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Divining the right role, capabilities, structure, and Regimental System for Canada's Army Reserves

  • Thread starter Thread starter Yard Ape
  • Start date Start date
A lot of good work can get done on a weeknight,
3hrs doesn’t make sense for 1/2day pay.
Better use two weeknights for 1 full weekend day, as far as training value for $

there should be a mandatory summer concentration AND normally scheduled training. Not like we're hurting for pay budgets, we're understrength as is haha.
Ideally I think there would be 1 weekend of mandatory training/ month and a second weekend that is optional. As well as a 3 week mandatory training time / year
 
3hrs doesn’t make sense for 1/2day pay.
Better use two weeknights for 1 full weekend day, as far as training value for $


Ideally I think there would be 1 weekend of mandatory training/ month and a second weekend that is optional. As well as a 3 week mandatory training time / year
Weekends don't exist in a vacuum. Most weekends that are available are already used for training. You can't cancel weeknights and find more weekends because you won't get reservists in to work every weekend of the month anyways. Most units already are working two to three weekends a month. Better some than no training at all.
 
Weekends don't exist in a vacuum. Most weekends that are available are already used for training. You can't cancel weeknights and find more weekends because you won't get reservists in to work every weekend of the month anyways. Most units already are working two to three weekends a month. Better some than no training at all.
Well somehow the ARNG manages to do that - and have better VOR rates than the CA regular army ;)
 
Well somehow the ARNG manages to do that - and have better VOR rates than the CA regular army ;)
Helps to have actual replacement equipment available when stuff breaks. That's not a luxury we have.

I haven't worked much with the ARNG but when I have, they certainly could use more weeknight training, they leave a lot to be desired and their E-4s struggle with tasks like Nav that I expect my Troopers to be proficient at. Pros and cons I suppose.
 
17 Wing won't let reserve maintainers use their empty maintenance bays, nevermind training facilities. Myself and other reservists in the area have often wanted to run courses off the base but it's often not worth the aggravation. I 100% agree that facility sharing should be streamlined and formalized, infrastructure gatekeeping keeps the institution poorer for it.
It kinda warms my heart that my unit isn't the only ones battling this, we had to spend a lot of budget to turn a bay that was storage into a maintenance area/class room for the reservists because tech services wouldn't share the floor. It got so bad at one point and lead to an investigation because someone was slapping fake danger tags on vehicles so we couldn't move them. (If we needed a bay on a weekend we would move a vehicle, and put it back after)

Infighting helps none of us, especially with how short handed we are, I am glad we sorted our issues, only took posting season to sort the people put.
 
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Helps to have actual replacement equipment available when stuff breaks. That's not a luxury we have.
Honesty having a Military without equipment makes zero sense...

I haven't worked much with the ARNG but when I have, they certainly could use more weeknight training, they leave a lot to be desired and their E-4s struggle with tasks like Nav that I expect my Troopers to be proficient at. Pros and cons I suppose.
My only operational experience with the ARNG is 19th and 20th SFG, so I'm not really a good gauge of the conventional ARNG from a Solider Skills standpoint - but I noted in Iraq and Afghanistan that even Active Duty US Army Units had some major nav issues, following Blue Force Tracker and GPS blindly.

My own experience as a PRes guy in Canada almost 40 years ago leads me to believe that the majority of weeknight training is a waste.
At least 10 min wasted on a Parade Roll call, and pay sheet sign in - (and saw 30+ min on some other units). That has been mirrored by a number of other folks who've been in the PRes as well.

Given the fact that Reserves are generally designed as cheaper versions of the Regular Army - use of the personnel budget as rigorously as possible only makes more sense to me.
 
My own experience as a PRes guy in Canada almost 40 years ago leads me to believe that the majority of weeknight training is a waste.
At least 10 min wasted on a Parade Roll call, and pay sheet sign in - (and saw 30+ min on some other units). That has been mirrored by a number of other folks who've been in the PRes as well.
Evenings are not an efficient use of paid time. Changing culture to weekends-only will likely have short-terms costs (eg. retention) but long-term would likely be better for the institution, as would shifting days out of the Sep-Jun frame to create an additional one-week summer block (ie. a two-week concentration).
 
