Originally Posted by this_easy_life
My terms and conditions that I signed up to have been altered beyond all recognition, I wasn't told that my entire career would be ops in the Middle East...
Originally Posted by melmothtw
If you joined up before 11/09/2001 then who knew to inform you? If you joined up after, then it wouldn't have taken a rocket scientist to have guessed where you'd be spending most of your time.
Melmothtw, when easy says the bit in bold above, I interpret it differently. I don't believe he was naive enough to assume that he wouldn't see some sort of operational time in the ME; anyone who joined within the 21st century has very little excuse in that sense.
However, I don't think any of us thought that our
entire careers would be nothing but op deployments and training for them. Perhaps, like me and my peers, easy thought he might get the chance for the occasional tour off the front line. Maybe an instructional job. Maybe an out of branch tour, or something different like recruiting?
I have peers who've moved for the past 4-8 years through 3 or 4 separate Tornado squadrons, sometimes bouncing from one that's just returned from HERRICK to one that's just about to start the workup. One colleague is 32 months into a GR4 tour. He's spent 16 months at Kandahar, 3 months at Gioia supporting ELLAMY, and is now into a stint at Aki on SHADER. Counting a couple of weeks here and there on exercises etc, he's been away for something like 21 months out of a 32 month tour.
What waits after this tour? Probably another GR4 tour, maybe as a QWI, and more of the same, with just 3 FL sqns to cover the load.
People joined up to go on ops, sure. But I don't know anyone who joined up to spend 2 years out of a 3 year tour on ops. That's fine if you're a young, enthusiastic 19 year old, maybe, but when the training system's so broken we have 30 year old first tourists, it's not entirely reasonable. People have a right to a life, a family, the chance to live normally, and that level of deployment doesn't allow it.
If things had been managed better, maybe we'd still have 5 or even 7 front line GR4 squadrons handling HERRICK/ELLAMY/SHADER, plus the small det to Africa. Then it wouldn't be the same people over and over again, both aircrew and groundcrew. There should be enough people to stick to harmony rules. There should be enough people to allow everyone varied careers. When 6 out of 8 of your colleagues looking at postings are getting extended or otherwise shafted by Manning, it's clear we don't have enough people.
And yes, some people, even within spitting distance of IPP, do vote with their feet. I'm sure that with the sort of deployment burden II(AC) have had, a crap cheese sandwich would have been the final straw for me!