The RAF reducing to 21000?

[mud moving sumpy]

guys and galls

have heard this news today from two different sources!!!!!

i believe the implication would be that the RAF would only employ RAF personnel on the 1st line basis. All other lines would become civillian. Hence that would make the whole 1st line deployable!!!!!!

Anyone like to comment!!!!:confused:

[PPRuNeUser0211]

I suspect your two sources are pulling your leg! How would anyone actually manage to get to 55, working front line all the way (bearing in mind that service til 55 is to be encouraged under the new pension scheme.....) Everyone knows that would simply result in the majority of the RAF pvr'ing. Also bear in mind that redundancy for the remaining 20,000 (41k left after T3 IIRC) would cost MOD an arm and a leg, as if you want to get rid of that many ppl the terms will have to be pretty special!

I actually heard mumblings that MOD have decided that a 41k RAF isn't big enough to do the job and they were thinking of cutting the number of T3 redundancies! Just goes to show...

These rumours usually result from some study that someone has done somewhere, and someone else overheard a discussion about, that no one has any thoughts about acting on....

[mrwickets]

Definitely a leg pull. CinC PTC advised recently that 41k is about 1500 less than we actually need, which when added to gaps in crititical trades means a whole lotta hurt to be managed. Or a challenge and opportunity in management speak ;)

[southside]

I dont think this is a leg pull. I heard it as well and that was straight from Shrivenham.

It seems to make sound financial sense to me as well.


The comment on redundancy is, I assume, based on the fact that at the moment if you are made redundant then the MOD compensate you. Remember though, that the MOD are not obliged to compensate you. If they wanted to they could just assume the old SNLR cop out and thats it. Goodnight Vienna etc etc. And so the actual redundancy would cost the MOD the square root of bugger all.

[tablet_eraser]

Leg-pull? Sounds like out-and-out bollocks to me.

I simply cannot see how you can have a Service that consists entirely of front-line personnel. We have already seen civilian engineering and service support personnel on strike at some trg stns, God forbid it should happen at a QRA base. And what about roulements? Given the fact that some front-line units already require emergency reserve personnel drawn from the regular strength of the Service in order to ensure efficient turnaround in theatre, how can we expect to sustain ops without breaking everyone? How are people to gain sufficient experience prior to deployment if they have no peacetime role?

What about MACA and MAGD? What would happen if we had another Op FRESCO? We'd have to seriously compromise our national defensive (and offensive) capability by drawing personnel directly from front-line units, something we managed (largely) to avoid last time around.

Gordon Brown would dearly love to reduce the Armed Forces as much as he possibly could - his priorities lie in directing tax sterling to any public service other than Defence. Yet whatever his plans are, I don't think 21,000 pers would be tenable even for him. We're stretched enough as it is, and with more cuts on the way I think things are going to get tougher unless we reduce our global commitments. I'm not sure what Broon thinks, but I don't think Blair would agree to us withdrawing from... wherever...

:hmm:

[2Old2Care]

Even Trenchard was left with 28,000 in 1920. Mind you, he had to cover the Fleet Air Arm as well (oops, perhaps better not go there....)

[althenick]

Ok i'll bite :(

Even Trenchard was left with 28,000 in 1920. Mind you, he had to cover the Fleet Air Arm as well

In 1920 the Dark blue : Light blue Ratio had gone from almost 0%:100% in 1918 to 75%:25%. And another thing Trenchard didn't give a flying fig about Naval Aviation which is one of the main reasons the Fleet Air Arm went to see with 20 year old technology at the begining of WW2.

God i'm bored:(

[skaterboi]

As tablet eraser says reducing to down to 21000 and being committed to global policing are mutually exclusive. It simply cannot be done.

I for one would leave if I heard this was to happen, and I suspect others would too, so it may be a case of, if true, a snowball effect until we don't even have an Air Force.

[Pontius Navigator]

Look at the other end of the telescope. Let's assume that the Shriv rumour was actually a staff study that got out?

Do we really need 50+ years old junior personnel? The latest Air Power magazine talks about the WWII Servicing Commandos. fits rather well with an expeditionary air force. Can you imagine all the current cope of light blue doing Peny Fan just to qualify for an OOA?

