Apparently the Army is struggling to recruit reservists and there seems to be a surprise. Why they are surprised baffles me. Apparently the Army’s THIRD recruiting campaign in a year. Obviously unaware they are flogging a dead horse. All this when they are due to announce further redundancies. In the real world, if you tried to recruit new people while undergoing a programme of redundancies, the company would have unions all over them like a rash, not to mention local press and politicians.
I bet there aren’t many who joined the TA as “weekend soldiers” thinking they’d be on the ‘front line’, with the potential for things such limb loss, disablement, disfigurement, death and mental health issues, when they joined up, which would ruin your real job. Actually join the armed forces and then unless you are exceptionally dim and get lost in the glossy brochures, the sorts of things mentioned go with the job.
The new style Army with it’s reduced numbers is going to be calling on reserves more and more, as it has already started to do and that is the tough selling point. You can spout all you like about training and development et al opportunities, but when you then have to sell being away on active service for x months and potentially repeating that with the potential downsides, it would lose its lustre somewhat.
A big problem will be skill gaps. It doesn’t matter how much training you give a reservist they are never going to be as well trained/knowledgeable and able to do what a regular does. Need a week or two or more to do a course, as a regular off you trot; as a reservist you may get a week’s extra leave or unpaid leave (which your company would need to agree to) or you do it over x weekends. The latter will mean a ‘two forward one back” training regime.
As someone who joined the reserves, although not Army, I broadly agree with your post.
I find the quoted bit pretty insulting though. While I’ve met a few blokes who were through and through hobbyists with a ‘cadets for grown ups mentality’, they were by far and away the minority. The majority joined up in the knowledge that they could be mobilised and then deployed operationally in exactly the same way as someone who joined up as a regular.
Since, as far as I remember, your service has been entirely ACO/VRT, I think the use of the phrase ‘actually join the armed forces’ is pretty uncalled for.
The phrase I used was to highlight the point that if you joined the regulars the sort of things I mentioned should be in the general expectation of that life, whereas joining the Reserves they wouldn’t necessarily be at the forefront of your consciousness. But now they are that’s a hard sell and people aren’t stupid. This is probably one reason why they have struggled to recruit.
Of the people I know who joined the TA did so pretty much as it was challenging hobby and the thought of be mobilised/deployed generally, as people have been in the last few years, was a very, very distant possibility as the regular Army was sufficiently manned to not require reservists serving alongside regulars. There were and are probably some specialist units that got called up, but they would have been more the exception. IIRC I remember seeing there were some TA Paras in the Falklands.
As for me I was very specific about what I wanted to do in the RAF and when I was told to go away for 2 years, that was that. The fact I’ve remained in the ACO is because I’ve never had some romanticised perspective of serving in the armed forces, as such I wasn’t joining up for the sake of it because I couldn’t do what I wanted to do. Nor did, nor have, I any real interest in ‘soldiering’, which is all that was on offer in the TA locally and there has never been an RAF Auxillary unit closer than a 2hrs drive from where I live. The irony is that locally in the last 25 years 4 TA centres have gone and the units moved or disbanded. There must be instances similar to this all over the country and now they want to recruit more. It doesn’t take much intelligence to see that if you reduce the places people can attend to do something, then recruiting for something that requires people to give up their spare time, is going to be bloody hard.
[quote=“glass half empty 2” post=14817]The phrase I used was to highlight the point that if you joined the regulars the sort of things I mentioned should be in the general expectation of that life, whereas joining the Reserves they wouldn’t necessarily be at the forefront of your consciousness. [/quote]That may have been true of the reserves of 20 years ago but certainly not since we started messing about in Iraq and Afghanistan. I cannot vouch for whether Joe Public actually understands that things have changed though.
I wonder whether the TA had been turning people away due to lack of space before the recent change in manning strengths and the new emphasis on reserves. With the recent operational tempo and casualties amongst the deployed reserves I’d be surprised if there hadn’t been a decline in interest. Despite that, somehow there is surprise that people in the real world aren’t flocking to take on a demanding parallel career? I don’'t imagine that employers will be overwhelmed at the possibility of losing members of their workforce for extended periods either.
Whilst I don’t agree with the tone of some of your comments GHE2, the general substance is correct regarding the issues that the Army Reserve (formerly known as TA) and other Reserves will face over the coming years; and remember, the RAF and Navy are also expected to increase their part-time strength too.
There are probably 2 basic types of reservist, those who join for a challenging hobby and nothing more, and those who actually want to have a civvy life/career AND do the dangerous military stuff. I would suggest that the Army Reserves, RAuxAF and RNR have already got as many of the later group as they’re likely to get and any increase will be in the first group. Therefore, the numbers voluntarily augmenting the Regulars on ops won’t alter a great deal. The possibility of compulsory mobilisation will also deter recruits into the ‘hobby’ cadre too.
