MoD's London brass resist job cuts

Rank Inflation

Just create a new Über-General and bump every job-description and pay grade down one level. Everybody gets to keep his rank and there'd be some room for years of generous promotions.

How come they never though of that?

Some things never change

and others just get worse. I used to think my Dad's solution to the civil service population was a bit extreme, now I find that I agree with him but instead of 2/3rds it should be 75% of them lined up against a wall and shot and the other 25% made to do a proper days work like everyone else.

I used to argue that they should be sacked not shot, he would argue that the compensation paid out to the families would be less than the wages and index linked pensions.

Looks like he was right :P

Stop sign, the civil service is probably big enough for a 200% population growth already

Do a "Proper days work?"

Not if I can bloody help it!

get rid of civil servants not miliatary personel

The numbers in your report may indicate that the RAF has more wing-commanders than wings to command, but other positions, notably squadron dentist are of a wing-commander rank.

Little more understanding of how the military ranks works please!

Also shoot the civil servants, they are a waste of space.

Draft the civil servants into the Army

(yes, I did mean "Draft", as in, legally forced into the army, even if against their will).

They would have to come in as grunts of course, then they can be given 6 weeks basic training and shipped out to Iraq or Afghanistan.

Make sure the ex-civil servants get the soft skinned "snatch" land-rovers that they were so keen to tell us were up to the job and make sure they're at the back of the queue for body armour, so that the proper soldiers get the proper kit and the civil servant get the kit they were willing to pay for.

It will actually save money too, 'cos soldiers get paid a damn sight less than civil servants.

Mine's the one with the extra 7.62mm ammo in the pocket.

Simple solution

Just take the 1200 desktop warriors and send them to Afghanistan as the Home Guard. They can be used for guard duties, while the real soldiers go out and do their job.

Kind of like a cross between 'Dad's Army', Carry On Up the Kybher' and 'It Ain't Half Hot Mum'.

Sometimes I don't agree with these articles, but this was right on.

re: I always wondered why we needed 100,000 civil servants to manage the armed forces

There used to be a fair few of them doing things needed to support the troops - ranging from maintaining/repairing equipment to installation and design that would have had the MOD ripped off even more than usual - and if not on the front line, some have certainly been into operation support areas.

But with the changes to "outsourcing" during the 90's and then during the late 90s the start of equality for all "grades" irrespective of the qualifications and skills - I suspect most have now left and been replaced with pen pushers monitoring contact compliance where they have no authority or power to actually do anything

bitter no - pay is much better out side ( though bureaucracy seems as bad) :)

Red flag them

Send the civies into Afgan waving red flags infront of the vehicles (see your history if you don't get it) - they'll easier to replace if they get hit by roadside bombs.

I'm a little surprised

To be reading about quite a few people supporting the pen pushers in command/mod central. I used to be an Officer in the RAF, and served in a variety of different places, including alongside MOD civil servants, on the front line, and in command. I was left in no doubt at all by my experience that most staffers are pretty useless and the command organisations could be very heavily cut back; and that the MOD civil service is very inefficient, with it's key ability being justifying their own jobs (see this article for more on that). One thing that routinely happens within these organisations is that a requirement changes for some reason, a new organisation is created for the new requirement, but the old organisation refuses to die; usually because of some civil servants who don't want to change what they are doing. I saw it first hand, because I had the misfortune when I was leaving the RAF of ending up in one of those areas. The job was no longer required, but the group that did it refused to die.

A great example of this is PJHQ. When the Permanent Joint Headquarters was formed it took command responsibility for all deployments, regardless of colour (green, light blue, dark blue). However, all the existing command functions at the RAF, RN and Army remained, without any real cuts. I worked for a while in one of the Strike Command functions, and it was clear that we weren't needed, all the important work was going on at Northwood in PJHQ. But, if they cut back Strike Command, then the 4 star would be out of a job, because the 4 star at Northwood rotates between the services.

Bureaucracies

Over half of any bureaucratic workforce are useless drones that, at best, merely retard work slightly, and in worse cases actively interfere. You could turn the drones into cat food without anyone much caring, except for the kitties.

Unfortunately, the drone concentration increases as you go up the ladder, and drones protect drones, so if a "fire half of them!" order comes down from on high, you'll lose many more useful than useless employees. Also, non-drones tend to be rather short-tempered with the idiots around them, so have reputations as being "uncooperative", "not team players", etc, which are convenient excuses to use when purging the ranks.

Footnote re kitties: they probably wouldn't eat canned drone. Mine took one bite of a venison cat food and said "fuck off, meow, that stuff is inedible." Maybe it was laced with melamine?

CCCP

Er, "capacity for concurrent contingency planning"? Some sort of soviet?

@Cal

"be of a suitable rank to blame should it all go tits up"

And we all know that will be the lowest POS on the totem pole.