flynavysomerset

Letter in the DT


Forces’ productivity

SIR – It is good that Philip Hammond has spoken out on preserving the current level of defence spending (report, March 2).
This does not mean that defence spending could not achieve better value for money. One area that promises improvements without reducing operational capability is that of “harmony” – the amount of time sailors, soldiers and airmen are not available for operations — an inverse productivity measure, if you will.
The Armed Forces Pay Review board has demonstrated that each service has different harmony levels. On the surface this is a reasonable decision, as each service has a different role.
However, the Royal Navy has its own army (the Royal Marines) and its own air force (the Fleet Air Arm) and collectively they operate with less “harmony time” and thus a higher operational availability than the other two services.
By examining a common three-year period the difference in productivity becomes clear. Royal Marines are available for operations for 660 days, the Army 498. Fleet Air Arm personnel are available for 660 days, the RAF only 420.
If the Army and RAF had the same harmony time as the Royal Navy and its constituents, Army personnel levels could be reduced by up to 24 per cent and the RAF up to 36 per cent without reducing operational availability – a significant saving, allowing scarce money to be used elsewhere in defence.

Dr Duncan Redford
University of Portsmouth

Roadster280

Dr Redford is taking a simplistic view of a subject that is anything other than simplistic. His 10 years in the RN and academic specialisation in naval history give the lie to his ridiculous assertion that the RN has an army and an air force.

They no more have an Army than the RAF Regt constitutes an army nor the AAC constitutes an air force.

Ergo he has an agenda. He wasn't one of Sharkey's accolytes was he?

racedo

Productivity !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

In the military !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

RN sail to where they need to go and take weeks in doing so...............not suprising as moving to anywhere there is no other way.

Army get a lift on "state of the art" planes

So does a vovage to the gulf account for availability ?

Boffin should stick to teaching Undergraduates.

Courtney Mil

Worry not. If you declare yourself as "FlyNavy..." do not be surprised by a tribal attack on the other forces.

I wonder why the joint concept is so difficult.

Thanks for posting.

Biggus

If he seriously thinks I've only worked 420 days in the last 3 years..... i.e. 140 days a year, 28 weeks of Mon - Fri....

If by harmony I assume he is talking about time deployed on operations, does it not occur to him that people back in the UK in the armed services actually work.

We haven't even discussed how many people routinely break harmony "guidelines" with nothing being done about it.

All in all - total boll*~*x!

London Eye

And if any doubt his sense of neutrality here his is last effort to the Telegraph:

SIR – The possible areas to be cut as part of the Strategic Defence and Security Review (report, August 7) raise an important issue. The oft-stated position that our Armed Forces will have to work far more closely with allies than previously is the only basis available for assessing where cuts should be made. By this measure the proposed cuts are illogical, dangerous and bad for Britain and Europe.

In order for any increased defence interdependence to work, Britain must bring to its alliances capabilities that are in short supply; in this way we can have a smaller defence sector but still hope to be able to shape European and Nato policies as well as ensuring that the EU and Nato have credible conventional forces.

Many of the proposed cuts go against this. The European members of Nato are rich in army manpower and fast jets, but they are weak in maritime power and strategic airlift.

To propose cuts to the Royal Navy's seven-strong amphibious fleet, which contributes nearly 40 per cent of the European members of Nato's holding in these types, is idiotic, as is any suggestion of cuts to the specialised amphibious power projection force found in the Royal Marines and 3 Commando Brigade.

Furthermore, the Royal Navy's hunter-killer submarines represent 57 per cent of the EU SSN force and 100 per cent of Tomahawk cruise missile armed force available to the EU. To cut the number of such potent platforms with strategic reach, endurance, and armed with a weapon system that is a major political deterrent, defies belief and will weaken our voice in Europe.


If Britain persists in cutting the Royal Navy when all sense suggests that our navy should be enhanced in order to strengthen our hand in Europe and the world, both Britain and the EU will be weaker for it.

Dr Duncan Redford
Centre for Maritime Historical Studies
University of Exeter

There are many holes in his argument in his latest letter, not least that the RN is 'accruing harmony' while undertaking their training at sea and other routine business (cockers p somewhere sunny included) unlike the other services who spend a higher proportion of their lives training at their home bases (one of the reasons why many of us avoided the RN box at the CIO). This undermines his argument about differences in time available for ops but I am actually more surprised at his naivety: if we increased harmony for the other services, losing many of us along the way to PVR, would that be more money for Defence elsewhere or just a windfall for the Treasury? I hope he was a better RNl officer than he is an amateur military planner!

