A very sensible reply briank, thanks and I agree with your comments; however, picking a small piece from your post above. The problem is that if the ‘feral’ Sqn Cdrs (and other CFAVs) are on this forum, I’ve never seen any comments from them supporting things such as Mr CI Pace Stick man or the SNCO’s Daughter and other posts. So it seems to me that, by and large, we are ‘the converted’! All we can hope is that the ferals ‘lurk’ and may feel embarrassed by what they read or that other ‘undecided’ individuals can see what the groundswell of opinion is.
my understanding of the ‘ferals’ is that they aren’t really cognisant of anything outside their little empire - not only is it ‘its my trainset’, its ‘and my trainset is the only trainset in the world’!
these are people who could get invited in for a 30 minute, career-ending conversation with their CO, and they would walk out the door genuinely thinking the CO’s friendliness at the meetings’ close meant they were utterly certain to get on the pink list.
these people don’t get hints and the lessons of others, they don’t even really understand when their desk gets cleared into a bin bag.
Following through your train of thoughts, Angus, these are the idiots who subsequently claim unfair treatment or raise grievances to the Air Force Board thus clogging up the admin system at HQAC and pi**ing off the senior leadership of the RAF.
they are also the people who become the treasurer of that Greater Manchester Sqn who transfer £80,000 (or whatever it was…) into some dodgy ‘charity’ and cause the closing of a Sqn - people who are utterly, completely blind to anything but ‘the project’.
the problem is not the rules, its the complete failure of the upper echelons to grip Sqn’s when stuff starts to go awry but before it goes completely off the reserve. the problem is a lack of leadership - the ACO doesn’t seem to have a cohort of people at Wing/Region level who have the moral courage to step in, or indeed the sense to tell the difference between what is innovation to be supported and nurtured, and what is idiot Napoleonism.
I also think its important that we stress that these incidents are rare, thankfully.
However, perhaps Angus is right. Perhaps this goes higher than Sqn level, but not as high as HQAC as mentioned earlier.
But also, maybe it’s not a case of lack of moral courage to step in. Why should it be? It should be a duty. It may seem to some petty, but these incidents are offences against the due processes of the ACO. Staff at Wing need to deal with this.
How?
Well, how about this. A Discipline SNCO. This doesn’t have to be the WWO, although of course, it should be. It could be a SNCO acting under the authority of the WWO. His sole purpose to ensure compliance with the doctrine provided by HQAC.
Bordering on being a Nazi?
Not really. It would not be something that affects cadets. Let’s be brutally honest, it’s the renegade and feral CFAV’s who cause all the angst, not the small people. Grip the CFAV’s! If they don’t like it, well, there is always a door isn’t there. Let’s get in amongst those that have no interest in maintaining the rules and, if necessary, get rid of them.
Although the Air Cadet Central Forum might get a bit boring and quiet, at least we wouldn’t have un-professional idiots making the staff look stupid.
But it is the general ineptitude and empire building 3 wise monkey approach within the hallowed halls over many years that has created many of the ills. Much of this in the last decade. How many posts on here and hours of debate at sqns and other places have been dedicated to being failed by the salaried staff in the Corps, the documentation we use being out of date and or incorrect in many ways and the systems we use generally unfit for purpose? The number of change requests I see about things being wrong in Ultilearn, never Ultilearn, are testament to this.
They do make policy and plan, but never with the end user in mind, this is why they end up firefighting. Much of the ‘trivia and pointless rubbish’ come from a lack of understanding of how we at the coalface operate, ie 2 nights a week for c.3½ hours a time. OK the vast majority of us don’t, otherwise squadrons would grind to a halt. They could save themselves a freightload of time and effort, if there was actual thought going into what they prescribe for us.
One area of policy that is OTT for us, in terms of what we actually hold and do is all the ADR and storeman for a couple of rifles and a few hundred rounds of .22. We managed to control these for decades without the other bits. My mate holds several weapons of different calibres and rounds to go in them, various shotgun cartridges and loads his own and has done none of this. Oh yes and he puts them in his car and drives to different places, on his own.
