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Great Benny Hill impersonations.
British Military Current Events
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daftandbarmy
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Royal Navy forced to recruit for tob job on social media
The advertisement was described as ‘utterly shameful’ and ‘unprecedented’ by naval sources
www.independent.co.uk
That’s…uh..one way of recruiting.
Also, interesting stat:
GR66
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I'm sorry. I know this is a serious story but I had to stop for a double take when I got to the picture of former Defence Secretary Ben Wallace:Royal Navy forced to recruit for tob job on social media
The advertisement was described as ‘utterly shameful’ and ‘unprecedented’ by naval sources
That’s…uh..one way of recruiting.
Also, interesting stat:
daftandbarmy
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99.9% need not apply, and they're paying attention to your slogan...
The advertising slogan once said ‘99.9 per cent need not apply’, but getting the remaining 0.1 per cent to sign up is proving a struggle
Ric Cole was 19 years old when, in 1995, he joined the Royal Marines as a young Commando. He’d applied for three services – Royal Marines, Army and RAF – but picked the Marines, he says, partly because they immediately offered him a job. And, he adds wryly, “I think the biggest motivator for me was that a lot of people said I couldn’t do it. I wasn’t particularly sporty, in the traditional sense. I wasn’t big or strong – I’m not a stereotypical Commando.”
Nevertheless, in the intervening three decades, Cole, 48, has reached the rank of Major and served around the world. The proudest moment of his military career, however, he says is “easy – it was earning my Green Beret and being presented it at the end of the 30-miler, the final Commando Test.”
Speak to almost any Marine, retired or serving, and you’ll hear a similar tale of loyalty and pride. “It was life-changing for me,” says Ben Brabyn, who spent five years as a Marine in the 1990s. “The Marines transforms the people who they recruit for the better – not just for those people, but for all of us.” Britain, he declares, “could never have enough Royal Marines.”
Hard to argue with when you think that last year alone, the Marines were dispatched to Sudan to organise a last-minute evacuation of British citizens; patrolled Gulf waters for pirates and drug smugglers; deployed to Norway to practise combat training in the extreme cold; trained almost 1,000 of their Ukrainian counterparts; and took part in Nato drills in Finland.
“You’re surrounded by men of very similar values, morals, ethics, who have self-imposed high standards, both personally and professionally,” agrees Marines veteran Mark Ormrod MBE, a triple amputee who was hit by an improvised explosive device in Afghanistan in 2007, resulting in the amputation of both legs and his right arm.
They are “men that want to do their bit to help and make the world a better place and men who are not only not afraid but excited by pushing themselves mentally and physically to the limits of what they can do. It’s a very difficult thing to do, which is what makes me proud,” he says.
Asked what sums up the Corps, Brabyn cites a former Marine named Lee Spencer, now a world-record-holding rower, who served for 24 years but then lost a leg – not in the theatre of war, but stopping to help someone in a car accident, when flying debris from another crash tore off his limb. “It’s that unselfishness, anonymously delivered on a dark motorway, as much as any danger faced in warfare,” says Brabyn, sounding emotional. “Unselfishness, cheerfulness and adaptability.”
“It’s a real family,” says another former Marines officer. “We’ve all lived in the same camp, and bled in the same camp.”
The number of Marines living and bleeding alongside each other, however, is dwindling. Figures published earlier this week show that the Royal Navy currently fields just 5,500 Royal Marines Commandos, with barely enough to field a brigade: a depressing state of affairs for the men (and a smattering of extremely tough women) that the Navy dubs “the world’s most elite amphibious force” and “a jewel in the defence crown”.
They are just the latest set of numbers to lay bare the crisis in the Royal Navy – traditionally Britain’s “Senior Service” – as a whole. Intake for both the Navy and the Marines dropped by 22.1 per cent in the year to March 2023; last week, The Telegraph revealed that the Navy has so few sailors that it has had to decommission two warships to staff its new class of frigates.
The Defence Secretary Grant Shapps’s latest proposal for the service is to retire the amphibious assault ships HMS Albion and HMS Bulwark – without which Marines Commandos would be unable to storm beaches from the sea, historically one of their central purposes. The move has been dubbed “the beginning of the end for the Royal Marines”; a petition to reverse the decision received nearly 30,000 signatures in six months.
