all somewhat irrelevant anyway; we spend a lot of money training/eductating people to get very niche specializations, but then tend to ignore them and ask a consulatant if the opinion is inconvenient (at least on the oversight side). Drives me crazy to have some fairly specialist knowledge but somehow a random consultant with no relevant experience can write a report that gets taken with more weight than whatever recommendation I come up with.

 

[Bruce Monkhouse]

It's all somewhat irrelevant anyway; we spend a lot of money training/eductating people to get very niche specializations, but then tend to ignore them and ask a consulatant if the opinion is inconvenient (at least on the oversight side). Drives me crazy to have some fairly specialist knowledge but somehow a random consultant with no relevant experience can write a report that gets taken with more weight than whatever recommendation I come up with.

Yea but how much of your salary do you kickback
to the coffers of whatever party is governing at the time?????

There are ways to be important.....

 

[Navy_Pete]

Yea but how much of your salary do you kickback
to the coffers of whatever party is governing at the time?????

There are ways to be important.....

I don't think it's that at all; we just chronically undervalue our internal expertise.

I joked about getting an impressive stamp and/or letterhead, but honestly it's just stupid. I think I've seen several million spent on consulatant reports/surveys to tell us what we already know, but they wanted an 'independent opinion'.

I think that's my issue with a lot of these external reports on reforming the CAF; they are written by people who have no idea what we do so there is no real context taken into account to make the solutions actually practical. We don't just work in an office so we can't adopt solutions developed for large businesses without mapping out what they do to what we do. There is always opportunities for learning and changing, but things have to work in the context they are applied, or they don't really work.

 

[TacticalTea]

Design an "officer selection" to take place after basic training. Check for mental and physical endurance, integrity, performance and thinking under stress, problem solving, etc. Make it 2-3 weeks long. You should be able to quickly find those with the abilities and traits neccesary

I've taken a keen interest in the RMA Sandhurst model. (Which was previously brought up in this thread a few weeks ago)

From what I can gather, it does not seem to be a requirement to have a degree to be an officer in the British Armed Forces. Obviously, if a specialized job requires a degree, then needless to say... it shall be a requirement.

Speaking generally however, I've met many an educated fella who turned out to be obtuse and close-minded. It seems to be common knowledge, nowadays, that a college degree is no guarantee of moral or intellectual fortitude. It is, indeed, nothing more than a proxy.

On the other hand, I've had the pleasure to work with a plethora of enlisted folks who had veritably taken on the path of the warrior monk, consistently striving to widen their perspectives and depth of knowledge.

As such, I'm inclined to believe it would be better to return to the old ways of the midshipman: have prospective officers serve a year or two in the ranks as an alternative to obtaining a degree, before sending them off for a one-year course at RMC. This, truly, would allow chains of command to better evaluate who is a good fit for the role of an officer.

At any rate, the current assessment philosophy seems to be ''we'll take whatever we can get, and if they make it to OFP, that means they're good enough. At worst, they'll fill staff jobs.''

 

[quadrapiper]

There is already a pretty natural bottle neck in a lot of the engineering trades at the Maj/LCdr rank, where you only have a small number of positions above it, and really get out of the technical work anyway.

The changes to the hiring process make it a lot easier to transition into a civilian job so there is a natural feeder into it. Think it's a win/win, as it keeps people with the experience/training in, and then gives stability for the different jobs instead of changing them out every few years.

It's all somewhat irrelevant anyway; we spend a lot of money training/eductating people to get very niche specializations, but then tend to ignore them and ask a consulatant if the opinion is inconvenient (at least on the oversight side). Drives me crazy to have some fairly specialist knowledge but somehow a random consultant with no relevant experience can write a report that gets taken with more weight than whatever recommendation I come up with.

Is this something where there might be a need to review what's needed for the deployable force, and what's a static role? Not suggesting the latter should be entirely civilian, but (recalling comments in other threads) lest there be a large deployment, make sure there's no vital static tasks being covered by someone who is, properly, going to be leaving the country with a deployed force.

 

[Navy_Pete]

Is this something where there might be a need to review what's needed for the deployable force, and what's a static role? Not suggesting the latter should be entirely civilian, but (recalling comments in other threads) lest there be a large deployment, make sure there's no vital static tasks being covered by someone who is, properly, going to be leaving the country with a deployed force.

I think it's really trade specific; in some cases the deployment opportunities disappear when you hit a certain rank, and since Afghanistan ended I stopped seeing CFTPO requests for deployments outside the trade in 'purple jobs' (unarmed observer, watch officer etc), so assume they are being filled by the Army now when they come up.

With the engineers in the Navy the postings to ship caps out at Lt(N), and aside from a very specific jobs there aren't many opportunities to get attached to a deployed ship, so most of the Senior officer jobs are essentially support for our trade (either directly on the coast, at 3rd line with ADM(Mat) or wokring on a project). You still need to understand how the ships function, so having that background is critical, but don't necessarily need to be in uniform anymore at that point.

Still the opportunity to do some other purple jobs in the CAF, but honestly if someone wants to do core engineering work to support the RCN, they will have better luck working for an ISSC or someone like NETE/QETE/DRDC.

 

[daftandbarmy]

I've taken a keen interest in the RMA Sandhurst model. (Which was previously brought up in this thread a few weeks ago)

From what I can gather, it does not seem to be a requirement to have a degree to be an officer in the British Armed Forces. Obviously, if a specialized job requires a degree, then needless to say... it shall be a requirement.

Speaking generally however, I've met many an educated fella who turned out to be obtuse and close-minded. It seems to be common knowledge, nowadays, that a college degree is no guarantee of moral or intellectual fortitude. It is, indeed, nothing more than a proxy.

On the other hand, I've had the pleasure to work with a plethora of enlisted folks who had veritably taken on the path of the warrior monk, consistently striving to widen their perspectives and depth of knowledge.

As such, I'm inclined to believe it would be better to return to the old ways of the midshipman: have prospective officers serve a year or two in the ranks as an alternative to obtaining a degree, before sending them off for a one-year course at RMC. This, truly, would allow chains of command to better evaluate who is a good fit for the role of an officer.

At any rate, the current assessment philosophy seems to be ''we'll take whatever we can get, and if they make it to OFP, that means they're good enough. At worst, they'll fill staff jobs.''

I've weighed in before on the Sandhurst model, having passed out as a 'Non-Graduate'.

It works very well except that, should you wish to pursue a degree subsequently, you will likely not be successful in having the military support you through this endeavour. What this results in is a two tiered system where the graduates tend to do better career - wise because: education box ticked. Non-graduates can therefore find themselves somewhat ghettoized into non-command type staff and training roles after approximately the rank of Major. I should emphasize that the majority of graduates enter RMAS having paid for their degree out of their own pockets. Very few are sponsored for 'In Service' degrees at civilian universities.

Interestingly, I recently attended a 40th reunion of my RMAS intake (oh gawd, has it really been that long?) and very few of those I passed out with seem to have progressed beyond the rank of Colonel. On the other hand several Officers I know, who were graduates, retired as one, two, three, and even one four, star.

The lack of degree acheivement opportunities also has an impact on retention. For example, seeing the writing on the wall, one of the reasons that I decided to leave the British Army, after 8+ years, was to pursue a degree. I'm not up to speed on what they do these days in the UK, so this might have all changed by now.

Having said that, if the CAF adopted a Sandhurst approach I assume that it could leverage our existing ILP system to help support those who wish to progress their educational qualifications to gain a degree, in due course, during their careers.