I spy an opening for an analogy:
Civvy scuba divers are trained to do safety or buddy checks before they enter the water to make sure that they know how their buddy's kit works. After training, a lot of them ignore said buddy check ("well I'm trained now!") and it's amazing how many of them die each year and could have been saved if they'd stuck to their training.
Military scuba divers are trained to do buddy checks. After completing their training they know that they should carry on doing their buddy checks because if they keep it STANDARD, then it could help them out of a potentially lethal situation. It's amazing how few military scuba divers die each year!
I remember about 3 years ago liaising with the ops team at MACC (darn good people too!) so that we could spread throughout MACC how military area radar controllers would coordinate with them and what we expected to hear back. A number of incidents had occurred due to ambiguity in the coordination phraseology used by SOME MACC controllers. If nothing else is standard across the 2 UK ATCO worlds, it's for sure that coordination phraseology should be. And no, there should not be any leeway for 'thinking outside the box.' As I think LonMil said earlier in this thread, how difficult can it be? Not above, not below, maintaining.