I think it’s the other way round our higher commands need to get their act in order and realise they are there to work for us and not the other way round. If we felt like we were being led by people who knew what they were doing and acting in our best interests then the Corps would be a much better place. We can all finger wag at people who bend rules, but we are all creatures who by nature look at the rules and take a POV that if we don’t get caught cushty and we’ll deal with it if we do or someone moans and gauge our future actions from the response. If people didn’t behave like that we’d have no need for law enforcement and solictors.
All the furore over pace sticks is mind boggling. The only people who IMO get excited about this are those who see a pace stick as a big deal and get all misty-eyed about them. It is a tool and to that end every squadron IMO should be scaled to have one. My cadet sqn had one and we all used it (cadet NCOs and staff) to demonstrate pace lengths and spacing to new cadets, for marking out parade settings and areas when we did arms drill displays. There seems to have been an odd mindset about pace sticks more so in recent years, but think of it as a screwdriver, hammer or pliers etc and the mystique soon disappears. Probably not among the “ooo I’ve got a pace stick” crowd, but then there’s no accounting for some people.
That doesn’t worry them in the slightest and hasn’t done for years. I’ve seen too many good mates get fed up with being treated like doo doo by senior Wing types, and the almost constant barrage of anti-volunteer policies and being treated like second class citizens by the higher CoC and that’s mainly uniformed staff. We have seen an increase recently in the you will be like the RAF when we say and ATC when we say and no consistency.
Check this out
Check this out Wow
actually, i think we’re all barking at the same tree, just from different angles.
CFAV’s ‘make stuff* up as they go along’ because HQAC is utterly divorced from the Monday night reality of the ACO. the OC of 123 (anytown) Sqn knows before he opens his BADER email that he’s recieved 20 missives that are either obvious, irrelevant or wrong, and he also knows that his immediate superiors - the WHQ - are not only no help in dealing with reality, but that they won’t get involved until someone gets arrested.
then we have the problem that all voluntary/hobby groups have - some of the people we attract are a bit weird, and they actively seek out an organisation where they are in charge of stuff, but where there is little effective oversight of what they do on a day-to-day basis.
WHQ’s have the problem that they know that much of what HQAC vommits forth is either obvious, irrelevant or wrong, and they know that some of the CFAV’s are less than they would wish - but they also know that if they push too hard against the ‘idiosyncracies’ those CFAV’s will walk away and you’ll have 40+ cadet Sqn with no staff which the WHQ will somehow have to manage and find non-existant OC candidates for.
juggling this pretty puzzle is made more difficult because the Officers who populate the WHQ’s are by definition the Officers who don’t want to run a Sqn - and i’d suggest that an Officer in a sqn-based youth organisation who prefers not to be involved in the ‘youth’ or ‘Sqn’ bits of that organisation is unlikely to be in the top third of his cohort. infact he’s likely to be the dross who gets ‘promoted’ to keep him away from everyone else.
so, we have an unholy mix of slightly wierd people with a power trip, people with absolutely no confidence whatsoever in their ‘betters’, people with no understanding of actual Sqn/CFAV life - and the people we pick as the referees in this turd pavlova are the least competant Officers the ACO produces who survive the four year chop.
excellent - what could possibly go wrong…
If you actually look at what he is carrying, you can see that it is a pair of drum sticks as spares not a pace stick.
At a guess i would say that AnonHB is actualy a member of thissquadron strange how he pops up trying to point out something on a video and it disappear
Just type in Remembrance Parade, Knowle 2013 on youtube
[quote=“AnonHB” post=13680]If you actually look at what he is carrying, you can see that it is a pair of drum sticks as spares not a pace stick.[/quote]Yup - that does appear to be the case.
