Mick Smith - Times Online - WBLG

It Wasn't Like That in My Day! The Army is Losing its Best People

Following the call from the head of the army for better treatment for our troops, resident veteran Chuck Unsworth explains why the armed forces cannot afford to lose their best people

Walk into any organisation’s headquarters and within a few seconds you can sense its personality.  Glance at the state of the building, pass the time of day with one or two people and within a few short moments you’ll have a very clear view of how things are.  Some organisations are unwelcoming, demoralised and slapdash.  Others seem to be humming along, confident, cheerful and highly professional.   The same is true of most establishments, including those of the armed forces. When you arrive at a military garrison you get an immediate sense of the Regimental Sergeant Major’s character.  From the moment you are stopped by the sentry on the gate to the point where you find your quarters it’s an instant education.

The Winners and Losers from the MoD's £2bn Black Hole, or Do I Mean the Losers and the Losers?

The past six months has seen internecine fighting between the three services on a scale not seen for many years as the Royal Navy, the Army, and the RAF bickered over which programmes should be scrapped to save the cash needed to fill the £2bn black hole in the MoD’s budget over the next three years. Yes you're right, the whole point about black holes is you can't fill them and so it has proved. The service chiefs have agreed, if that is the right word, on a series of delays and salami-slicing, most of which simply postpone payments and move the black hole back a few years when it will re-emerge even larger than it is now. Don't expect a list of cuts out of the MoD, Gordon doesn't want the bad publicity over not properly funding the armed forces so that mantra about telling parliament everything has gone out of the window. But here for TimesOnline readers only, is a list of the winners and losers, or more accurately the losers and the losers:   

It Wasn't Like That in My Day! But Some Things Will Never Change

Our resident veteran Chuck Unsworth goes back to his Vietnam days to reflect that disengagement from military occupations like those in Iraq and Afghanistan are never easy.

It’s a couple of hours flying over the South China Sea on a Boeing 707 from Singapore to Tan Son Nhut airport at Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City).  My flight, just after the Tet Offensive in January ‘68, was notable for a couple of things.  One was the elegantly uniformed cabin crew of extremely blonde blue-eyed stewardesses from the American Mid-West.  The other was being told on presenting my boarding card that I could sit anywhere I wanted.  On the aircraft there were only six passengers.

It Wasn't Like That in My Day: The Continuing Allure of the Bluey

Our resident veteran Chuck Unsworth looks at the importance to forces of ensuring the mail gets through and the vexed issue of whether those who have never served can ever understand

A Replenishment At Sea (RAS) is a searching test of every aspect of Seamanship for vessels and crews of the Royal Navy (White Ensign) and its Royal Fleet Auxiliary (Blue Ensign) support ships.  The Fleet Auxiliary ships have traditionally been crewed by civilians.  They are a remarkable group of men.  The RAS involves two or more vessels sailing in close proximity, parallel with each other, transferring stores, fuel, sometimes personnel, and crucially, mail from home.  The congregation of large amounts of seriously expensive capital equipment at a single point in any Ocean is enough to concentrate minds on the task in hand.  Failure to pay close attention will, inevitably, lead to Boards of Inquiry, stupendous amounts of paperwork and acute all round personal embarrassment. Watching one of these operations in full swing is akin to watching an impressive white-knuckle fairground ride, although I’ve never witnessed true disaster, despite the best efforts of one or two Ratings. 

Fighting Behind the Wire, The View From the Serviceman

Over the past couple of months, this blog has been adding some new voices to the debate, including Mandy, the mother of a soldier serving in Afghanistan. Today we add another voice, no names, no pack drill, this is from an unnamed British serviceman, still serving, fighting from behind the wire and anonymous because of the infamous DIN (Defence Instruction and Notice) banning servicemen and women from giving their opinions.

It was reported a few months ago that The Parachute Regiment alone had lost nine officers in the past few months, all quitting in disgust at the lack of resources and poor treatment of soldiers and their families. One was the commanding officer of 3 PARA, Lt Col Stuart Tootal. The OBE officer, hotly-tipped to one day head the Army, highlighted poor pay,  a lack of equipment for training, appalling army housing and shoddy treatment by the health service. His letter to service personnel chiefs was described as a “devastating indictment” of the Government. Apart from a few news articles what impact did his actions or others before him really have, what good did they actually do for the forces?

