When I first took over as OC, sector commanders were just being rolled out in the wing. My first sector commander (Sqn Let unpaid) was brilliant, and did exactly what you described. We had sector courses, and a sector camp. It was really useful.
But then he started being assigned to WSO jobs - investigations, inspections, etc and the sector stuff started to suffer, because there wasn’t enough time in the day to do the 3 roles (OC, SC, and WSO). In fairly short order he resigned from sector commander, and binned off of the ATC. So we lost a dedicated OC and brilliant sector commander because our wing ‘leadership’ team couldn’t understand the difference between a WSO Sqn Ldr (paid), and SC Sqn Ldr (unpaid).
When we first started using sectors we had OC Wing, Dep OC Wing, 4 Senior Wing Staff Officers as the Senior Leadership team. We also had 4 unpaid Sqn Ldrs as Sector Commanders, who were also Sqn OCs. Plus we had the Secondary Wing staff officer - shooting, AT etc.
The idea was that the SWSOs would deal with the investigations, inspections, boards, etc, whilst the Sector Commanders would coordinate training between squadrons in their sector.
How many investigations, inspections, boards etc do you have in your Wing, to make dealing with them a “full time role”. This is why our sector WSO is in effect the sector commander, not that anyone takes any notice and we largely all do our own thing.
I know a lot of WSOs who go onto Wing for an easy life.
We had 2 in our sector who disliked being squadron staff and only did Sqn OC for as short as time as possible just to get onto Wing Staff as long as it wasn’t area/sector WSO, as they would mean dealing with people. Both are obsessed with getting a scraper and they chase any stick thrown, not realising that people just laugh at them.
It’s very Wing Dependant, in my Wing being a WSC isn’t an easy life, I took one look at the terms of reference and went “no way I’m applying for that” it’s at least as much work as being a Squadron Officer.
However in my old Wing there was plenty of dead wood who had gone to be a WSC as it was an easy life. (12 months in post and my WSC who was appointed with no process hadn’t even visited my Squadron).
So I have seen a further 2 Sqn’s offering OC positions in the last week with those moving on to sector roles after the 1 resigned out right and the other has chosen to take time away from all things cadet related.
I could imagine it happening were Sqn’s are run by SNCO’s and OC’s filtering through the sector positions before leaving or taking time off and before you know it…no officers left
Let’s not ignore the fact that Sector Commanders can be pretty useful at squadrons where there aren’t many staff members. Ours comes around once a month and helps keep us on top of admin and guides us with the training programme etc.
Sector commanders as a stand alone post (and not just the WSO) are just a symptom of the modern need for a plague of endless levels of management and pointless/meaningless job titles, such that an analysis would find ridiculous overlapping.
We’ve had two restructuring processes at work over the years and lost a number of job titles and lo and behold the company hasn’t collapsed.