I think it is fair to say that carrying spare drumsticks does not constitute “performing as part of a cadet band” so the CI in question was incorrectly dressed for the situation. I have seen drummers manage to carry their own spare drumsticks in the past 
In short: naughty squadron - make sure it doesn’t happen again
Spoilsport.
To be honest GHE2, I cannot argue with many of your comments, but I also think it’s unfair to lay all of the blame at HQAC’s door. They, like most other organisations across the MoD, are hopelessly under-resourced for what they need to do (with little chance of getting any further staff in the short-term at least), and they also suffer from having to enact policies and practices which are not of their making, transporting weapons and ammunition being one that you mention. The difference is that in other parts of the RAF, much of the supporting admin work that subordinate units routinely do negates or at least diverts further staff action from the HQ. Unfortunately, in the ACO, the actions of some of our feral (I like that term) units and staff achieve exactly the opposite. Should HQAC be doing something about the problems they have? Of course they should, but it’s a resource issue. Link across to the Training Management thread and there is a crying need for proper training for our staff to deliver what we should. Again, policies have been imposed on HQAC (doing DSAT training - good in my view) that they are not resourced to see through.
I stand by my comment that it’s up to the coalface to get it’s act in order as I believe that the trivia and feral behaviour that we love to discuss and deride on here and which should be addressed at a much lower level often ends up with HQAC for action, and it distracts and diverts their staff from doing other, more important, things. What would you rather have people like Mitch or Ray Pelcot, or Sam Badger do; spend time stopping people from kitting their whole Sqn in MTP as quickly as they can at public expense and working on who can carry pace sticks on parade, just because a Sqn Cdr, WSO or OC Wg hasn’t gripped his people? Alternatively, would we rather they spent their time developing better staff training courses for us or changing equipment scalings? Whilst I applaud the Admin Burden Reduction exercise that HQAC is undertaking, ostensibly for our benefit, we should also look to reduce the admin burden that we send their way as a result of the incompetence, ignorance, arrogance and egotism of some of our volunteers and their leaders.
Plus 1 karma
I’ve been doing this for many years and never known such a state of flux as in the last 10ish years, mainly because we have adopted EWOW. However HQAC (in all it’s guises) using it (probably with the best intent) have created confusion and disarray. They have IMO tried to compensate too much for the slow updating methods of old, but the method of distribution and highlighting of changes is IMO worse now than it was before. Who for instance thinks that it is a good move to put out altered documents without any indication of the change and or put training and policy documents on a platform (supposedly) designed for e-learning? It’s almost like the chattering is “oooo we’d better use it” without the slightest clue as to why they are. Anyone with any intelligence knows that you put things where they are accessed the easiest.
I’m not as optimistic about the ABR project as you CM imply you are, as the method of getting things into the mix, ie sent to one of the team, is too open to things that will make a difference, not getting brought up, because it is might not be easy or as I said in the specific thread out of scope. The method of raising should be like the Bader helpdesk, so that it is open, so that we at the coalface can see where the priority of the team lies. If we get anything that removes any admin at all I will be stunned, adding to admin directly or indirectly would not surprise me in the slightest.
Much of what we get in way of policies as hobbyists are in our day to day environment unworkable or require accessing things that you won’t have hand, which means missed deadlines. We need our head office to make it workable for us, but this requires them to understand the day to day working of the volunteer. About the biggest problem we have is an employed SLT be that at Wing, Region or at Cranwell that is apathetic and by and large out of touch and do not know the CFAV’s world. Some might regard this as a cop out, but in the business world not understanding how the shopfloor works and losing touch with what is going on, means losing money and at worst going out of business. In my day job were almost a victim of this sort complacency not long after I started. The Board were given a mauling by the shareholders and quite a few of the old guard left no long after. In the last 30 years they have been much more accountable and attuned to the market we operate in. However, within the confines of the MOD, with the heirarchical system and kow towing, there is no mechanism for scrutiny from the shareholders, if it doesn’t work, the senior management bury their heads in the sand, pull rank and say it will happen, regardless of how poor it is. The one time scrutiny should happen in the ACO is the Annual Convention, the Corps’ AGM in some respects, but I have been told by 3 Wg Cdrs, it’s a waste of time in that respect, as anyone with greater knowledge than the HQAC people are not listened to and told effectively it’s not their place to criticise, yet HQAC are only too willing to finger wag at the volunteer side. Frankly if they had a greater working knowledge and or listened to those volunteers allowed to play at HQAC, we might, might, just get things that are workable. It is all too easy to blame the volunteers for the ills of the organisation. But in any organisation the blame for the really important failings lies largely at the top, not saying there isn’t culpability at all levels.
