MILITARY RELATED CELLULAR USE BY RESERVISTS

[Jarnhamar]

well aware.  My point is that there is the expectation.  Hell, they even include that as a fail safe in their planning at times.

Doesn't the C in a paCe plan stand for Cell phone?  ;D

 

[Oldgateboatdriver]

What! You never heard of the Bridge on the River Trout?  ;D

And, isn't  using the phone system the way the US Marines call in artillery fire? (p.s.: It was so funny that Clint Eastwood put it in his movie Heartbreak Ridge)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7RqMDU9eDI

 

[chrisf]

The Army built a bridge at Trouty?

https://www.ctvnews.ca/mobile/military-builds-bridge-in-town-isolated-by-igor-1.558001

 

[daftandbarmy]

Just don't use your phone in the field if you don't want.

In the past, I have made this clear to my troops. Unfortunately, they are too interested in doing a first class job in the face of the inadequate communications equipment provided by the CAF to pay much attention to me.

 

[chrisf]

What! You never heard of the Bridge on the River Trout?  ;D

No me ol' trout... Trout River is on the west coast... the bridge was in Trouty.

Bare in mind, this is the same province thats home to the communities of Blow Me Down, Dildo, Black Hole, and a whole lot of other ridiculous place names

Most of those places also have terrible cell phone coverage.

 

[BDTyre]

The best is when they expect you to use your cell phone on ex because comms goes down.

Or when the GPS was loaded with the wrong data...

 

[daniey3]

:not-again: :Tin-Foil-Hat:

 

[Oldgateboatdriver]

No me ol' trout... Trout River is on the west coast... the bridge was in Trouty.

I swear there must be a "Trout" river in every province of Canada, including, to my knowledge, no less than three "rivière à la Truite" just in Québec.  ;D

But I jest: I was just trying to make a play on words with "the Bridge on the River Kwai" and Trouty has two syllables instead of just one, so I cut it down to one. In fact, at Trouty, it's not even a river. The bridge is over a narrow arm of the Atlantic ocean that comes inland from the coast by about 600 meters before spreading out into a small pond-shaped basin. That pond shaped area was well protected from the sea, so that's where the fishermen of the inshore fisheries kept their dories in the old days. The town like many in NL just grew up around that protected basin. 

 

[chrisf]

But I jest: I was just trying to make a play on words with "the Bridge on the River Kwai" and Trouty has two syllables instead of just one, so I cut it down to one. In fact, at Trouty, it's not even a river. The bridge is over a narrow arm of the Atlantic ocean that comes inland from the coast by about 600 meters before spreading out into a small pond-shaped basin. That pond shaped area was well protected from the sea, so that's where the fishermen of the inshore fisheries kept their dories in the old days. The town like many in NL just grew up around that protected basin.

I got your joke, but I also got to bring up Dildo, so it's a win-win.

I did not know that about the bridge though, I've never had reason to go to Trouty, the closest I've been is Dunfield.

Side note, if anyone does find themselves heading to Trouty, stop by for a coffee and a sandwich at Two Whales cafe in Port Rexton, and if you're in Port Rexton anyway, take a few minutes to drop by the brewery.

If you need to make a phone call, you'll need to do it at the top of the hill on either side of the town though.

Its not just small towns in the arse end of Newfoundland though, the same problem exists throughout a surprising amount of our huge country, extremely limited cell phone coverages.

Even in urban areas, cell coverage is reduced severely within 24-48 hours of a power outage, when batteries start dying.

Same thing with any fibre optic based phone systems, even if you have a backup generator available, when pole mounted repeater batteries start dying, service dies.

It's a bit of an aside from the original topic, but the military puts entirely too much reliance on cell phones.

Any sort of aid to civil power exercise should really include the order "no cell phone communications, issued or otherwise" just to see how it goes.

 

[runormal]

This isn't about a text or two.  It's about using our cell phones as 522's on exercise.  This rarely happens at the unit level but I've seen it on large concentrations or collective exercises.  If cell phones are the back up then issue them.

They should be, as should be Sat Phones. Heck we used to roll out Line Dets back when I first joined (which still should happen). The comms situation is laughable  with radios, trucks and personel. It's not really a surprise that people are leaving, "make it work" can only go on for so long.