The RAF Needs to Remember - Turkeys Don't Fly

The MoD’s defence of Prince William’s use of an RAF Chinook helicopter to ferry himself and Harry to a two-day stag party at Cowes is looking increasingly threadbare. William had already passed his flying course when he went off for a ten-day familiarisation course on the Chinook helicopter. It is transparently obvious what happened here. The wings ceremony at RAF Cranwell was scheduled for the same day as cousin Peter’s stag party, a two-day binge in Cowes. How were Wills and Harry going to get there in time? Don’t worry HRH, some helpful officer says, we can sort that. We’ll give you a training flight that will take you down into the London heli-lanes, you can make a landing in a confined space at Woolwich, pick up Harry, then you can make a water crossing to the Isle of Wight and land at Bembridge, we do it all the time and you’ll be minutes away from as many pints of Strongbow as you can handle. Take away the italics and you have a completely routine training flight which any Chinook pilot needs to practise on a regular basis. So where’s the problem?

Why Should Our Troops be Denied the Basic Right to Life?

The decision by a High Court judge that relatives of servicemen who died as a result of defective equipment or lack of the proper equipment could sue the MoD for failing to protect their human rights, in this case the very basic right to life, is a good one. There has been a lot of ill-informed ranting from people who ought to know better about how this means that anyone could sue on the basis that they weren’t given the best possible equipment. That is not the case, and we have seen too many scandals where servicemen died because they weren’t given the equipment they needed or because it was not working properly to be fooled into thinking that. There is in fact a case that was already on its way to the European Court of Human Rights on precisely this issue...

The Cheap and Tawdry Way Our Veterans are Treated

One line stood out for me in our report today on the potential increases facing soldiers for the insurance they have to take out when they serve on operations abroad. They have to buy the insurance to make up for the inadequacy of the MoD's own compensation scheme. The premiums could be effectively doubled for many soldiers from January 1st to provide adequate cover for soldiers and their families in the event of their being severely injured or killed. But in its own way, it was just as shocking to learn that soldiers going to war have to insure their own kit. If they lose it in combat, it seems, they have to recompense the army for the cost and then claim it back from the insurance policy. How petty and parsimonious can the MoD bean-counters be? No don't answer it we know...

Blame the "fluffy bunny" Training

The inquiry into Iran's capture of 15 British sailors and marines has found a catalogue of errors ranging from a breakdown of communications among key commanders to a complete lack of understanding of the threat posed by Iran. This was of course entirely predictable and while the tone of Lt-Gen Rob Fulton's report is analytical rather than judgmental its contents are said to be none the less damning and there seems little doubt that there will be a board of inquiry into the whole sorry affair.

Desperate MoD Sells "His and Hers" Uniforms to Raise Cash

The defence budget is now officially in such a dire state that the Ministry of Defence has set up its own eBay-style internet auction selling off anything from army boots to £1,000 Green Goddess fire engines in an attempt to boost its funds. Whether it will actually produce much cash has to be questionable. Although those with a fascination for the military who are prepared to make a minimum bid of £10 have for instance just three days left to snap up “his and hers” army combat trousers at edisposals.com.

Blair Confirms Navy Cuts

Having gone to Plymouth on Friday to hear the Prime Minister make his speech on the future of our defences, I read Saturday's newspaper reports, largely concentrating on his ludicrous and scarcely surprising attempts to justify Iraq, with dismay. It is perhaps understandable that Iraq grabbed the attention of the political writers, but the real story out of that speech was the lack of any short-term extra funding for defence and the effective confirmation of the stories about cuts to the navy.

Thank God for our (very) Special Forces

If you're a Brit and you're stuck in a tricky situation in some war zone you might well hope and pray that the SAS will turn up to rescue you. You might even be a bit miffed if they didn't, so often do they seem to rescue people in such situations. However, if you're an Italian climber stuck 24,000 feet up the Himalayas, you haven't eaten for three days and acute mountain sickness means you can't move, you probably wouldn't in your wildest dreams imagine that a joint SAS/SBS team would come round the corner and rescue you from what was otherwise likely to be certain death. But that is precisely what happened to Roberto Marabotto. He just happened to have the very good fortune to fall ill on the route of a joint SAS and SBS team that is currently making an attempt on the "Seven Summits" challenge.

The Pathetic Way in Which Our Forces Are Treated

The disgusting and totally pathetic way in which this government is prepared to treat the armed forces has been exposed yet again, this time by the decision - reported in today's Sunday Times - to mothball half the major ships of the Royal Navy and cut some of its new ships to save money, largely because a series of procurement projects and the hidden costs of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq are spiralling out of control. This war-obsessed government is equally obsessed with cutting back the forces they need to turn their maniacal delusions into reality. They are war junkies. They are hooked on the power our armed forces give them on the world stage but they dont want to pay for it. The armed forces have apparently been told to save more than £250m this financial year and £1bn by April 2008 amid a radical “re-balancing” of the MoD’s spending plans.