ArmyRick said:
How many of those overbourne in the infantry trades are guys waiting to be put on PCAT or sent to a JPSU from severe injuries in Afghanistan? Does anybody have a statistic for that?
Unless one in six infrantrymen are in that situation, there is still a problem.
Also, NEVER mind cutting infantry. If we do what General leslie suggest, cut the "fat" from NDHQ then we would be able to recruit for other trades, yes? If infantry being overbourne hurts others trades, then so does HQ being overbourne.
There are two different issues at play:
The infantryman occupation has more bums than chairs - hence describing it as overborne. (MSE Op is in a similar situation, but is a much smaller trade, so we don't talk about them as much)
HQs are not overborne. That is, they don't have a mismatch between bums and chairs. The problem as posited by LGen Leslie (among others) say that there are too many chairs; reducing the number of chairs in HQs means those chairs can be asssigned to other places.
If dontrinally we are suppossed to have 735.5 soldiers in a battalion (example) then thats what we should strive for. Not leave XX positions open for reserves to man in the event of ops. That also doesn't work when say a domestic snap operation comes up (Ice storms, earth quakes, forest fires and floods as examples). Manning should be done properly.
But we also have a finite number of chairs (PYs) assigned to the Army, so choices have to be made. To provide those extra chairs to the Inf Bns, what is the Army willing to sacrifice? Folks much higher on the food chain than you or I decided that this was the best option to ensure the capabilities needed would be available.
Personally, I find it funny that we are complaining of having too many combat troops (Not too often in history of the CF did you hear that).
Now, the .coms, not every thing is perfect when it first comes out and tweakings are neccessary as a result of lessons learned. So I am guessing, a single CAN OP COM would be ideal to replace CEFCOM, CAN COM and CANOSCOM? I do think CANSOFCOM should remain its own entity, thats a tiny organization and it seems that no one is complaining about that .com, agreed?
Keeping CANSOF its own command makes some sense. Streamlining the bloat and inefficiency that marks the rest of the dot COMs should free up chairs (PYs) for other important things. Investing nearly 10% of the Regular Force expansion chairs (PYs) into more NDHQ, a choice made by Gen Hillier, was in my opinion a suboptimal use of resources.
Maybe we need to ask parliament about an "margin" for service members in the CF that would acount for PCAT, soon to be CRA, etc, etc. I don't like the idea of throwing people out the door (I am actually agaisnt just tossing someone right away because they are too hurt to continue) but the reality is being released on a PCAT medical (usually 3B) takes years. Those numbers also hinder recruiting.
Parliament gives us a great deal of latitude in determining how we run things; the fault lies not with our stars but with ourselves. We could structure ourselves to permit those things without our current structure, but choose not to do so. Adding more money and chairs to do so would elad to some bright MBA somewhere, eventually, to redirect those chairs and funding to other bright ideas, and we'd end up back where we started.
So I think Hillier did alright, not perfect, but heck, no of us are. We just need to further refine the changes he began.
Refine and in some places replace, but I agree.
All in all, I think winning the public over was a huge step, we had to win the psy ops at home first.
PsyOps, doctrinally, is an asset we use only against enemies and third parties, and do not employ in domestic scenarios at all.