Ah yes, and part of the utopia involved Top Brass selling the justification for redundancy at a time of war on the grounds of freeing up engineers from working in Deep, enabling them to boost manning on the Sqns. They failed to explain why the subsequent redundancies involved hundreds of engineers. Also RAF personnel would become multi-skilled, sadly the high paid Brass haven't explained how someone can be in Iraq and Afg at the same time.
The cuts were just that, cuts to fit a given budget.
Talk about moral and intellectual bankruptcy.
"...136. We consider the arrangements for the future support of military aircraft below (see paragraphs 163–181). However, one of the principal justifications for the decision to concentrate support—deep repair, scheduled maintenance and modification of aircraft—forward to main operating bases was the need to retain sufficient uniformed personnel to sustain the level of concurrent operations as set out in Future Capabilities. It is therefore,on the face of it, surprising that the bulk of the 2,750 redundancies from the RAF are to be aircraft engineers.
137. The proposal to provide 170 front line crews to man up to 64 offensive fast jets in an air expeditionary task group, representing an aircrew to aircraft manning ratio of approximately 2.5 to 1, reflects current practice. The numbers do not, however, represent the overall requirement for offensive fast jet aircrew. There is always a further number of aircrew on squadrons who are not yet combat ready, others who are filling operational and other training posts and others whose experience is essential to fill associated staff posts. We are concerned that the significant reductions in RAF manning in the short term ignore a predictable increased requirement in the medium to longer term, with the effect that a short term gain may undermine longer term resilience....."
Last edited by nigegilb; 3rd Sep 2007 at 12:44.