So what’s going on? Does nobody want to be a Marine anymore? And if not, can the Corps survive?
There’s no doubt that you have to be tough to serve in this elite force. Marines selection is one of the longest and most physically demanding infantry training courses in the world, lasting 32 weeks for Commandos and 15 months for Commando officers – as the famous 1970s advertising campaign put it, “99.9 per cent need not apply”.
In 2020, MOD figures revealed upwards of 20,000 people applied to join the Corps yearly, with only 400 making it in. As Cole puts it, “Joining the Royal Marines taught me a lot about my limits and how far I can push myself – it was a great environment in which to grow up.”
Marines, as a rapid-response force, are asked to undergo the toughest of missions at the shortest of notice – witness their current deployment to the Red Sea fighting Houthi rebels. “Only the Royal Marines are trained to operate at sea and on land,” points out Cole.
The Commandos are also undergoing a transformational process to convert from a special operations-capable unit into a fully fledged special operations force under the Future Commando Force plans; it’s perhaps not surprising that Marines already make up almost 50 per cent of Special Forces, or that they are so disproportionately represented in senior leadership positions across all three services: the current Vice-Chief of the Defence Staff is a Royal Marine, as are the Deputy Chief of Defence Staff and the Chief of Joint Operations.
But while the ethos of the Corps, and the demands made of the Marines, have remained much the same over the decades, circumstances, and the recruits themselves, have subtly changed.
For a start, Britain is not – officially at least – currently at war (Red Sea strikes against Houthi rebels aside), and to fight wars is why a lot of people join. More broadly, general employment rates are strong in Britain right now, and wages relatively high, so there’s less incentive to sign up to fight for King and country. And, says one anonymous serving Commando, “the offer for service personnel ain’t what it used to be”.
It’s not just pay – which for a Commando starts at £20,000 after initial training and goes up to £51,000 (officer salaries start at £31,000) – it’s everything else that comes with the job, from extremely short-notice or long deployments, to old and dilapidated housing stock.
And once you’ve gone through Marines training, the lure of the private sector can be strong; “Royal Marines are a corps of specialists, and as such our talents are in demand in the private sector, where pay is better,” admits Cole. “That is a simple reality to which there is no easy fix.”
Then there’s the issue of what being a Marine demands (crumbling housing and all) versus the quality of recruits. And no, it’s not just the physical demands. The type of people who join the Marines, says the former officer, are “inquisitive, intelligent individuals. They want to do the business, and if they can’t, they want to do something else.”
But the recruitment process can take up to six months from when someone walks into the recruitment office – which means some potential candidates are lost to other employment during the long wait. And – adds the former officer, albeit tentatively – this is also Gen Z we’re talking about.
Not only are they the instant generation – demanding everything right now, at the click of a button (which makes a six-month wait even more interminable) – they also, says the former officer, want the “Gucci kit” featured in recruitment manuals, not least to show off on their social media feeds, while many of today’s younger recruits (you can join from 16) don’t want to be too far from home and its comforts. It is, says the former officer, “staggering” that the latter should be the case. (“You want to be nearer home? Go and work in Tesco.”)
Can low numbers be blamed solely on a flaky younger generation? That’s not entirely fair, say several others I speak to. A Royal Navy spokesperson says that the service is working hard to “ensure working in the military remains one of the most attractive careers”, and is introducing an updated recruitment process “to expedite a candidate’s recruitment journey”.
They acknowledge that “our workforce requirements are changing,” but say – in response to the suggestion that the running down of numbers is deliberate – that “there has been no suggestion that we ‘slash’ Royal Marine troop numbers, nor do we intend to.”
The Navy now offers a financial incentive to refer a friend, and all three services say they also now encourage a “zig-zag career path” as an option for those who want greater flexibility when, for example, their children are young – so, like Cole in fact did, personnel might leave and then rejoin. “The benefit for us, as well as sheer numbers, is that we get to use the skills they’ve acquired in the civilian sector,” a Royal Navy spokesperson says.
Arguably there’s also only so much capacity within the system itself: unlike every other part of the Armed Forces, all Royal Marines, from the greenest of recruits to the hoariest of officers, go through the training process at the Commando Training Centre in Lympstone, Devon, which means you can’t speed the process up indefinitely. Neither has the training got any less rigorous – many don’t make it to the end. And, as Cole puts it, “You can have the world’s best recruiting campaign, but not everyone wants to join the military.”
