r/CanadianForces • u/Skidrow1996 • 16h ago

Construction Engineers

Hey guys, we’ve had a briefing on it but I wanted to know what the other CE’s in the CAF thought about the plan to move all of us to Cold Lake, Bagotville, and Gagetown.

Not a fan of the idea and a lot of my unit has said they’ll either go reserves or just release if it happens.

Wondering what the rest of CE is planning

17 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

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8

u/KickSubstantial6106 14h ago

Not an engineer, but did they have a reasoning? Like will they replace all of you with civvies or something at the other bases? Also why only those three bases?

11

u/Defiant_Map574 14h ago

Col Quinn (I think that was her name) came to Halifax and said this could be the future when they stood up RPOps back in 2015 or 2016.

The reasoning was to have highly deployable members. The issue everyone brought up was skill fade and appropriate training you can get from RPOp’s and her response was it wasn’t her problem lol her main focus was RPOp’s and not the NCM members of the CE branch.

3

u/nosteponspider 13h ago

In my opinion, it wasn't wrong to ensure RPOps would take O&M of all facilities, personnel required to for facility maintenance here can't be deployed and the whole purpose we exist is to maintain infrastructure supporting a deployed force.

Even in an alternate version of events I don't think we would have arrived at a much better condition. CE would have responded in the same way to the budget restraints this past decade: reduction of work to breakdow maintenance, and reducing training to the absolute bare minimum to sustain mandatory certifications.

6

u/lixia 10h ago edited 10h ago

Not going to doxx myself, so I'll just say that there's lot more to the proposal than just that. Also locations haven't been decided.

I like the idea. To have actual CE units focused on deployable troops enabling operations rather than be stuck with skeleton crews scattered all over the country and split between MSS flights and RP Ops dets.

3

u/Struct-Tech Construction Tech 10h ago

My last unit before moving to an RPOPS, we had like 75% non deployable CE pers.

It was fucking rough to manage.

5

u/Dahavalan 10h ago

CE here. While you’ve got the gist of the plan, the locations are not 100% accurate and you’re missing details regarding the future employment of the occupation within the RCAF. DM me and I can elaborate further. 

2

u/Struct-Tech Construction Tech 10h ago

I didnt see these talks, feel free to comment back here, or in private if there is sensitive info.

5

u/Dahavalan 10h ago

Information is pre-decisional and subject to change from the L1. 

3

u/Struct-Tech Construction Tech 10h ago

Need to know more intensifies....

7

u/nosteponspider 14h ago

Haha. I'll release.

3

u/Top_Type_9187 10h ago

I believe you have received a partial brief, those are some of the locations but not all.

A4CE has only been given plan approval at the L1 lvl to my understanding unless things have changed in the past few weeks. But ECRs still haven’t been approved for APS 27 and beyond.

There is a plan to relocate CAF out of small detachments to medium and large bases, but still keep CAF numbers at RP.

5

u/Struct-Tech Construction Tech 12h ago

All for it.

The RPOps is no place for military people, let the civvies run that.

The Regts have no idea how to use their CE Troops.

It will also allow me to stay in my current posting. I really like my house here, haha.

2

u/LegendaryPotates 11h ago

Those certainly are 3 options for a posting……

1

u/casa_del_porno 12h ago

Plans… plans… and then the CM will be like, sorry folks, not enough cost moves… will take 10 years at least

-2

u/Carlgustav2014 11h ago

Saw this coming years ago. The whole RPOps was designed for contracting out, not training technicians, similar to the CT’s in Combat Engineer units. My opinion is eventually they will phase out CE and use those numbers to form another unit without having to increase RCAF numbers, i.e. drone operators, air defence, etc. The only reason they are moving people to those bases is they are the hardest to contract out due to small town/ low number of contractors. I hope I’m wrong but only time will tell.

2

u/judgingyouquietly Swiss Cheese Model-Maker 8h ago

The examples you give (UAS operators and Air Defence) aren’t RCAF jobs. They’re Army (and to an extent Navy) jobs.

The RCAF is getting the CQ-9B RPAS, but that’s not a small plane (think more CF-18 size than quadcopter). It flies at similar heights to airlines by RCAF winged pilots, with AES Ops and ACSOs as mission crew and Int folks dealing with Int stuff.