This is still a problem.

The military has developed an over reliance on cell phones, that will bite them.
It is and already should be a "lesson learned", but folks refuse to learn it.

100% agreed. As the cell coverage increased it appears that our usefullness has diminished. It seems more important to make it "work", rather than to make sure that collective training is benefical for everyone. Anything complicated? "Fuck it, I'll call Major XXXX on my black berry." Or the classic "Don't worry I'll call C/S 2's OC and tell them to monitor their radios."...

Anyways, this has been an insinghtful thread.

Thanks

 

[dapaterson]

We shortcut away tremendous problems in training at home - whether signals, CSS or equipment holdings.  The system has failed to supply sufficient radios? Use Motorolas and cell phones.  No trucks?  Rent.  Forgot supplies?  Go back up base side to grab what we need, or go to Home Depot with a credit card (since all deployed ops will be conducted with big box stores within  50 kms).  Need LAVs or tanks?  CFTPO them out to Wainwright, and the problem goes away.

Until the CAF as an institution get serious about addressing these support shortfalls (to say nothing of massive capability gaps - AD, for example) we'll continue to play at Potempkin villages, and conduct exercises where the key lesson learned is that the final attack is always a success.

 

[Lumber]

Someone as NAVRESHQ forgot that memo and also the MCS userguide - the amount of reports my RSS staff get requested for the same thing (slightly different wording) is absolutely gut-wrenching due to the hours wasted - whereas they honestly could just enforce proper data entry and have scheduled pulls from MCSC and MITE.  GBA+, EE, and that ******* failure of OPHTAS (reverted to using the old Excel sheet for now) alone have consumed roughly 100 man-hours in troubleshooting/query setup/emails.  OPHTAS reporting system - well LOL to the misery that crap show is.  Another little annoyance was the repetitive OPQs because some honourable person had a spaz fit crap fest over Uber being used for official travel (i.e. TD); P.S. My unit actually has banned the use of shared economy travel services while on TD thanks to these OPQs  :tsktsk:

As for emailing Class As, very rarely is anything I do with Class As time sensitive unless it involves travel arrangements (or a couple HARD to get PERs... those ****ers are going "UNABLE TO SIGN" 15 May).  For the RSS Adjts/AdminOs on here - get access be it yourself or delegated to the big data systems (HRMS-MITE/Monitor-MASS/MCS CFTPO/MCS CFRIMS/DRMIS - FI and MA&S (your MRP)/WebSCPS V2) and make sure the data input is correct.  If by virtue of your trade you can get master/superview privileges get them even if they exceed your HQ's normal priv sets  (my DRMIS MA&S superview is nice )

1. What's wrong with OPHTAS? Works fine for me?
2. All PER's signed by (or at least marked "unavailable to sign") by May 15th? Ha! I'll be happy if they're at least all written by May 15th.
3. For DRMIS access, I would recommend that Adjts/AdminOs NOT get DRMIS access. DRMIS is good for two reasons, supply and finance, neither of which is technically supposed to be the Adj/Admino's responsibility; that's why theres a LogO, a SupplyO, AND a BudgetO, plus our Snr FSAs are probably better than all of them at using DRMIS financial. Sure not every unit has all of these positions filled, and it MAY fall on the full time RSS to help out, but let that be the exception not the norm. Don't automatically give all of us DRMIS access or they're going to go to us first for DRMIS reports without first going through the actual "SMEs". Besides, I'm a tech savvy guy; I'm my unit's monitor mass and excel "guru", and I did the DRMIS navigation trg, but on my first time logging into DRMIS I was so blown away at how non-intuitive it was  (I couldn't find ANYTHING) that I deleted the program and never looked at it again.

 

[CountDC]

I remember signing pink pay sheets for extra work such as admin, pre and post ex drills etc.  Those were the ones that would get submitted at years end IF there was any money left.

Now CF Mil Pers instr 20-04 para 2.14 prohibits unpaid or volunteer duty.

I remember having to rush at the end of the year to figure out how many of those pink pay sheets I could process with the budget left and get them in on time so they did get paid. Start at lowest rank and work upwards.