Can the Marines survive? Everyone I speak to is confident of the fact. “If you got rid of the Royal Marines, you’d effectively get rid of the Special Forces, as they act as a feeder,” points out one senior Army officer. “Because they haven’t lowered their standards, you get the best of the best – and we need that.”
As for losing amphibious landing craft and the like, insiders pooh-pooh the notion that this will make any difference to this most adaptable of units.
“Anyone can get off a carrier ship,” scoffs the former officer, who says the fuss about HMS Bulwark and HMS Albion has been blown enormously out of proportion. “We get paranoid about things like that, but these sorts of things have happened before. This is not the end of the Marines.”
What the Marines bring to the theatre of war, meanwhile, remains as relevant as ever. That’s the view of Dr Sidharth Kaushal, whose recent report for the Royal United Services Institute acknowledged that while a pivot is already starting to happen, “what the Marines have historically brought to our war-fighting capability is climate specialisation, rapid response and special forces capability. Most of those functions remain strategically relevant.”
“We will continue to evolve, adapt and move with the times,” agrees Ormrod. And, he adds, “we are needed whether the people that push numbers around on a piece of paper know it or not.”
Fighting talk indeed. And perhaps best summed up in a parting shot from Major Cole: “Being a Marine is so much more than muscle – it’s a mindset.”
The Royal Marines are in a recruitment crisis – but can the regiment survive? (telegraph.co.uk)
The Royal Marines are in a recruitment crisis – but can the Corps survive?
The advertising slogan once said ‘99.9 per cent need not apply’, but getting the remaining 0.1 per cent to sign up is proving a struggle
Ric Cole was 19 years old when, in 1995, he joined the Royal Marines as a young Commando. He’d applied for three services – Royal Marines, Army and RAF – but picked the Marines, he says, partly because they immediately offered him a job. And, he adds wryly, “I think the biggest motivator for me was that a lot of people said I couldn’t do it. I wasn’t particularly sporty, in the traditional sense. I wasn’t big or strong – I’m not a stereotypical Commando.”
Nevertheless, in the intervening three decades, Cole, 48, has reached the rank of Major and served around the world. The proudest moment of his military career, however, he says is “easy – it was earning my Green Beret and being presented it at the end of the 30-miler, the final Commando Test.”
Speak to almost any Marine, retired or serving, and you’ll hear a similar tale of loyalty and pride. “It was life-changing for me,” says Ben Brabyn, who spent five years as a Marine in the 1990s. “The Marines transforms the people who they recruit for the better – not just for those people, but for all of us.” Britain, he declares, “could never have enough Royal Marines.”
Hard to argue with when you think that last year alone, the Marines were dispatched to Sudan to organise a last-minute evacuation of British citizens; patrolled Gulf waters for pirates and drug smugglers; deployed to Norway to practise combat training in the extreme cold; trained almost 1,000 of their Ukrainian counterparts; and took part in Nato drills in Finland.
“You’re surrounded by men of very similar values, morals, ethics, who have self-imposed high standards, both personally and professionally,” agrees Marines veteran Mark Ormrod MBE, a triple amputee who was hit by an improvised explosive device in Afghanistan in 2007, resulting in the amputation of both legs and his right arm.
They are “men that want to do their bit to help and make the world a better place and men who are not only not afraid but excited by pushing themselves mentally and physically to the limits of what they can do. It’s a very difficult thing to do, which is what makes me proud,” he says.
Asked what sums up the Corps, Brabyn cites a former Marine named Lee Spencer, now a world-record-holding rower, who served for 24 years but then lost a leg – not in the theatre of war, but stopping to help someone in a car accident, when flying debris from another crash tore off his limb. “It’s that unselfishness, anonymously delivered on a dark motorway, as much as any danger faced in warfare,” says Brabyn, sounding emotional. “Unselfishness, cheerfulness and adaptability.”
“It’s a real family,” says another former Marines officer. “We’ve all lived in the same camp, and bled in the same camp.”
