My Missus is in the RAF, and when not on deployment or treating the injured back home, works in hospitals along side civilian medical staff looking after civvies.

Wouldn’t surprise me if they get involved in “shipping aid to bongo bongo land” 😮 (see other thread)

konabunny – Member
…sort of ignoring the police’s role in the origins of the London riots there.

POSTED 1 HOUR AGO # REPORT-POST

Christ on a bike, not this again.

The forces are just a microcosm of society there are good and bad elements, there are young boozy men just like you’ll find in town centres across the land.

When they are not at war they can be peacekeeping for the UN, helping with civil disaster, training, exercising, maintaining and cleaning.

OP – firstly, there is still a war in Afghanistan. About 5,000 are preparing to go; 5,500 are deployed; 6,000 are recovering and picking up their lives; 20,000 are in basic, advanced & trade training; 600 are peacekeeping in Cyprus; a unspecified number in the Falklands; about 800 in Brunei… The remainder are training in order to provide a credible deterrent against future threats. The only certainty is uncertainty; the only preparation is adaptability.

The Army only acts in civil emergencies when asked to do so by the local authorities. In fact, most civilian agencies and blue light services are are much better placed to help in civil emergencies than the Armed Forces, apart from specific niche skills eg. Bomb disposal, amphibious vehicles, and mass aviation.

A private soldier today is better trained, equipped and educated than a SAS Trooper in the Falklands War, but they will happily fill sand bags and help the public when asked to do so.

A private soldier today is better trained, equipped and educated than a SAS Trooper in the Falklands War

I can believe the equipped bit but not the trained.

Surely even in the 1980’s the SAS and SBS would have had specialist skills and training way in excess of an average soldier today?

ton – Member

project, just tell the stupid woman, no matter how many sandbags are filled and stacked, with the amount of water falling from the skies, anyone trying to stop the flooding is on a loser.

youve obviously not tried telling a stupid woman anything relevant to a discussion.

All sandbags do is divert the water, and they leak with standing water behind them, what was needed is the army to move people and possesions to higher ground and enforce traffic regulation, something the blue light people dont have the staff or means to do

what was needed is the army to move people and possesions to higher ground and enforce traffic regulation, something the blue light people dont have the staff or means to do

And the army do?

“Enforce traffic regulation” – Really?

Im RAF Aircraft techie. First point is. I go into work and graft my nuts off all day, with barely a minute to think let alone have a brew. As for the 45k personel, where the hell did that figure come from. 32k ish and with more and more cuts. We are completely overstretched. Wish I had time to skive off.
Amazing the amount of “know what they do as dave up the road told me in 1972” people that know sod all about the day to day work

So what does a soldier do on a base when not marching, shooting guns, and polishing painting stuff anfd how come theyre not called out straight away in a civil emergency.

The likes of the teeth arms (infantry etc) will train. They spend a lot of time training for their role. There will also be a readiness cycle for a lot of the units who will have to rotate a duty of being on standby as the lead unit to be deployed anywhere as reqired by the govt. As said, a load are still in Afghanistan, so there are those preparing to go, those there and those just back.
The Corps (Royal Engineers, REME, Sigs etc) and most of the RAF do their job on a daily basis. All that equipment gets used in support of those training tasks and other ‘real’ jobs so it neds maintaining and looking after just the same as it does when being used in anger. Plus bomb disposal, search and rescue (for now), aircraft crash recovery, training for prison officer strikes etc etc.

As for being called out earlier – the civil authorities must exhaust mutual aid, the private sector and other agencies before calling for the forces. The military and the civil agencies are totally distinct for lots of reasons. There is work under way to improve the links, but the military are not trained too much in natural disaster recovery or any of the other 1000 tasks people think you can put untrained people in to when it is an emergency.
It is, of course, more complex than this, but you get the idea.

Just a point for a few of the more ignorant posters – it is often better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than open it and remove all doubt.

Winston_dog. Interestingly, infantry soldiers in Afghanistan now do what SF did a couple of decades ago: train indigenous forces, conduct raids, assault compounds, operate in small groups etc… The educational standards have risen to meet the demands of IT and communications equipment, learning languages, medical skills, controlling aviation and fast air, operating complex weapons systems and vehicles.

A fully trained British soldier is a highly skilled professional – they can even fill sand bags, but so could the rest of us.