PPCLI Guy said:
Time to expand on my comments I guess - with a silent reminder to myself not to post after Happy Hour. :-X
First, in the Army we have a militia, not a reserve - and all that seemingly pedantic splitting of semantic hairs means. As such, they respond well and are well suited to domestic / regional based emergencies and form an excellent base for mobilisation (not that I can see a circumstance that would overcome the political penalties of enacting said mobilisation). A militia force is also well suited to supplementary reinforcement of the Regular Force, which we are doing now with acceptable results.
A Reserve on the other hand would be formed to allow larger scale reinforcement of the Reg Force, both in a supplementary and complementary role. The US model is based on that approach. A complementary role (think CIMIC et al) can be usefully assigned to a Reserve if those reserves have the sort of legislative protection that allows them to respond to a "call-out" without penalty.
Seeing as we have a militia, and not a Reserve, I believe that legislative protection is not warranted - and unlikely to come to pass (for various reasons, mostly political). One could argue that we should separate the supplementary from the complementary and offer them protection, but an equally valid argument would be that we avoid being half pregnant - and not assign complementary roles to the militia.
Well intentioned is a given - and I believe that poorly trained is also a given (although I perhaps could have chosen a slightly less pejorative modifier than "poor").
As to the "embarrassing degree" that we rely on the militia, I simply mean that a) we have too few infantry Battalions (all of which are under-manned to a critical degree) to fulfill our assigned tasks and b) that I believe that some of the complementary roles are too important to be sole sourced from the Reserves.
The wording in my original post was blunt - but hey, so am I.
Dave
Blunt is good, and I'd expect no less from an infanteer.
Thanks for the reasoned reply. Actually, I really don't disagree with much of what you say, except maybe regarding the reserve/militia distinction. I think our "militia" has actually taken on many of the attributes of a "reserve" (using your definitions); more problematic is whether this was by design, or the op tempo that's evolved over the past decade or so has simply caused it to happen. I think it's some of the former, but more of the latter, myself.
Since the point of discussion seems to be more around job legislation, I'll offer my 2 cents...as I stated above, I think we'd need to consider the U.S. model very carefully, and then examine other models around the world. Basically, the problem with job protection is that employers stand to lose personnel--some cases, key personnel i.e. the only person in the machine-shop who can run the new computerized lathe--on short notice, and for and extended period of time. So, you lose the support of employers...and especially small employers, who provide most of the job creation in our economy (many large employers, such my own--the Ontario Public Service--have relatively generous military leave provisions). A way to offset this is to offer something as employer support i.e. subsidies to hire back-fills, tax incentives, or other measures to encourage employers to accept the job protection legislation that applies to their Res F employees. The cost? Money. And probably a fair bit of it. Is that feasible? Maybe. A lot of work needs to be done to determine EXACTLY how this could be made to work, if at all.
Part of the problem is, I think, the "all or nothing" reality of what we have now. You are either a Reservist, or in the Reg F...you do this as a career, or for 37.5 days per year. Recent discussions around terms of service have tossed around the idea of allowing more mobility from one state (for discussion's sake, call it "regular service") to another (call it "reserve service"). My experience has been that Reservists typically change in terms of their interest and availability as life goes on. The kid out of high school may be willing to invest a year or two in full-time service (currently, the only way of doing that is by becoming that thing called the "militia bum"), but then goes to university and can't be a full-time soldier. University finishes, maybe back to full-time, then marriage, family and a full-time job come along--back to part-time. The kids get older, some financial security is obtained, and another stint of full-time ensues. And this can be a two-way street--the soldier who starts off out of high-school as a full-timer on "regular service" decides, ten years down the line, it's time to have some kids and settle down for a bit--so he migrates into "reserve service" for a while. I will grant that there are many, many devils in the details of this, but a "sliding scale" of readiness might be a reasonable solution, avoiding the sledgehammer approach of legislation.
And, as for your choice of words--yeah, "poor" is a bad one (I can be blunt, too). Reservists aren't "poorly" trained; in the context of the training that they're provided, they're trained very well. Naturally, that training can't approximate what a Reg F soldier gets (if we could train a Res F soldier to be exactly equivalent to a Reg F soldier in about 38 days a year, there really WOULD be something wrong). Res F soldiers are, for the most part, dedicated and motivated men and women who do the best job they can. The result is soldiers are who at a lower level of
readiness than their Reg F counterparts. Give the Res F soldier the training to fill in the missing delta, and you'll get a soldier who is close to being as good as a member of the Reg F (the Regs will always have the advantage of living, breathing, eating and sleeping in the military culture, doing all those various things that make up day to day military life, and developing that cohesion that comes from working together over long periods of time).
I absolutely do agree with you about the undermanned state of our Reg F inf bns. That needs to be fixed. But we can do that, and still make and manage an effective Res F to support them.