What the hell is wrong with this nation.

[Mike]

And we can give £48m ? in bonuses to M.o.D. staff

[HighlandSniper]

disgraceful

[T_J]

So we can spare chinooks to film a scene in a christmas advert for waitrose while our guys out in the warzone can go swing because they say we don't have enough! What a darn disgrace

It is a complete non-story. I assume you are referring to the Waitrose advert that featured last year? It was the same when the press picked up on service families being taken on Chinook flights during Families Days. The filming, as with the families of service personnel being flown, will be incorporated into routine training. Think about it? Not every Chinook can be deployed to Afghanistan as a proportion have to remain for training and UK tasking.

Debate from 2008

http://www.pprune.org/military-aircrew/ ... trose.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

TJ

[Jimbo27]

And we can give £48m ? in bonuses to M.o.D. staff

And this one is equally b******s...

[T_J]

Link to the 2008 Waitrose advert that is featuring again this year.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oe23gCqP7O8" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

TJ

[SteveS]

A good point well made Teej, there was a similar stupid debate on UKAR I think a few months back I think, regarding why do we have a Chinook display when it could be off in Afghanistan saving lives - it's not that simple. If we sent all our Chinook's overseas to war, we'd soon find ourselves in a mess, because no-one would be doing any training on the darn things - that's why they're not all overseas!

Steve

[jingernut]

Surely some Chinooks are over here anyway for training purposes. A total non-story if ever there was one.

edit: Steve beat me to it

[GOOSE]

This may well be a re rerun of last years ad but when you live in a small town that just lost two soldiers this sort of thing sucks balls. I have a friend who is married to a red cap, they had their first child three weeks ago and he goes to afghanistan next month. Nice to know the MOD can rent out helicopters to supermarkets when our guys have walk.

Sorry Mish. I'm from Gy / Clee myself. Your objection simply does not stand up. Are you saying that training should not be conducted prior to a deployment? Your Red Cap friend would disagree.

[Richard B]

Do not understand how we have 85.000 civil servant pen pushers getting a bonus.
also they should not be getting any bonus when they have under performed, with our men out on the front line under equipped.

[Pen Pusher]

Do not understand how we have 85.000 civil servant pen pushers getting a bonus.
also they should not be getting any bonus when they have under performed, with our men out on the front line under equipped.

I love it when uninformed people, basing their opinions on biased press reports, jump on a band wagon.

Brian

[T_J]

Mish,
You are still failing to realise that a proportion of Chinooks have to remain in the UK. Crews need to train, exercises have to be conducted and emergency relief roles have to be taken into consideration. The recent floods and support to civilian authorities, for example.

http://www.mod.uk/DefenceInternet/Defen ... Effort.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

The MoD is also a huge landowner and makes considerable amounts of money from hiring out filming locations.

http://www.films.mod.uk/index.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

http://www.mod.uk/DefenceInternet/Defen ... kdrops.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

The application form on the website highlight the following

'Please state whether military personnel and/or equipment will also be required: YES / NO'

The Chinook in the filming has to remain in the UK. The Waitrose team get to film part of a scheduled training mission and their actor has a few ground shots in the back.

Earlier this year the media got a roasting from service personnel/families over Families Days flights. Flights that would have been scheduled into the crew training pattern for an asset that has to remain in the UK.

http://www.newsoftheworld.co.uk/news/43 ... ights.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

http://www.pprune.org/military-aircrew/ ... -notw.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

TJ

[Pen Pusher]

Press release from Prospect Union over media miss information.

12/11/2009

Prospect, the union for 10,000 Ministry of Defence specialist civil servants has condemned the witch-hunt by the media over the payment of bonuses to its staff this year.

National secretary Steve Jary said: “First, these bonuses represent 2.8% of the pay bill which has been removed from basic pay progressively over the last eight years. This is in-line with 20 years of government policy to increase the use of performance pay in the civil service.

“Second, if civil servants were not doing some of the work in MOD, it would be done by military staff - at twice the cost to the taxpayer.

