Originally Posted by
nigegilb
I was interested to see the immigration figures the other day. 1500 people per day coming in to the UK, but 1000 per day leaving these shores. It appears that not only are people leaving the armed forces in increasing numbers but there is a significant increase in people quitting the UK for good.
Food for thought.
Well I left the RAF and Blighty, your correct. I didn't leave the RAF by choice, it was 'natural wastage' though.
Something the figures don't show, which is maybe unique to the RAF is how important 1 or 2 people can be as there are more and more specialist posts that are empty. Certain branches/trade are understaffed and constantly in and out of Iraq/Afg too. Plenty of SOs happily sat at PMA etc though.
One, of many, crazy situations is with the state of the Stn Regiment Flights. At large stations like Brize Norton (for example) you may have 3 or 4 Rocks to train 4, 000 odd people. It's crazy and despite their best efforts people are then going on guard, or to Iraq etc undertrained. These shortfalls also mean the average person in the RAF gets about 6 hours a year training for weapons, NBC, First Aid etc Even if you add IDT total training can be less than 20 hours a year. We then send people in to dangerous places having maybe fired less than 100 live rounds in their life. Why are we in this situation? The lack of training staff prevents any additional hours of training. People then have to re-do CCS before they do guard or go out OOA if they have less than 6 months currency left (which almost doubles the workload). Plus all the flights/sections can not spare their staff for longer as they are so understaffed.
If you look at the maths you would need 1 instructor teaching CCS 5 days a week, for 50 weeks (I doubt they are lucky enough to get 2 weeks leave a year though) are year with 20 people per class to get through 5000 people. That assumes you can teach CCS on your own, but you can't and leaves no time for IDT, IRT, SGF courses.
Must be at least another 100 examples of critical overstrech like this.