The number of Marines living and bleeding alongside each other, however, is dwindling. Figures published earlier this week show that the Royal Navy currently fields just 5,500 Royal Marines Commandos, with barely enough to field a brigade: a depressing state of affairs for the men (and a smattering of extremely tough women) that the Navy dubs “the world’s most elite amphibious force” and “a jewel in the defence crown”.
They are just the latest set of numbers to lay bare the crisis in the Royal Navy – traditionally Britain’s “Senior Service” – as a whole. Intake for both the Navy and the Marines dropped by 22.1 per cent in the year to March 2023; last week, The Telegraph revealed that the Navy has so few sailors that it has had to decommission two warships to staff its new class of frigates.
The Defence Secretary Grant Shapps’s latest proposal for the service is to retire the amphibious assault ships HMS Albion and HMS Bulwark – without which Marines Commandos would be unable to storm beaches from the sea, historically one of their central purposes. The move has been dubbed “the beginning of the end for the Royal Marines”; a petition to reverse the decision received nearly 30,000 signatures in six months.
So what’s going on? Does nobody want to be a Marine anymore? And if not, can the Corps survive?
There’s no doubt that you have to be tough to serve in this elite force. Marines selection is one of the longest and most physically demanding infantry training courses in the world, lasting 32 weeks for Commandos and 15 months for Commando officers – as the famous 1970s advertising campaign put it, “99.9 per cent need not apply”.
In 2020, MOD figures revealed upwards of 20,000 people applied to join the Corps yearly, with only 400 making it in. As Cole puts it, “Joining the Royal Marines taught me a lot about my limits and how far I can push myself – it was a great environment in which to grow up.”
Marines, as a rapid-response force, are asked to undergo the toughest of missions at the shortest of notice – witness their current deployment to the Red Sea fighting Houthi rebels. “Only the Royal Marines are trained to operate at sea and on land,” points out Cole.
The Commandos are also undergoing a transformational process to convert from a special operations-capable unit into a fully fledged special operations force under the Future Commando Force plans; it’s perhaps not surprising that Marines already make up almost 50 per cent of Special Forces, or that they are so disproportionately represented in senior leadership positions across all three services: the current Vice-Chief of the Defence Staff is a Royal Marine, as are the Deputy Chief of Defence Staff and the Chief of Joint Operations.
But while the ethos of the Corps, and the demands made of the Marines, have remained much the same over the decades, circumstances, and the recruits themselves, have subtly changed.
For a start, Britain is not – officially at least – currently at war (Red Sea strikes against Houthi rebels aside), and to fight wars is why a lot of people join. More broadly, general employment rates are strong in Britain right now, and wages relatively high, so there’s less incentive to sign up to fight for King and country. And, says one anonymous serving Commando, “the offer for service personnel ain’t what it used to be”.
It’s not just pay – which for a Commando starts at £20,000 after initial training and goes up to £51,000 (officer salaries start at £31,000) – it’s everything else that comes with the job, from extremely short-notice or long deployments, to old and dilapidated housing stock.
And once you’ve gone through Marines training, the lure of the private sector can be strong; “Royal Marines are a corps of specialists, and as such our talents are in demand in the private sector, where pay is better,” admits Cole. “That is a simple reality to which there is no easy fix.”
Then there’s the issue of what being a Marine demands (crumbling housing and all) versus the quality of recruits. And no, it’s not just the physical demands. The type of people who join the Marines, says the former officer, are “inquisitive, intelligent individuals. They want to do the business, and if they can’t, they want to do something else.”
But the recruitment process can take up to six months from when someone walks into the recruitment office – which means some potential candidates are lost to other employment during the long wait. And – adds the former officer, albeit tentatively – this is also Gen Z we’re talking about.
Not only are they the instant generation – demanding everything right now, at the click of a button (which makes a six-month wait even more interminable) – they also, says the former officer, want the “Gucci kit” featured in recruitment manuals, not least to show off on their social media feeds, while many of today’s younger recruits (you can join from 16) don’t want to be too far from home and its comforts. It is, says the former officer, “staggering” that the latter should be the case. (“You want to be nearer home? Go and work in Tesco.”)
Can low numbers be blamed solely on a flaky younger generation? That’s not entirely fair, say several others I speak to. A Royal Navy spokesperson says that the service is working hard to “ensure working in the military remains one of the most attractive careers”, and is introducing an updated recruitment process “to expedite a candidate’s recruitment journey”.
