I don’t think so. ‘An officer on parade, dismiss’ is pretty much the only time everyone salutes. Yes, there are commands for collective salutes at the halt and on the march in AP818: but I see these as drill moves solely for training in how to salute, for drill tests and competitions, etc, that are rarely if ever used in service life.
By contrast for general salutes, the national anthem, passing a saluting dais, raising/lowering the ensign, etc, it’s only officers who salute. Furthermore, when a squad of marching troops encounters an officer, compliments are paid with an eyes left/right and it’s only the person commanding the squad who salutes.
I’d say no salute in most circumstances if temporarily leaving an activity. It’s custom and practice rather than completely defined I think.
So in your example, cadet leaves the session to go to the loo or join another part of the activity, a salute seems unnecessary and a distraction for everyone. If the cadet was leaving completely and heading home, a salute would be appropriate before leaving, but I don’t think anyone would criticise them for not saluting.
My usual guidelines for activities on Sqn are start and end of the evening/event, but not during an activity when everyone is busy with the task. An exception might be reporting to the staff office or similar.
There isn’t an order for that, but you could simply tell everyone to cut away without using drill commands. Alternatively, local arrangements can be made when there isn’t room to march four paces (as long as everyone is taught the correct drill and knows to do it properly when those local arrangements don’t apply: such as on a camp, parade, or wing field day).
Perhaps a better question would then be why was it decided that this was the best way of doing it?
Marching an arbitrary number of steps as part of a dismissal, rather than 0 steps (or marching all the way to your bed) just seems odd.
It’s like you suddenly actually get dismissed halfway through marching somewhere.
I can’t be the only one who thinks it looks weird?
If you’re on a parade square, you march off the parade square. But this doesn’t really solve even the problems that can be thrown up in that specific scenario.
I think by the book it is ‘Turn to the incline then march off of the parade square’. However as we are not normally on a parade square, it is just ‘Turn to the incline then do some paces’.
It only looks weird on Summer Camp where you can immediately spot those who’ve been conditions into not marching off due to space constraints on Squadron, versus those who’ve been conditions to march off because they have space at Squadron. It’s normally a 50/50 split; and it involves lots of people walking into each other.
I just looked it up, and I was wrong. It has nothing to do with marching off the parade square, and is in fact just a specific number of paces. 4 paces.
It’s always been like that, was the same when I was a cadet in 1988. The only difference now is the random placement of the flag. The 45 Deg turn would usually leave you lined up to the flag positioned to the right. These days, that no longer seems the case.