In order to go truely exped there needs to be a root and branch renewal at the working end. The desk warriors can stay where they are and the racing snakes can do the business.

The OFA from next April is designed to see just how fit the services are. If the over 40's can't meet the Operational Fitness criteria then goodbye Vienna.

OK, not goodbye but perhaps transfer to a 'regular service home-committment' basis with a commensurate 15% pay cut?

Ducks and runs.

[Talking Radalt]

Do we really need 50+ years old junior personnel? The latest Air Power magazine talks about the WWII Servicing Commandos. fits rather well with an expeditionary air force. Can you imagine all the current cope of light blue doing Peny Fan just to qualify for an OOA?

You're not suggesting we finally get rid of all those knackered old gits who have their bread conveniently buttered both sides by MOD but who'd be in a job seeking wilderness were they to take a walk down a civvy street that deems them "unemployable".....are you? :E

[Muff Coupling]

Could well have foundation. Heard a similar debate in the corridors of power a few days ago.

Its all about shrinking budgets and expeditionary forces for NATO 2020 and SDR chapter 5? If your admin tail can't go in a couple of C17's..you aint. Listen to the latest transmissions from CAS.."warfighter first tradesmen second". The writing is on the wall for the RAF, dont wait till your back is against it to read it!

Dont rule out the old and bold either. Many 50+ soldiers are deployed on Telic, not as fit as they might have been 10-15 years ago, but can still pull a mean trigger and get down and dirty!

Light Blue is about to go through an ethos change...you may well have to ditch a load of 45 something crusty's and spec aircrew who think that the RAF will survive forever on the Battle of Britain. Get rid of some pink and fluffy blunties, ATC, work bench lizards and get some young blood who understand what future joint, light, rapid entry warfare really means and are prepared to sleep rough, muck in and do without water coolers for a few weeks.

Try the math.

RAF - 31 aircraft squadrons and a handful of flights...41000 personnel post latest round of cuts. Pure combat types reducing to 3. No real role for Typhoon or F3. All officer pilots
Army Aviation - 22 aircraft squadrons and 9 flights...2000 personnel post latest round of cuts! 64 % NCO pilots out of 350 and large proportion of those flying AH. Now that is what treasury ministers do not understand!!

Think green and go lean if you want to survive as a credible force beyond 2012. If that means civilians at 2nd / 3rd line, bite the bullet. Septics have been doing it for years.

[buoy15]

Tablet

Still got QRA?

Is that for the waves of Badgers coming over the horizon?

Need to Know?

Where's that soddin Bus Pass?

[PPRuNeUser0211]

QRA, surely that would be for the nail clipper bearing terro's who will chose to run a 737 into canary wharf?

As for fitting into a C-17, cool, I dig that... so surely the Army will be binning the whole AGC?

Seriously though, it's all very well saying warfighter first and all the rest of it, but as mentioned earlier, you have to train some of the time! And I think they'll find retention drops when the E-3 boys are spending the whole year away, rather than just half of it;)........

If the minimum level of personnel required to fight our fights the whole time is 21,000 having 42,000 (i.e. 41000 post redundancy plus PTC's extra 1500...) does not seem entirely unreasonable, giving half the boys time to train and the other half committed on ops or in direct support.

Army aviation, I might point out, does benefit from the rest of the army doing it's trivial support for it! And some of the riff raff's a/c are slighty (emphasis on slightly) larger and more complex than a lynx/gazelle. (Can't comment on apache, but will get round to it when they've got some that have the aircrew to fly them....;-))

As for redundancies, I'd like to see them try making 20,000 of Liz's finest redundant without compensating them.... the lawyers would rub their hands in glee at the very prospect of ripping the MOD's case to shreads! As has been mentioned in a few threads previously, although quite some time ago now, MOD has been done before vs the PVR requirements and other such things. It's not exempt from employment law, much as it would like to think it is! Not speaking from personal experience there though, and am not a lawyer, but reckon it would be pretty shaky for them....

[Hanse Cronje]

Sure i heard CAS motion that 28,000 was a viable number to maintain current Ops whilst at MoD the other month. No doubt the bean counters will take this as gospal and find ways to reduce us even further....

