Sir, if you’re willing to be receptive to some advice, this has the appearance of being slightly antagonistic, but in good faith I suspect this was intended as tongue-in-cheek. It does open up opportunity though for a remark or two on the quality of comms. Where semantic discussions crop up tends to be when a policy or statement is ambiguous or incomplete. We are left with little choice but to attempt to interpret or fill in the gaps that are left, because what we are provided with is insufficient to adequately discuss or advertise on our squadrons. Sometimes the responses are themselves offered with a tongue firmly placed to the side.
I of course echo the sentiments of gratitude and respect for making an appearance on here. There’s not much that I can add in terms of specifics that hasn’t been said since you offered yourself to us or that you may not have already read further up this thread or in others that are related. But I can add that I have a Wing Commander that seems to only turn up when they perceive or there is a problem, and that if I were to use official channels to communicate directly with higher up the CoC I don’t have enough faith that I wouldn’t be earning myself a visit.
I can also concede that there going to be things about the machinations and structures within the CS and FTRS structure and the onward links into the RAF and MOD that we may not understand, but that is a result of deliberate obfuscation and not for a lack of desire or effort to understand.
Conversely, CFAV feel that the realities faced on squadrons, their experiences and feelings, and the consequences of decisions and policies are purposefully ignored through wilful ignorance or a lack of desire to understand. We are very vocal, through the CoC, on Social Media, and indeed forum posts about what life is like at the bottom, yet we rarely even get platitudes let alone any sense that a decision has been made with a bottom-up perspective in mind. It all just feels like air conditioned diktat from people either unable or unwilling to break out of the militaristic styles of leadership and communication to which they have become accustomed, in recognition of the different environment that they now operate within.
I am led to believe that Air Cdre McCafferty has had her eyes opened to a lot since joining a squadron as a CI, despite how public and travelled she was in her time.
We are not paid for our efforts, we are not reliant on the organisation for our existence. If you take Maslow’s hierarchy, what we do here is truly at the top: it’s optional, because we want to, because we believe what we do gives value and we do in turn get value on an intrinsic and benevolent level.
That means that the currency is time and that we are paying RAFAC, and our time beyond all else is our most valuable asset as volunteers and we want to spend as much of it as possible having the effects that we joined to have - delivering knowledge, activities, and experiences to cadets so that they grow, develop, and learn valuable skills. Anything which causes us to spend more time not doing that (a finite resource in a zero-sum system) needs to be justified - we will ask “why”. Anything that renders time already spent on something wasted (such as last minute blanket bans, cancellations, or delays) needs to be justified - we will want to know why. If a resource can’t be brought back online after removal (Vigilants) we will want to know why…
…And when that reason is “not economically viable”, but a few years later government funding is granted to a charity to attempt to do what we didn’t, it’s going to be pretty annoying.
The other thing about CFAV, is we spend a lot of time planning and problem-solving to make things happen. We like to make as much happen as we possibly can and are incredibly proactive in pursuing this goal. So when something stops we will begin to consider what mitigations could have been made, when should contingencies have been considered, why was a better plan to mitigate this scenario not found?
“SW had staffing issues, move to the pillar system”. Ok, not a fan of that idea for a few reasons, but if needs must…
“While we transition we ask for patience”. Sure.
“We need additional time so temporarily ask that you don’t put in anything that requires our self-inflicted CACE system, but here’s the date that you’re good to go by”. Ok, this is an annoying restriction, but at least it’s temporary and we can plan to get things moving again after that date.
“Oh, you wanted to do stuff? Sorry the ban on CACE is now indefinite.”
“Oh, you wanted to do stuff that doesn’t involve CACE? No, now you can’t do that either, because despite knowing we are short-staffed, despite already pushing our initial deadline further out, despite changing our entire working model to be more efficient, we are (completely unpredictably, definitely didn’t see this coming) short-staffed and over worked and don’t have a better plan to stop this becoming your problem and we’re not going to explain why this is now your problem”…
This is how it looks to us and at this point, we declare a shambles. Your view may not be that your final decision is a shambolic one, you may not even think that the contingency planning was chaotic or indeed absent. But the result is that the entire region now has (at least) the appearance of being a shambles.
1/6 of the organisation is practically dead in the water and has seemingly been left by the rest of the organisation to sink. It’s going to take a lot to rebuild our faith that this is going to be turned around positively having already lived through 6 months of a progressive decline, including missed deadlines, on top of the issues we’ve seen over the past 10 years.
To be honest, it’s a relatively light jab to receive by this being described as a “shambles”. It’s fortunate that “South West Region” doesn’t rhyme with “muster”.