Training courses, great, but they have to be plentiful, accessible, fit for purpose and face to face for all subject matters. If this means the people delivering have to come to us so much the better. Until you have all the appropriate and necessary resources available, managing training is like trying to catch chickens.
The sort of thing that attracts the bitching that goes on here should be sorted locally, getting anything above Wing involved is pointless. If I was that concerned, but it would only be on matters pertaining to safeguarding, I would be speaking to the CO or WSO. Putting any form of gripe where the individual can be identified due to video / photo on an online forum is completely wrong IMO.
[quote=“incubus” post=13691][quote=“AnonHB” post=13680]If you actually look at what he is carrying, you can see that it is a pair of drum sticks as spares not a pace stick.[/quote]Yup - that does appear to be the case.
I think it is fair to say that carrying spare drumsticks does not constitute “performing as part of a cadet band” so the CI in question was incorrectly dressed for the situation. I have seen drummers manage to carry their own spare drumsticks in the past
In short: naughty squadron - make sure it doesn’t happen again :)[/quote]
As he is at the back he is probably picking up dropped drumsticks not carrying spares, I suppose what would be better is having the CI in civvies in the middle of the uniform parade, that would look great! Or even better, leave the drumsticks on the ground and wait for a veteran top fall over on one.
Or to be less sarcastic, what really would be best is to acknowledge that the CI seems to be playing an important role in the parade and making the ATC uniform at a public event, within the band/uniform regulations.
[quote=“goober” post=13957]As he is at the back he is probably picking up dropped drumsticks not carrying spares, I suppose what would be better is having the CI in civvies in the middle of the uniform parade, that would look great! Or even better, leave the drumsticks on the ground and wait for a veteran top fall over on one.[/quote]Have a uniformed member of staff in the squad act as detritus-collector. Carry on.
[quote=“goober” post=13957][quote=“incubus” post=13691][quote=“AnonHB” post=13680]If you actually look at what he is carrying, you can see that it is a pair of drum sticks as spares not a pace stick.[/quote]Yup - that does appear to be the case.
I think it is fair to say that carrying spare drumsticks does not constitute “performing as part of a cadet band” so the CI in question was incorrectly dressed for the situation. I have seen drummers manage to carry their own spare drumsticks in the past
In short: naughty squadron - make sure it doesn’t happen again :)[/quote]
As he is at the back he is probably picking up dropped drumsticks not carrying spares, I suppose what would be better is having the CI in civvies in the middle of the uniform parade, that would look great! Or even better, leave the drumsticks on the ground and wait for a veteran top fall over on one.
Or to be less sarcastic, what really would be best is to acknowledge that the CI seems to be playing an important role in the parade and making the ATC uniform at a public event, within the band/uniform regulations.[/quote]
My bold.
I dont get what you are saying are you saying that he is acting within the band/uniform regs??
If you are saying that then you are wrong if he is not playing in the band he has no authority to wear uniform on parade at all…
As for playing an important role In all my time I have never seen the need for someone to be there to pick up dropped sticks. Veterans have been marching long enough behind bands to be able to dodge sticks.
If they can dodge a bullet they can dodge a stick… 