[Roland Pulfrew]

southside

Crown Immunity has gone. The MOD are an employer and therefore have to pay redundancy like anyone else. SNLR does not cut the mustard - if you have an offer of service to 36/16 44/22 or whatever that is deemed to be a contract and is therefore eligible for redundancy (although I am sure that the minimum legal payment would be all anyone would get). Mind you if you can encourage personnel to leave on PVR by burning them out early you save on redundancy AND pensions. A win win situation for HMT!!

There are a lot of civil serpants who would very much like our armed forces to follow the failed Canadian experiment and a lot of them are in powerful positions. They do not understand military ethos and a sense of belonging; they would very much like to see us all wearing 'purple'.

Equally there are a lot of VS army officers who think that 'purple' is great as long as its a green shade of purple, likewise VS naval officers - purple shaded dark blue. The VS RAF officers are our own worst enemy and do not defend the oldest Air Force in the world as hard as some of us might wish!

Muff C

If you include the support elements of the wider army required to support the AAC then the maths would not be quite so stark - but then never let the truth get in the way etc. Unfortunately "facts" like yours are seized upon by HMT and the aforementioned civil serpents. HMT must love the three services for briefing against each other, saving them the time and hassle of doing it themselves! It is time that the VSOs of all three services stood together against the Treasury and said 'No'. Either that or we need to lose a small war or two!

RAF at 21K/28K - not sure. I have it that 41K will not be the end and 35K is the next (and not too distant) target. Lets not forget that some RAF VSOs must now have their eyes on 'Lord *******' so they are not likely to rock the boat, are they?

[Biggus]

If a reduction in size to 35,000/28,000/21,000 etc is to take place, and I'm not saying it is, when will it happen? It is taking 3 years, until 2008, to 'slim down' to 41,000ish. Further, potentially massive, reductions would surely take several, as in 5-8, years to achieve? So are we indeed talking 2020 'think tank' projections?

[Pontius Navigator]

Talking Radalt

<<Do we really need 50+ years old junior personnel? The latest Air Power magazine talks about the WWII Servicing Commandos. fits rather well with an expeditionary air force. Can you imagine all the current cope of light blue doing Peny Fan just to qualify for an OOA?>>

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


<<You're not suggesting we finally get rid of all those knackered old gits who have their bread conveniently buttered both sides by MOD but who'd be in a job seeking wilderness were they to take a walk down a civvy street that deems them "unemployable".....are you?>>

I is one.

I did the maths this morning. I am as far from 40 now as when I joined.

Muff Coupling said:

<<Many 50+ soldiers are deployed on Telic, not as fit as they might have been 10-15 years ago, but can still pull a mean trigger and get down and dirty!>>

Agree, me too and I would love to give it ago but having got down I am not sure I could get up again.

The same air power magazine reported that a fighter pilot's skills fades after the grand old age of 28!

Warfighter first, tradesman second and old war horse in horseguards maybe. Fact remains there are a lot of grey beards out there possibly because the young bloods haven't hung around once they have been offered a desk and no promotion to wg cdr and beyond.

[Hanse Cronje]

Here in the Jolly Happy Club, Joint means Army. OC of JSFAW is now a Full Colonel and i here that the next but one OC at RAF Odiham probably will be Army to....Better start digging a tunnel!

Did hear a rather amusing story about a certain leaving gift for the short Kiwi one from the Stn Execs at Odiham. :ok:

[The Rocket]

get some young blood who understand what future joint, light, rapid entry warfare really means and are prepared to sleep rough, muck in and do without water coolers for a few weeks.

No, I'm afraid you can stick that right up your pipe, Mr Coupling.:cool:

[BEagle]

Thank you, The Rocket, - at last some words of sense to counterbalance the utter tosh spouted by the camo-yoof earlier!

Goodness, by the sound of it you're b£oody welcome to the RAF of the future. The one I joined existed mainly to defend our shores and to provide a deterrent to aggression - not to go around the world hanging on Bush's coat tails playing the role of underfunded world policeman.

Notice how Trust-me-Tone used every means at his disposal to stifle free speech at the recent Noo Liarbour conference - so that the question "OK, you lying ba$tard, when the hell are we quitting that desert $hit hole called Iraq?" was never raised.....

