Originally Posted by
Bob Viking
I realise I’m in no place to comment, since I never did any Ops, but how the hell do you get to the rank of AM and only have a row of jubilee medals and an LSGCM to show for your efforts?! Add that to the fact he had no flying badge of any description and I’m sorry to say I don’t see how the hell he could be considered to lead the Air Force!
BV
I had no pretension to be an AM so my lowly rack of 5 (chocolate) medals matters not.
Some years back, a retired Air Commodore called Henry Probert, wrote a book called High Ranking Officers of the RAF, he covered CAS' and other notable very senior RAF officers, with a short biography of each. When he got to the last one he was able to cover at the time of the book being ready for publishing, he observed that MRAF Sir David Craig, was not bedecked with medals like his predecessors. He predicted at the time that this would be far more regular among future CAS' as the withdrawal from former outposts of Empire and the stale mate of the cold war had negated the opportunities for serving officers to gain combat experience, just as those before Craig had. Even though Craig had flown everything from Meteors to Vulcans, that was the one constant, all had backgrounds as operational pilots, but with air combat experience which Craig had missed, except, of course, for the very first three or four, who were pioneer military pilots. But who's frontline military experience was forged in the Army or Navy.
FB