FJAG
Army.ca Legend
- Reaction score
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12 - 14. It varied over the three years I was BK. They were great folks too - my favourite people and not just because they kept stuff moving. One summer we ran into a strange problem on our spring exercise. Shilo has lots of poplar trees and they throw out fluff during the spring. The M109s air intake filters ingested it and no one noticed until it was too late and between J and G Bty we lost, I think, it was five engines due to overheating. It got to the point where we'd have to stop every few kilometres and clean out the filters. Long story short, all the guns were back on the road within a week. Yup five engines pulled and changed. We had VOR rates close to zero most of the time I was there. - Except G11 - an M113 - which kept running real weird and would frequently lose power. After almost a year of going into and out of the shop they finally found a small ball of gun tape in the fuel tank which, every once in the while, bobbed against the fuel line and choked the flow making the engine sputter and surge.You had 12 techs for your battery? That must be nice
When Ops tasked we had a vehicle tech with 5/4 ton full of parts and tools. He restored old army vehicles as a hobby and was quite talented and we were able to maintain our fleet of trucks quite well. I will argue that the Reserve goal should be 1 vehicle tech per unit with a basic tool setup and parts. Have some of them on Class B and you have enough techs to keep the fleets in much better shape.
Clearly this will not work everywhere, but should be encouraged and supported.
It's hard to do maintenance on a Class A concept unless you have "that guy" who can take time off during the week. I find that a full-time Class B is just another term for a RegF soldier who can't be posted or deployed. Personally I think that the ResF must be equipped and that means there need to be full-time maintainers there and a proper logistics system behind them. That means a proper RegF establishment. Where there's a will, there's a way.Class B or a civilian contractor full time. Either or.
Totally agree. BUT. We have to get away from the notion that service support comes from the closest army base because those bases are no where near where the largest reserve force population is - the bigger cities. We need to bolster the service support to those.This is also part of why I don’t like the way we spread out units, reserve service Bns are a terrible way to organize maintenance for Bdes dispersed across a province. I digress though.
I don't think this is a digression at all. If we're talking about replacing the ResF C3s, we better have a solid logistics plan in place for that. Even back in the 70s when I was an RSSO in Brandon, we had troubles getting work done by base maintenance on our C1s or trucks in a timely manner because we were number 5 on a scale of 1- 5 priority list. Base maintenance - who supported 26 Fd - were a whole different kettle of fish from 3 RCHA's maintenance troop.