While troops aren't working most weekends, my experience the last number of years and based on this year's training calendar is that most leadership is working at least half, and often the majority of weekends as is. There physically aren't more NCOs to run additional training on any weekends that are actually free, which isn't many of them. Off the top of my head we're running 4 courses, and supplying instructors for 2-3 more. Some of these courses are fortunately short, and can combine things like ranges, but it gets impractical to ask people with families and civilian careers to start sacrificing every weekend for most of the year, before even getting into asking them to try and take a month/two/three months off to teach summer courses on top of that. This will obviously vary by unit of course.

I like the idea of more weekend training vs weeknights as you get more training value out of a whole day on say, a Saturday, rather than a couple weeknights, but unless we have a robust training establishment that can take care of all the weekend courses, and focus unit leadership on regular unit training it's extremely difficult, if not impossible, with current demands on what leadership is still around, outside of the occasional event.

Some weeknights are wasted, but there are plenty that are useful, battle procedure for exercises, post-ex drills, covering the myriad annual training requirements we need to hit, etc. Even with weekends being more efficient, a unit that isn't planning and effectively using it's weeknight training time is probably going to suffer the same failure to plan that will to lead to poorly utilized weekends and exercises in general.

Re: roll call and paysheets, roll call should be quick, but we desperately need a better system than pay sheets. That said, at least everything I've ever done, paysheets are signed before parade begins, so it shouldn't cut into the actual training time.

Tactical grouping of units can also help alleviate some of the above issues, but while some of the best exercises I've done were multi-unit exercises in the early 2010s, the last time we did a bunch of multi-unit exercises it was a disaster of lack of planning, communication, and conflicting priorities and directives from seemingly everyone involved. Also groupings should be based on logical parameters, like say, geography, rather than whether or not units wear funny hats.

We're missing a lot of things, and critically short of what we do we have, but even then it can be managed effectively, it just requires cooperation and good planning, the latter of which seems to be chronically missing.

Evenings are not an efficient use of paid time. Changing culture to weekends-only will likely have short-terms costs (eg. retention) but long-term would likely be better for the institution, as would shifting days out of the Sep-Jun frame to create an additional one-week summer block (ie. a two-week concentration).

I think the two week summer exercise hits the sweet spot for minimizing disruption of member's civilian obligations, while offering a good chunk of time to get good training in. Three weeks of training time is great, but starts getting more difficult depending on the employer. Align annual training plans to the concentration ex and even with our limited resources you can achieve good results.

None of this helps the support aspect, such as maintenance space, parts, tooling, training techs, or letting techs do tech things, but I'm not a tech and can't meaningfully comment on that outside of give them training, tools, spaces to work, and let their focus be on fixing stuff.
 
My own experience as a PRes guy in Canada almost 40 years ago leads me to believe that the majority of weeknight training is a waste.
At least 10 min wasted on a Parade Roll call, and pay sheet sign in - (and saw 30+ min on some other units). That has been mirrored by a number of other folks who've been in the PRes as well.

Given the fact that Reserves are generally designed as cheaper versions of the Regular Army - use of the personnel budget as rigorously as possible only makes more sense to me.

Our standard policy is we start working at 1900, arrive 15 minutes prior to sign in, parade at 5 to the hour. We are usually going by 10 after at the latest. If we want to go faster, we really need to modernize how we do signing in for class A. Anything weapons though is almost pointless IMO, issuing weapons can take 30 minutes, plus 30 to return, so you got maybe 2 periods to do classes.
 
I'm not a fan of weeknight training either. Usually you get two - three if you are lucky - periods of training in.

Plus you get your weekly hour in the mess in as well so there is a socialization pull associated with that.
Sarcastic Sarcasm GIF

It does provide an opportunity for more senior leaders to get some administration done. In 26Fd Tuesdays was admin nights, Thursday was training (albeit leadership did more admin) and there were two weekends per month for training (some of which were field exercises). We RSS took every Monday off which meant we had alternating one-day and three-day weekends.