Deepsixteen

Hi


This could be an entertaining thread, looking forward to you making a case for not harmonising harmony in the services.


Racedo said “So does a voyage to the gulf count for availability?” fixed the spolling for you.


Only if there are insufficient sun loungers around the pool to go round!


It would appear that the Doctor is not the only one with a simplistic outlook


Deepsixteen

Melchett01

Dr Redford, as well as displaying a naivety of analysis that I last saw in a 6th form debating society, misses the concept of what Airpower and therefore the RAF is there to do.

As racedo metioned, the RN take an eon to get anywhere, and the Army generally have to go en masse to take and hold, which by implication involves a fair chunk of time away 'holding'. Conversely, the RAF don't actually have to go anywhere to carry out operations. Yes, whilst deployed in AFG, our role is largely to support the Army, but defence of UK airspace is a strategic operational role in its own right. And given that it is a non-discretionary role, carried out 24/7, you could argue that there the entire RAF is on or supporting operations, with no bobbing around on a 14 day transit to get to the AO before you even start doing things.

He really should start by working out what it is the various Services actually do before trying to get into the nuances of their operatioanl manning plots.

orca

I think that there are discrete issues here.

I don't think anyone would argue that a ship tends to move at a slower pace than an aircraft which has all the implications well highlighted above.

I don't also think that anyone in the RN can complain about the fact that to move a combatant around incurs a tarif of absence before and after the 'on station' time.

What might be worth investigating is why the metrics are different and what the effects would be if they weren't. After all they are under pinned by quality of life/ moral component of operational capability notions, are they not?

Supposedly the manning for any force depends on the harmony guideline - so there must have been a rationale for them being different. Otherwise one could argue that SDSR wasn't worth the paper it was written on. Ah, hang on a minute.

Perhaps we should be arguing for harmony guidelines to align, based on the current RAF model - but I suspect that would be unaffordable, and apparently affordability trumps everything these days. Maybe it's impossible to make savings based on harmony - but I ssupect that isn't quite the case.

I'm not convinced that the RAF is, in its entirety, supporting ops from the UK. An Aussie told me that once about their Air Force and I did think about it before i dismissed the notion. However, I am certainly not convinced that a circa 40,000 strong force looks efficient when you look at what we can actually deploy. The same is true of the other services. I am not convinced that the army readiness cycle is as lean as it could be. I am also not convinced that the RN needs its current officer cadre construct to deploy a small amount of combatants. But then again I don't feel the need to say so in the national press. And I am genuinely all ears if anyone is prepared to enlighten me.

Melchett01

Just because an individual may be providing logs or other support functions rather than actually sitting in a cockpit doesn't mean that they aren't necessary or supporting ops in their own way. Don't get sucked in to thinking size equates to efficiency or effectiveness - that is a Sir Humphrey definition of a successful civil service department.

In the Army, a single rifleman is a unit of fighting power. In the RAF, in flying terms, an individual aircraft is a unit of fighting power, but it requires far far more operational and logistical support to get it in the air than a rifleman does to get out on patrol. Whereas the Army equips the man, the RAF - and I suspect the RN - mans the equipment which may give rise to perceptions of inefficiency and excessive manning.

The argument over efficiency and numbers was something we had near constant issues with in JHC where the RAF and AAC had different shift patterns and manning levels / routines. By simplifying things down to a pure numbers game, Radford is completely missing the point that the single services have different ways of doing ops and those individual ways of doing things will come with their own manning requirements.

However, I think you're spot on about not raising this as an issue in the press, however, well intentioned. All it will do is pull the beancounters of the fence and armchair generals out of retirement to argue for their own single services when we should be pulling together and collectively fighting the politicians who would happily see us cut to shreds.

exgroundcrew

In 1965 I was on 90 Squadron when all our Valiant’s were grounded and after we scrapped them all there was a need to temporarily deploy us on anything useful?
I was asked to go on a “work study” team to identify the productive hours of all RAF personnel. This required us to learn work study techniques and once trained I was sent to RAF Hullavington at the time a navigation training base. The unit I had to monitor was the ground radar support team and I had lots of code to enter on the forms identifying each quarter hour for each person in the unit. This included items such as Primary role, rest periods, collecting from stores, haircuts, meal breaks and many more.
This was being carried out on at least 50% of bases in the UK.
My radar unit was working 24/7 because of the training commitments and the fitters were working shifts of over 72hrs per week with approx 60% of the time identified as Primary role giving over 40hrs per week productive work.
On submitting my report it was rejected and I was requested (ordered) to massage the figures to produce a result of 29hrs per week!
When I objected I was given this explanation:
The forces pay rise was being discussed in Parliament and one MP raised the question “How many manhours did the average member of HM forces do per week on their primary role” The response was 29, Then came the next question “ When was that study carried out?” Answer 1936. The next obvious question was “Don’t you think we should have more up to date figures?”
In order to ensure the pay rise was voted through and not delayed, we were strongly encouraged to ensure our figures produced a very close match to this mystical 29 hours!