“Third, the purchase and supply of military equipment is undertaken by teams made up of civil servants and military officers. The majority of these teams are headed by military officers. If you believe they are under-performing, make sure you take the military hierarchy to task as well.

The union says newspapers have repeated ill-informed comments about the ratio of civil servants to the armed forces. In fact MOD is more tightly staffed than it was in 1997 by 30%. The number of civilians has dropped three times as fast as the number of service personnel.

“Civilian servants are deployed in Afghanistan in large numbers – intelligence analysis, operational research, logistics – which of these ‘pen pushers’ does not deserve our respect,” said Jary.

Brian

[urkles]

I think there is alot of picking on the wrong targets here Gents, it seems to me the problem is an insufficiant defence budget for a country at war, does that sound about right?

[Pen Pusher]

I think there is alot of picking on the wrong targets here Gents, it seems to me the problem is an insufficiant defence budget for a country at war, does that sound about right?

YES.

It's the Treasury, approved by the PM, who dictate how much money there is to spend on Defence and it's the MoD Civil Servants who have to use that money to make anything work. If it can't be stretched to make anything work then it's the Civil Servants who get the blame and not the Treasury that set the budget in the first place.

Brian

[headset 57]

So we can spare chinooks to film a scene in a christmas advert for waitrose while our guys out in the warzone can go swing because they say we don't have enough! What a darn disgrace

It's a training exercise and i'm sure waitrose paid for it.

[Sheff]

As has been said, training ops have no direct effect on Afghanistan. It is perhaps a little tasteless though to use a Chinook for advertising in the present circumstances. But then the whole Afghanistan saga is media-fed and it would be unwise to assume that all our problems over there are due to a shortage of helicopters in any case - obviously they are not. In some respects the helicopter saga has just become an easy topic for the media who seem unwilling to take-on the wider question of what the hell we're doing in Afghanistan in the first place. I'm constantly amazed at how the media seems incapable of addressing this fundamental question, and they carry-on allowing idiots like Gordon Brown to say that "withdrawal is not an option" as he has done again today. Thankfully, voting him out of office is an option however...

I suspect that one of the reasons why the media is so scared of taking-on the real issue is because they've fallen into this trap of thinking that supporting the war means supporting our forces (and therefore vice-versa). Of course this is quite the opposite of the reality, but the media are scared of being accused of "not supporting our boys" if they question why we're allowing them to be sent-off to be killed. It's complete madness. Thankfully we are gradually drifting away from the media-fed obsession with equipment shortages and slowly starting to address the key issue of whether we should just get out of the country completely. Brown might keep blithering about this not being an option but I suspect that public (and eventually media) opinion will gradually force our beloved politicians to get honest about the whole business and not allow us all to get side-tracked by other issues. We can see that we're already moving this way - at long last.

[Vulcanone]

....

[Sheff]

Indeed - it looks like he might actually reach a decision next week... finally. Of course, we're simply stuck here treading water until Obama effectively tells us what our policy is. Absolute madness.

[garethbrum]

I'm constantly amazed at how the media seems incapable of addressing this fundamental question, and they carry-on allowing idiots like Gordon Brown to say that "withdrawal is not an option" as he has done again today. Thankfully, voting him out of office is an option however...

Withdrawal would be "deeply damaging, if not catastrophic, for Nato's cohesion and credibility" - Dr Liam Fox, Shadow Defence Minister Sept 09

"Let me be clear: we support the mission in Afghanistan provided we are realistic about what we are aiming to achieve. And to us the overriding aim must be to train those Afghan forces so they can take responsibility for their own security and our soldiers can come back home." David Cameron 14/10/09

I'm really struggling to work out how a new government will mark a change in policy. The Tories have given no indication that they will make any significant changes in foreign policy at all!

Gareth

[mrlongbow]

Withdrawal would be "deeply damaging, if not catastrophic, for Nato's cohesion and credibility" - Dr Liam Fox, Shadow Defence Minister Sept 09

Well we could add it to the list of other things that the Americans and long before Britain has messed up. Not involving Nato but certainly damaging our credibility.