They acknowledge that “our workforce requirements are changing,” but say – in response to the suggestion that the running down of numbers is deliberate – that “there has been no suggestion that we ‘slash’ Royal Marine troop numbers, nor do we intend to.”
The Navy now offers a financial incentive to refer a friend, and all three services say they also now encourage a “zig-zag career path” as an option for those who want greater flexibility when, for example, their children are young – so, like Cole in fact did, personnel might leave and then rejoin. “The benefit for us, as well as sheer numbers, is that we get to use the skills they’ve acquired in the civilian sector,” a Royal Navy spokesperson says.
Arguably there’s also only so much capacity within the system itself: unlike every other part of the Armed Forces, all Royal Marines, from the greenest of recruits to the hoariest of officers, go through the training process at the Commando Training Centre in Lympstone, Devon, which means you can’t speed the process up indefinitely. Neither has the training got any less rigorous – many don’t make it to the end. And, as Cole puts it, “You can have the world’s best recruiting campaign, but not everyone wants to join the military.”
Can the Marines survive? Everyone I speak to is confident of the fact. “If you got rid of the Royal Marines, you’d effectively get rid of the Special Forces, as they act as a feeder,” points out one senior Army officer. “Because they haven’t lowered their standards, you get the best of the best – and we need that.”
As for losing amphibious landing craft and the like, insiders pooh-pooh the notion that this will make any difference to this most adaptable of units.
“Anyone can get off a carrier ship,” scoffs the former officer, who says the fuss about HMS Bulwark and HMS Albion has been blown enormously out of proportion. “We get paranoid about things like that, but these sorts of things have happened before. This is not the end of the Marines.”
What the Marines bring to the theatre of war, meanwhile, remains as relevant as ever. That’s the view of Dr Sidharth Kaushal, whose recent report for the Royal United Services Institute acknowledged that while a pivot is already starting to happen, “what the Marines have historically brought to our war-fighting capability is climate specialisation, rapid response and special forces capability. Most of those functions remain strategically relevant.”
“We will continue to evolve, adapt and move with the times,” agrees Ormrod. And, he adds, “we are needed whether the people that push numbers around on a piece of paper know it or not.”
Fighting talk indeed. And perhaps best summed up in a parting shot from Major Cole: “Being a Marine is so much more than muscle – it’s a mindset.”
The Royal Marines are in a recruitment crisis – but can the regiment survive? (telegraph.co.uk)
Blackadder1916
Army.ca Fixture
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Oops!
www.bbc.com
Two Royal Navy warships collide off coast of Bahrain
Video widely shared on social media appears to show one vessel reverse into the other.
www.bbc.com
Colin Parkinson
Army.ca Myth
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Ouch! Likely a control failure.
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If your warships are all alongside for repairs, you don't need support ships.Oops!
Two Royal Navy warships collide off coast of Bahrain
Video widely shared on social media appears to show one vessel reverse into the other.
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That'll buff right out.
daftandbarmy
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Happy Guy
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As a former MSE Safety guy, I would recommend that the Helmsman retake the MSE safe backing course again - take a physical look around at the area that you intend to back into, check your rear and side mirrors and blind spots and sound your horn to warn people that you are backing up! Where was his backing up guide? Did he he do his morning DIs on the vehicle?
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Not sure that most people deliberately back time vessel into another…it happens, to wit the American Dynasty crash into HMCS Winnipeg in Esquimalt:
Oldgateboatdriver
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Those minehunters are built of Glass Reinforced Plastic (GRP) and the hulls are built as a single mold as a single piece. Repairs for that hole will be very complex and expansive. Depending where the RN stands in its mine warfare vessels replacement program, they may well decide to write her off instead.
daftandbarmy
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Colin Parkinson
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This accident was due to the failure to fit a cotter pin, which led to the Clevis pin falling out, which led to the engine not answering the telegraph.
and no back-up speaking tube (no moving parts and nothing to break down.).
OldSolduer
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For want of a nail…
Happy Guy
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I'm not a maritime engineer, but it amazes me to see how thin the walls of the ship are considering all the forces at play or it is just the view perspective? I think that the width of my surf board was thicker than that.
Oldgateboatdriver
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Difficult thing to conceive for people who have never been at sea: Ship's hulls have to be flexible.
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