Swompdonkey

The Chocolate Side of the Force



"**I move my frontal breathing vent away from the mic to respirate."

That's just awesome.

If you haven't yet, check out the original. Over 12 million views. Unbelievable.


*****

Jon Kay looks at military funding in this country over the last 40 years or so. The data may surprise you at first, but there is a reason something looks cockeyed. (hint: check the comments for the answer) The real kicker for me is that not only did I join the CF just as defence spending went into a nosedive, but I left just as it started to get better!

I can well imagine that nowadays the average no-hook buck private reservist with 18 months of service has already had access to more state-of-the-art military equipment and advanced training than I ever did as an NCM and Officer from 1993 to 1999. And that is as it should be.

Becoming a soldier today, even a reservist, is no longer the vague open-ended commitment it was when I got in fifteen years ago. The prospect of combat looms large, and the preparation for this eventuality must, I think, give the task of training and moulding the soldier a focus and urgency that the process may have lacked in the nineties.

For instance, I have no doubt that nowadays, the average recruit gets familiarized with every weapon in the infantry's arsenal, including mortars and anti-armour weapons, sometime in their first couple of years of service.

Yet even though something like the .50 machine gun is considered one of the basic arms of the mounted infanteer, and I perhaps flatter myself to believe that I was trained as an infantryman – I never got to fire a single round from one.

The fifty cals were always in “war stores” (reserved for use on UN missions overseas and workup training for UN missions) whenever it came time to break them out and learn how to operate them on any given course during any given summer of my unremarkable militia career. As time and time again my training on the weapon was deferred, the "Fifty" began to take on an almost mythical status.

After a while, I came to suspect that the 50 cal did not in fact yet exist -- that it was a theoretical weapon that military theoreticians had developed to help formulate future doctrine in the war colleges of NATO. It wasn't theoretical. It was in fact an antique - it had existed for close to a century; basically a precursor of the weapon was used during the Great War. Imagine my surprise the first time I saw one being fired on exercise, 4 years after joining the military!

Such was life in the militia in the nineties!