I tend to favour a system which comprises both mandatory and voluntary training. Initial mandatory training would consist of DP1 trg for both officers and ORs conducted during summer school breaks and heavily - if not exclusively - targeting students and as close to RegF standards as possible. Continuing mandatory training would be limited in time (one weekend per month from Sep to June, none during July (for vacations) and 16.5 consecutive days in August) targeting individual retention of skills training and subunit collective training. The annual schedule of mandatory training must be set out at least a year in advance so that all individuals, families and employers know well in advance when these sessions will take place and can adjust accordingly.

All DP2 and higher individual training would be voluntary training conducted through distance learning, local armories or summer trg as appropriate.

One of the reasons that I favour the 30/70 structure of hybrid units is that even under today's austere equipment holdings, there is still sufficient equipment available for training and further sufficient RegF personnel allocated to conduct unit administration and the organization and conduct of training.

🍻
 
Our standard policy is we start working at 1900, arrive 15 minutes prior to sign in, parade at 5 to the hour. We are usually going by 10 after at the latest. If we want to go faster, we really need to modernize how we do signing in for class A. Anything weapons though is almost pointless IMO, issuing weapons can take 30 minutes, plus 30 to return, so you got maybe 2 periods to do classes.
Bulk weapon draws prepped on carts before parade starts, signed for by responsible pers for each pl has worked out well for us. If it's things like HMGs or SF kits you could also have a couple pers who are available earlier in the evening get them setup prior to, so the main body can just focus on training while a few pers handle setup and return.

Weekends also have the benefit of being easier for people who are further away. A couple hour commute is a lot more manageable done twice a month for a long day than once every week for a few hours training. But again, I don't think it's practical at this time at least in my area with existing demand on weekends for leadership as it is.
 
For those arguing against the retention of the messes, and that consider socializing anathema -

How many people, in the absence of messes, would head down to the nearest pub after training?
 
A lot of good work can get done on a weeknight, there should be a mandatory summer concentration AND normally scheduled training. Not like we're hurting for pay budgets, we're understrength as is haha.
Weeknights are inherently inefficient. 3 hours, including some kind of opening and closing down organization, costs a half day. I can get double the hours for the same price on a weekend. With a lot less time spent on admin.
 
Weeknights are inherently inefficient. 3 hours, including some kind of opening and closing down organization, costs a half day. I can get double the hours for the same price on a weekend. With a lot less time spent on admin.
There's only so many weekends in a training year, we're kinda maxed out on that front unless reservists don't get any weekends off haha.
 
There's only so many weekends in a training year, we're kinda maxed out on that front unless reservists don't get any weekends off haha.
No offense to you personally- over the last couple years I've noticed that a lot of these types of "reform" discussions go circular because "Reform X" won't work because of "Status Quo Constraint/Reason Y." There's two productive paths forward in that discussion- either questioning the proposer on how "X" would render "Y" moot or advance the discussion on how Y is something that needs to be considered and solved.
 
I found the weeknights useful for all the admin churn, which more has been added since my day. Also kit issue, exchange, testing and packing kit prior to the weekend exercise, planning and then cleanup and packing away tents that had been put out to dry, etc. We did one night a week and it was always busy.
 
I found the weeknights useful for all the admin churn, which more has been added since my day. Also kit issue, exchange, testing and packing kit prior to the weekend exercise, planning and then cleanup and packing away tents that had been put out to dry, etc. We did one night a week and it was always busy.
The better solution is reducing the admin overhead.

It's something the CAF is slowly adopting, but it needs to move faster into the digital age.
 
No offense to you personally- over the last couple years I've noticed that a lot of these types of "reform" discussions go circular because "Reform X" won't work because of "Status Quo Constraint/Reason Y." There's two productive paths forward in that discussion- either questioning the proposer on how "X" would render "Y" moot or advance the discussion on how Y is something that needs to be considered and solved.
Fair enough but in my opinion they aren't overly well informed reform ideas. How do you deal with the lost time from cut training? Reservists aren't coming in every weekend for nine months. I'm all for reform, but it needs to make sense.
 
The better solution is reducing the admin overhead.

It's something the CAF is slowly adopting, but it needs to move faster into the digital age.
That still leaves the exercise prep/cleanup, you never get rid of all the admin either. I can see one night useful, but not 2
 
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