Squadron CC assigned to other duty positions.

[Eclipse]

While this sometimes happens at units in or contiguous to large metropolitan areas, it is the everyday reality in units in rural areas.

If the area the unit is in can't sustain it, then move it.  Get publicly available demographic info and see if there's any
reason to bother.  If not, move the unit and put it where it belongs, not where it fell by the chance of facility or
commander.  In most cases, however, even rural communities are starved for meaningful, patriotic extracurricular activities,
what they don't have time for is anything that wastes their time.  A kid who had to beg dad to let him go to the meeting and
walks into "drill night" (i.e. "I prepared nothing so let's drill), and 2 tired seniors in the corner waiting for the "cadets to finish",
they probably won't be back.

If chartering as a cadet squadron until you can build a cadre to the point where you can recharter as a composite squadron is an option, why is that bad? How is that giving up?

But that's not what's happening in the example you gave, nor in most of the country, and that also presupposes some larger plan, which rarely, if ever, exists.

You're using the tools in the tool box to your advantage. The units that do this aren't giving up. They are using  a mechanism that the regulations provide in order to avoid having the regulatory requirements of a composite squadron overwhelm them when they are low in personnel who are active and trained.

Another fallacy - the regulatory requirements are not different enough between a cadet and composite unit to be meaningful in this context.
There maybe a few pages here and there in the SUI guide thta maybe allowed to be viewed as "optional", but the overall program is the same.

Stopping and doing nothing else for six months or longer just to put "composite" in your unit title isn't an answer for many units.

You missed the point, you're not "doing nothing", in fact your doing more, and in a more focused way, then the years that brought you to that point.
Focused, meaningful recruitment, processing the new guys, and then getting them into staff jobs and trained so they can be useful.  On the other side
you have a fully-functional, operating unit with the ability to scale even further from there.

[JeffDG]

You don't stop the mission to recruit and train.

Of course you do, happens all the time in business and the military.  Commands routinely
stand down because of safety issues, and companies reorganize and retool.

Really?  Where do you find businesses that stop operations to reorganize?

I've never seen a company stop operations and ever resume them.

[Eclipse]

Really?  Where do you find businesses that stop operations to reorganize?

The whole business?  No.  Divisions and operational entities?  Happens everyday - retool, strategic
reductions, reorganizations, mergers, safety recalls, etc. 

But we're not talking about anything that grandiose, we're talking about units that are struggling to the point that
they think reclassifying the charter is a "fix" - that's step one to shutdown.

There's only one fix - get the people in the room to actually do something worth the time.

Put plainly, no unit that is struggling at charter minimums with no plan to change that is meeting their mandate
or accomplishing their mission.  They are going through the motions, nothing more, because at that point,
the organization itself does not have the critical mass to be able to do anything but less then the bare minimum
check boxes.  The focus becomes "just keeping Group or Wing off their back...", which in turn degrades into
being disgruntled about all how "CAP is administering us to death."   Then one key person quits and the
charter folds (sometimes it coughs one last time with another CC).  Before you know it you're folding what's left
of those failed units into increasingly geographically larger groups, and then one day you look around and realize your
wing has lost dozens of units without anyone really taking any notice.

Any "success" in those bare-minimum units will be purely by the individual, not through any programmatic momentum,
and they might as well be in 000.

"Showing up" and doing, you know "stuff", is not accomplishing the mission.

[lordmonar]

I'm out...this has drifted too far....and I'm getting mad at Eclipse again.

To the OP......I don't see anything wrong with a Commander holding down other jobs.   It is not ideal.....but the reality of the situation is that it has to be filled with someone and we don't have the personnel or time to do all thing things we should be doing.

[Storm Chaser]

While it's acceptable and common (although not ideal) for commanders to have other duty positions, I actually understand Eclipse' point. We sometimes use the word "mission" very loosely in CAP. A unit that is struggling to survive is not accomplishing ANY mission. If you can't recruit new members and retain the one's you have, then what good is it to do anything else? What can you really do of value? All missions within CAP required enough trained personnel to be successful.

