Bits & bites

Things have been rather intense on the work front recently, and my days have been ending before I've pinned down all the blog post ideas I've had. Catching up at this point would take forever. So instead of putting together a full post on each one, here are my scattered thoughts in a rough anthology:

• Further to this post, and specifically the pay increase for our SOF people, I've got a comment and a question. First, pay is only one of a number of factors that affect retention. I don't know how big a factor it is for CANSOFCOM personnel as a whole, nor do I know if their attrition rate is better or worse than the rest of the CF. What I'd guess, however, is that those in the SOF community are more concerned with being allowed to do their jobs, and less with pay - if you had to rank the issues that affect retention. Individual cases will vary, especially for those with families, but that's my guess: as long as pay is somewhat comparable to the private sector, the...thrill, gratification, satisfaction, passion, whatever you want to call it...of an elite unit doing things only governments can authorize will keep this highly specialized public sector work competitive. My question, though, is whether the 427 Squadron personnel are included in that pay augmentation.


• Mark helpfully posted about our outsourcing of pirate prosecution to the Kenyans here and here. My question, is why the hell wasn't the Kenyan solution worked out until after a PR fiasco like this? Somebody dropped the ball: perhaps military planners not pursuing the natural result of their operations to their logical end; perhaps JAG lawyers hemming and hawing until operations had to proceed without a legal ending in place; perhaps pissy foreign affairs mandarins who refused to listen to DND and get serious about making a suggested solution work until the politicians turned up the heat on them; or perhaps the politicians themselves making policy decisions without the slightest thought to the predictable consequences of those choices. I don't know who it was. But I know it should never have happened that way.


• I don't know that I've ever read a more clear-headed editorial from the Globe & Mail than this one about military aid to Pakistan:
  
  

  The renewed military ties were to take the form of an approved officer training program and a potential sale of military technology. Training Pakistani officers is clearly in Canada's strategic interests - by educating them in Canada, co-operation between the two countries would be enhanced, which in turn would improve the reliability of the Pakistani military establishment.
  
  ...
  
  Given that the technology being considered for sale involved surveillance and training - not, for example, Sparrow missiles - this seems like an overreaction. No guns, tanks or bullets were on the table.
  
  If we are going to stop all programs that might see dual-use technologies being leaked to the Taliban, then what of the fertilizers being distributed by aid agencies to farmers in Afghanistan that have turned up in IEDs used against Canadian soldiers?
  
  ...
  
  Given Canada's investment of blood and treasure in Afghanistan and Pakistan's linchpin role in that conflict, it makes no sense for us to refuse to back the army fighting our enemy in the one place where we cannot fight them - across the border in Pakistan.

  
  
  You could have bowled me over with a feather when I read it. To those making the decisions at the Globe & Mail: more like this, please!

That's going to have to be it for now...I started this post over twelve hours ago, and only had time to wrap it up just now. Egad.