I don’t recall there being any TA Parachute Regiment in the Falklands. All the Bn’s to my knowledge were max strength then. Any discrepancies would have been made up of attached arms or more than likely BCR from 1 Para. Apologies if I am mistaken though.
Continual problems will occur with manning whilst there is a need for restructure, lack of security and the ugly conflicts we are involved in. 447 dead troops in 12 years is hard to swallow in some far away land. 711 died in Northern Ireland in 44 years (in and out of Op Banner) in a war that was continually on our doorstep. The math is appalling.
However, the fact remains, with the drawdown of troops in Afghanistan, the completed drawdown in Iraq and Germany; there is not the requirement for the forces, in particular the Army to be so heavily manned. So, the obvious alternative is to have an Army in reserve ready as and when. It’s not brilliant but its a necessity; simple as that.
As far as the training and hobby idea that there is take it from me, some of the very best troops I have served with both on exercise and in less hospitable climes have been trained to the very highest standard, have been of the utmost level of professionalism you can find and have been a credit to HM Forces
I’ve also had the pleasure of working with TA (REME, RE and R Sigs) as well as RAuxAF on ops and Racing Stick is right, you would not have know the difference between them and their regular colleagues; superb tradesmen (and women). My point earlier was that the ‘pot’ of these sort of people, the ones with the same skill set as regulars and who actually want to deploy and work alongside regulars on ops, is likely to be limited. Those who want to have that sort of lifestyle already have it and we reap the undoubted benefits of their skills, but there aren’t any many more out there. Any increase in numbers is therefore likely to be from those who just want to do reserve service for the personal development and civvy career enhancement opportunities it can bring. Sure there will be the ex regulars who have left the services, but I would suggest that there’s not enough who want to come back as a reservist, particularly if they’ve been made compulsorily redundant.
I am concerned that the Government want our Reserves to be like those of the US where they tend to mobilise a whole reserve unit. To my knowledge, we don’t do that and our reservists are only used as individual augmentees. A general mobilisation of a complete Reserve unit is probably something that hasn’t happened in the UK since WW2 and I wonder whether such a big change in expectation is achievable in the timeframe that the Government expects.
I’d say the majority of reservists who joined in the last ten years, including myself, have done so with the expectation and intention of deploying on operations in Iraq or Afghanistan (or both).
I used to be of the belief that if our allies (USA, Canada, Australia, NZ, etc…) were capable of deploying large numbers of reservists, often in formed units, then there was absolutely no reason why the UK couldn’t. Nowadays, I’m afraid that I’m much more cynical and have come to the conclusion that there is some unique cultural quirk of the UK, which means we probably can’t. I’m not sure what it is, there just seems to be less ‘get up and go’.
[quote=“cygnus maximus” post=14824]I’ve also had the pleasure of working with TA (REME, RE and R Sigs) as well as RAuxAF on ops and Racing Stick is right, you would not have know the difference between them and their regular colleagues; superb tradesmen (and women). My point earlier was that the ‘pot’ of these sort of people, the ones with the same skill set as regulars and who actually want to deploy and work alongside regulars on ops, is likely to be limited. Those who want to have that sort of lifestyle already have it and we reap the undoubted benefits of their skills, but there aren’t any many more out there. Any increase in numbers is therefore likely to be from those who just want to do reserve service for the personal development and civvy career enhancement opportunities it can bring. Sure there will be the ex regulars who have left the services, but I would suggest that there’s not enough who want to come back as a reservist, particularly if they’ve been made compulsorily redundant.
I am concerned that the Government want our Reserves to be like those of the US where they tend to mobilise a whole reserve unit. To my knowledge, we don’t do that and our reservists are only used as individual augmentees. A general mobilisation of a complete Reserve unit is probably something that hasn’t happened in the UK since WW2 and I wonder whether such a big change in expectation is achievable in the timeframe that the Government expects.[/quote]
Army field hospitals (medics) mobilise as Squadrons in entirety so long as people get the required leave from their respective jobs.
And when I joined as a ‘reservist’ in the RAuxAF back in the day I knew what was to be done, it wasn’t to go to Iraq or Afghanistan, it was to protect this country on home soil. We trained every other weekend at our task, just in case we were ever needed. Luckily we weren’t; that was over 20 years ago.
And when I joined as a ‘reservist’ in the RAuxAF back in the day I knew what was to be done, it wasn’t to go to Iraq or Afghanistan, it was to protect this country on home soil. We trained every other weekend at our task, just in case we were ever needed. Luckily we weren’t; that was over 20 years ago.[/quote]
And the TA of the same period largely trained to deploy out to the Weser and kill as many Russians as possible before they were turned into atomic dust.
I think you can go all the way back to the Volunteers who expected to be called on to repel Napoleon’s invading army to make the point that it’s never been a hobby for most. I think people either understand, in which case they probably are or have been reservists, or they don’t and never will.