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A Leaky Sieve: Retention in the ADF
- Thread starter dimsum
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The ADF has similar recruiting/retention issues. Their attrition was at 11.2% in the last 12 months, vs our 9.6%.
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The REAL story in the CAF isn't the recruiting/retention issue, it's the number of members filling positions that are unfit for service.
It would be interesting to know the actual numbers CAF wide. I'm certain if accounted for, the CAF is probably closer to 25k understrength.
GR66
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Not just the CAF and ADF, the US Military is having recruiting/retention issues as well. While Canada has some specific issues to deal with this is a trend for Western militaries overall and may require a general re-think about how we both structure our forces and approach personnel issues.
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Agreed. Also I would suggest that the ADF may also be in that situation.
daftandbarmy
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Tangentially-related:
www.theguardian.com
‘Should never have been allowed in’: ADF recruiting psychologically unfit candidates, veteran psychiatrist says
Retiring psychiatrist alleges defence force recruiters are permitting candidates with ‘significant’ psychological vulnerabilities to enlist
www.theguardian.com
Agreed 100%, Your post IS the elephant in the room, that no one wants to Ack!!
Quirky
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Tangentially-related:
‘Should never have been allowed in’: ADF recruiting psychologically unfit candidates, veteran psychiatrist says
Retiring psychiatrist alleges defence force recruiters are permitting candidates with ‘significant’ psychological vulnerabilities to enlist
Completely related to the CAF. We have too many people who are unable to mentally cope with basic stress and end up running to the MIR.
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I think most of that could have been prevented with mental resiliency training built into our overall training.
Canadian society is not training people to be resilient like it had in the past. Life in Canada right now is generally very easy, or very traumatic, with little in-between.
The CAF needs to take people from "your internet doesn't work today", through to "You and/or your friends might die today". We haven't really done that, and it shows when people face even a bit of adversity either in training or normal work.
quadrapiper
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And equally, addressing the "very traumatic," provide supports and development tools for personnel from that sort of background.
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Very true, but we also need to be prepared to release those whose traumatic experiences prior to joining make them unsuited to CAF service. The CAF doesn't exist to fix the ills of Canadian society.
quadrapiper
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Agreed. I'm thinking of some of the traditional recruiting pools: urban and rural poor people, "hard neighbourhood" types, those from areas with fail(ed/ing) industries, etc. whose experiences, responses, and common coping mechanisms are now further from societal expectations.
btrudy
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We need to accept the traits that our recruiting demographic has, rather than what we might wish they have. I mean, first off, those groups in said "traditional recruiting pools" do largely seem like a shrinking set. If the problem is that fewer and fewer people have learned to cope with hardship (this is of course to be celebrated as an outstanding achievement for Canadian society), we can't double down by focusing on those who have; that just makes it ever harder to recruit from a shrinking base.
Just as how a nation goes to war with the military it's got, the military needs to recruit from the population it's got.
If it is indeed accurate that folks the youth of today aren't as resilient in the face of hardship due to not having had to face it as much, then that's something we just need to accomodate for in our training pipeline. We aren't going to fix our staffing issues by writing off the bulk of Canadian citizens. Bring in as broad of a spectrum of people as you can, and adapt our training to fix any systemic gaps. We don't expect people to show up knowing how to fire a rifle either; just treat resilience as another skill set we'll need to give them along the way.
Also an afterthought: we can also thankfully try to teach them healthy coping skills, rather than just accepting whatever methods of dealing with shit everyone brought with them to the table. Let's face it, there's a lot of people who learned to cope by drinking until it didn't hurt no more, and we just accellerate that by piling on the stress.
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Quirky
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Drinking, smoking, smoking and abusing pot, not exercising, etc are all choices people make that exacerbate their mental health. Our biggest problem children with mental health issues are also physically inactive, have poor diets and are pot addicts.
You’d think at even the 10k number being used in the press, we’d have found a way to speed up recruiting & streamline the training pipeline so new recruits can be considered valued members of a unit in a shorter period of time.
I’m not trying to detail the thread, but it blows my mind that when I was a unit recruiter back in…2007/2008-ish…I could have someone sworn in within a month of them first contacting me. (And this was when the Afghan war was in full swing, and I actually had a lengthy list of people wanting to join)
Anyways, back on topic…when accounting for the above, being short 25k is believable but still absolutely insane
btrudy
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To a degree, those are also often just symptoms of mental illness. It makes you unmotivated, it makes you want to eat like shit, it makes you more likely to abuse alcohol, pot, or other drugs.
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