[shoutingwind]

they surley cannot shrink the RAF any more? we'd dissaper into a tide of army red tape!

As we stand if (hahaha), if we managed to get everyone in the RAF together we'd be pushed to make the Millenium Stadium look half full. Most rock concerts get more people than we do. And don't diss the oldies face it most of our a/c are old. i work of planes older than me! experence and knowledge (and occasonally the smell of digestive biscuits :) ) everybody is leaving and we are going to be left with a baby force only just out of long trousers.

i like the RAF saying "check in, don't dig in!"

when i grow up i want to be a civvy

[TheBeeKeeper]

And the general consensus regarding this particular rumour is???

Credible sources for information?

TBK

[Bluntend]

Courtesy of the RAF Rumour Network...

"The RAF was formed on 1st April (how appropriate) 1918 by merging the Royal Flying Corps and the Naval air Service. At the end of World War 1 it found itself the Word’s most powerful air force with 22 000 aircraft , 188 operational squadrons and 291 000 personnel. In an early version of LEAN, this was reduced to 12 operational squadrons and 31 500 personnel by 1919 (now that’s cutting out the deadwood). 1918 to 1936 was the golden era of the bi plane with unforgettable designs like the Grebe, Tomtit and Westland Wapiti. In these between war years the RAF had to be content with bombing the crap out of defenceless natives in various parts of the world, in particular Iraq where it dropped 100 tons of bombs for the loss of 11 aircraft. This demonstrated a remarkable foresight on behalf of the RAF and stood it in good stead for a similar operations some 75 plus years later.

World War 2 proved to be a sterner test for our boys in serge blue on account of the natives being slightly more inclined to put up a fight. Still on the plus side, it was drop a few bombs on Jerry then back home for tea, medals and a jump from some tart in Lincoln while her hubby was sweating it out in the North Africa with the Desert Rats. Despite all this our heroes in blue came through, in part to ‘state of the art’ designs such as the Fairy battle (a light Fighter bomber with Morris Minor like performance) and the Manchester (a heavy bomber with C130J like reliability),.but mostly because Bomber Harris let us drop lots of bombs.

The post war years brought new challenges with the start of the jet age and with this new technology at our disposal it was high time we started bombing people again; so Indonesia, Malaya, Korea, Kenya Aden, and Egypt soon found themselves on the receiving end of large amounts of high explosives.

The 1960s brought us the ‘Supersonic Age’ the English Electric Lighting was an important breakthrough. It was built in response to an early episode of ‘Scarp Heap Challenge’ where the object was to get rid of 1500 gallons of kerosene without actually pouring it down the drain. The Lightning completed the challenge with ease and a useful spin off was that it could fly at almost twice the speed of sound and shoot things. Unfortunately it could not drop bombs, but the RAF bought it anyway because it discovered that it could scare the crap out of kids at air shows.

A long period of inactivity facing off the Soviets in Germany followed this, but an advantage of this was that although we did not drop any bombs we had LOA, tax free cars, booze and fags. In 1982 the horrid Argies gave us the chance to start to bomb things again. The pathetic attempt by RAF Vulcans to bomb Port Stanley runway demonstrated the importance of regularly bombing things. Eight years later the RAF found themselves back in familiar territory in the Gulf. Faced with a massive abundance of falling HE the Iraqis responded with psychological warfare; they surrendered thus forcing the RAF to vacate their 5 star hotels and return to dear old Blighty . The next few years were spent with the Jags and Tornados just itching to drop some more HE on the Iraqis, but next in line were those horrible Serbs. This time it was back to the type of war our boys in blue loved best. Bombing Johnny Serb direct from Bruggen and getting home in time for tea and medals (well bratties and tax free cars and booze any way). Next on the list was Iraq again with the opportunity to drop more bombs, this time smart bobs that you could put up Saddam’s hoop (but just remember smart weapons need smart people).

At the time of writing due to Defence cuts, E2E and Lean, we are heading towards a similar size that we were in 1919 and chances are, due to Jointery, we may yet become the Royal Flying Corps again; Trenchard and our heroes of yesteryear must be rolling in their graves."