FJAG
Army.ca Legend
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It's a money issue, in my eyes. A RegF major kept to command a 10/90 company costs $120,000 per year and will be seriously underworked. I'll bet you dollars to donuts that within a few months he'll be dragooned into a job in a cubicle at NDHQ and a ResF captain put on Class B AWSE to fill his spot. Instead I want to see a RegF captain as the Coy 2ic at $90,000 who also fills a training position in the 30/70 battalion. For the extra 30K I can hire the a Class A major and a lieutenant. If my prediction about NDHQ becomes true, that would pay for 4 capts and 5 lts on Class A.
Lets face it. Coy and Bty command is a captain's job in a lot of armies in the world, including the US. A properly trained ARes major on Class A will do.
I'm with @markppcli on this one but not for the same reason. The issue is funding, or lack of it, above everything else. Funding allocations for capital purchases are discussed at the L1 levels (@dapaterson can give a better overview on this than I) and the priority lists are so long and so detailed that by the time you get to ARes equipment, the money is mostly long gone. When they could only negotiate for 25 extra M777s back in 2008/9 there simply wasn't more money that everyone at the table was prepared to pony up - the FIFC ARes C3 replacement simply fell off the list - again.
Don't get me wrong. Lack of respect does exist in various quarters but not universally. There was great respect for reservists that deployed to Afghanistan but under the individual augmentation system in place, one can make do with heavily under-resourced ARes units as long as there is operational funding to "train-up" individuals before deployment. They don't disrespect individual reservists, but, they generally do have disdain for the ResF system and structure - and rightfully so - but that is something which, IMHO, is entirely within their ability to fix if they ever approached it properly and with a will.
I'll repeat my view. This isn't simply a GoC issue. It's also the issue for how the L1s slice the pie and how strongly they advocate for any particular issue. When you have folks like Lawson say "The army has had its turn," when it was sitting there with clapped out equipment from having been at war, you know that the depth of understanding within military leadership is sometimes as thin as the GoC's.
