The potential negative change is the adoption of eRASP via Defence Portal, which will be seen by some as an increase of admin to go shooting, I’m hopefully that in reality it will just improve the planning process and should rule out last minute submissions.
The positive is that ALL Cadet Weapon Systems are now available to ALL cadets regardless of age or previous shooting experience/skill. For me this is the biggest win, as we can get cadets shooting now with whatever weapons we have access rather then needing to private purchase Air Rifles or wait for MOD Procurement to sort out the L144 fiasco.
It’s been a long time coming the change to allow all Cadets the L98. It was agreed in October 2017 at the OC SATTs conference.
There are further changes coming to ACP 18 Vol 3 which will make attaining badges easier in some disciplines which should further motivate the troops. That was agreed in October 2018 so you never know it might appear at some point in 2019.
We have the ammo, what we don’t have is any way of training cadets. We have no L144s, no air rifles and limited options at wing level for cadets to attend there (and they aren’t using L144s either)
I would talk to the RAU as part of the recce on what they expect, lots of RFCA ranges starting to ask for them as they have caught on the DTE ones are.
For us I don’t see it adding any real advantage other than the archiving capabilities but it will take longer than a RAM to produce.
Never seen one and I’m only a SA(AR)12 so not an issue personally, take it you can’t copy and paste or have a generic starting point like you do for a RAM?
Main problem of eRASP is that you can’t copy and paste, or adapt a previous RAM/RASP, so you have to go through all the questions from square one every time. As it is for regulars there are pages and pages of irrelevant stuff (e.g. weapons, pyro) to ignore. If you have your own range, and had to use these, it would be a nightmare - so I hope before that day comes, there is a big button on page 1 which says ‘I do cadets, please make this simple for me’… Needless to say I’ll be feeding that back via the official channels (to some extent I already have) not just on social media…
I started to build my first eRASP today, all of this made my head hurt, not helped by having never used a RASP before being of the RAM generation.
With the other positives, this is an admin burden increase, I spent all afternoon and still don’t have it finished, the corresponding RAM would have taken 30mins - 1 hour.