BlindWingy

Yet another sad, bitter ex-navy officer with a chip on their shoulder.

Might be indicative of some Naval concern about the next SDSR due to their lack of participation in recent conflicts. Not to mention the carrier/F35B debacle!

orca

Melchett,

All valid points. I deliberately didn't try to compare the forces - merely pointed out what I suspected as being inefficient in all three. But I do suppose there was a implicit comparison in what I wrote.

Last time I checked (admittedly pre-SDSR) a Hansard the RAF had circa 1200 Wg Cdrs and the RN 800 Cdrs. Roughly 1 in 30 for the respective force sizes. One has a small number of squadrons and the other has a miniscule number of ships - now the operators, as you rightly point out, are not the whole story - but the numbers are still a little off don't you think? I can't see how either works. Should more than 1 in 30 people in a Navy be a Cdr or above - when a Cdr commands the basic warfighting unit?

I understand that we are different, but that doesn't mean that we are beyond scrutiny and it doesn't mean that we should not attempt to be as efficient as possible.

CoffmanStarter

We (the RAF) need to get better at the art of politicking. IMHO this is classic example of the Navy preparing the ground for the up and coming Strategic Review. Have an academic peddle some ideas that twit politicians can hang their hat on ... where the Senior Uniformed Brass can deny any such skulduggery.

Courtney calls it right ... Army, Navy and Air Firce are a COLLECTIVE Team ... and must operate as such.

Coff.

FATTER GATOR

Kack article from the 'Professor', however...

Perhaps the RAF should have a much greater proportion of reserves including FTRS.

That way the FTRS can help defend the nation at home without being incumbered by the harmony red-herring.

The RAF Reserve, in much greater numbers, can deploy where required and only when the nation needs them. The RAF could then consist of a much smaller rump of Regular personnel to provide command, policy, continuity and training.

And if it all hits the fan, the FTRS fall-in with the requirements of the day.

FG (staunch Reserve advocate)

FATTER GATOR

Standing-by for spears

Roland Pulfrew

Fatter Gator

The only problem with more FTRS is that we have singularly failed in a number of areas to recruit our quota of FTRS personnel. There is a naive belief in certain political circles that reserves are the cheap answer, but we often fail to recruit the required numbers. As a simple example the 3 elementary flying training squadrons were supposed to be manned with 50-60% FTRS. The assumption (unsubstantiated) was that recruiting personnel leaving at 38/16 in the normal QFI rich areas around Links/Yorks would be easy, missing the obvious point that those leaving at 38/16 are generally off to airline jobs. Unfortunately we never made the required FTRS recruits meaning that the regular air force had to backfill. The same is/was true of recruiting SRs around the Brize area for Voyager.

For those that haven't caught up (and I include Dr Redford in this), the latest version of Defence Strategic Direction has changed the harmony rates for the RAF and Army to much closer to the RN figures.

As I mentioned on one of the other topics relating to retired RN officers writing to the "broadsheets", expect more of this divide and conquer tactic in the run up to SDSR.

just another jocky

Does anyone else smell a Sharkey-troll?

Utter........utter........bolleaux.

Bismark

Of course Redford's piece is simplistic - it is a letter for goodness sake. But there is some truth in his words. For the same requirement for delivering Force Elements you will get more out of an RN FAA Squadron than you will out of an Army or RAF one. due to harmony rules. It was always an issue in Joint Force Harrier and was for JHC when it tried to amalgamate the differing operating stances of each Service...the FAA were always more "available" and more efficiently manned than the RAF due principally to the harmony rules.

We shouldn't be squabbling about this, but we do because of the perceived inefficiency of one Service when compared to the other.

It is a bit like the deployment rates for individuals. When I was serving one always used to see an RAF individual deployed for 4months and 2 days - why? The answer appeared to be that if he/she served for less than this then he/she would not be entitled to the Op Welfare package!

Justanopinion

Enjoying the paranoia. However, the 2 recent letters in the press are no more representative of Royal Navy policy/planning than the pages of Pprune are that of the RAF.