The Royal Air Force, in it entirety, is no different to a Sqn – It will have its ups and downs in morale.
You can have a Sqn where morale is superbly high. In the space of 6 months that morale can plummet; all it takes is a few key players (i.e. characters) to be posted and a few bad apples posted in. You know the ones I mean: they don’t attend beer calls or any Sqn functions, eager to get away as soon as possible and they will always find reasons why the job can’t be done rather than it can be done.
When I joined the RAF in 78, I joined an Air Force that had recently lost a lot of people, aeroplanes and good postings. The RAF had recently pulled out of the Far East. It was shrinking rapidly. In fact my father had left in 1977 and he was a little bit concerned that I was joining. All in all morale was on a bit of a low.
However, the eighties brought the Falklands, a surge in the cold war (cruise missile and Greenham Commen etc, etc) and Tornado taking over Germany. It climaxed in 1991 with GW1. Morale just got better and better. During the late eighties and early nineties morale was at a peak. However (and this is only my opinion) after about 1997 morale started to go down again.
As a Sqn person, in one of four corners of Bruggen and a short tour on the SH force, we noticed that more and more people came out of the woodwork to cash in on the morale party. They introduced more and more petty rules such as CCS, fitness tests, IIP and tick in the box QA programs. They even told us how we should deploy to a bare based airfield in the desert.
The biggest problem was the way they portrayed their argument; it was almost impossible for anybody to counter it. Everybody that worked hard and deployed for several months of the year away suffered.
Then it got worse after GW2. “Lean” became the new buzz word. Manpower in the most hardworking of places was cut. Again people were told how to do their jobs by people that did not have a clue. Change after change took place; Forward and Depth replaced 1st and 2nd line and suddenly Sqn engineers and junior aircrew just became a pool of manpower. Finally JPA came along……no need to say any more on that subject.
The non deployable RAF have a lot of bad apples at the moment and they really do not help the real hard workers that actually do the work. A lot of those bad apples sit here on pprune arguing, slagging off and pretending to be whiter than white. They very much have a glass half empty attitude. These people will leave one day and they will be replaced by characters that will play in the big team.
And finally, a message to “The Swinging Monkey”, with respect to my flawed argument. Glenn was at Bruggen and morale was mega high. From what I can gather everybody that has met him thinks he is a top bloke. He rose above the rest, not because he was a yes man but because he was/is good. But a single man cannot get rid of the disease of bad morale overnight.
I have left the Royal Air Force recently; morale was probably at the lowest that I have ever known in 29 years. But it will bounce back with leaders like Glenn. And all the bad apples will either retire or put their money where their mouths are and PVR.
My question to CAS:
When you get rid of the bad apples will you let me join again – cause I loved it?