What I understand Eclipse is saying here is that sometimes we want to do too much and accomplish nothing. We need people and we need them trained. If your unit can support recruiting and training while performing other missions, then perhaps it's not in as bad of a shape as other units in CAP are. But there are units out there that struggle to even have a meeting; units where 3-4 senior members have 5 duty positions each and are stretched too thin to be effective in any of them. And worst, there's no one to train to take over; you lose one of them and you lose 25-30% of your work force.

We're so used to doing things like this, that we can't stand someone telling us there's a better way. But we know better (or at least should). The turnover in CAP is ridiculous. And it's not uncommon for our "star players" to get burned out or disappointed with CAP at some point or another (just read the many posts in CAP Talk). And while we know there's a problem, no one does anything about it because we're too busy doing the "mission". The question is: what mission? Running a robust Cadet Programs require a good number of cadets and cadet leaders. It requires resources and trained personnel. The same goes for Emergency Services. You need qualified individuals with the proper training, equipment and availability. And Aerospace Education... what can I say about AE? I believe the reason this mission tends to take a backseat to the Cadet Programs is because we don't have enough trained members dedicated to executing this mission, internally and externally.

We can argue with Eclipse all we want, but all he's saying is that when it gets to the point where a unit can't accomplish the mission effectively anymore, it's probably better to stop and focus on fixing these problems, to include recruiting and training new members. To do otherwise could lead the unit to face extinction. It happens all the time...

[Walkman]

A mentor once gave me this analogy:

You're traveling for work and you need to be there right on time, but you've left late. The place you need to be is further than the amount of gas in your car will take you. So not only have you left late, but you'll have to make a stop that will add to your tardiness. But if you don't make that stop and get gas, you won't get there at all.

I don't think a unit would have to forego all its normal activities in order to run a recruitment program. Out of your two hour weekly meeting, 20 minutes could be dedicated to planning a "pipeline recruiting" event each week. Much of the work for this can also take place outside the meeting. It takes many weeks to get one of those events going, so 20 minutes a week to get coordinated and go over assignments leaves plenty of time to keep a cadet program hitting all its reqs. Even once you start training the new cadets, their training still falls within the cadet program anyway, so no one's missing out. New SM training can occur outside running the CP anyway, as the cadets should be running it mostly on their own.

Getting back to the OP's original thought, if the CC is holding too many jobs because there's not enough people to run the program, then I would say thats a failure in leadership. I understand that there will be times that stuff happens and sometimes you have to take on extra work. But, that should be only temporary and the CC should lead by getting the people needed to run things well.

[Eclipse]

I don't think a unit would have to forego all its normal activities in order to run a recruitment program. Out of your two hour weekly meeting, 20 minutes could be dedicated to planning a "pipeline recruiting" event each week. Much of the work for this can also take place outside the meeting. It takes many weeks to get one of those events going, so 20 minutes a week to get coordinated and go over assignments leaves plenty of time to keep a cadet program hitting all its reqs. Even once you start training the new cadets, their training still falls within the cadet program anyway, so no one's missing out. New SM training can occur outside running the CP anyway, as the cadets should be running it mostly on their own.

There are any number of ways this could be accomplished, and it's already supposed to be getting done as a matter of course, higher HQ can be a big help as well.
However, if the commander and staff had the wherewithall to be able to manage their time, not to mention the manpower to get things done, they wouldn't be in that situation to start.

The "ALL STOP" is also to draw attention to the situation and insure everyone is focused.  It will also tend to draw out the real members from the empty shirts.

If CAP had 1/4 of the effort from the "members" who like to show up to staff meetings and other "non-work" situations and who either announce they would "love to help" and/or
have all sorts of "ideas but no time", we'd not be in this situation.  Heck, just the cost of the paper from all the checks people with no authority or involvement write in someone else's
name would fund the program for a year.

To borrow from the above analogy, these charter-minimum, life-support squadrons are akin to driving with a flat tire. Everything is slower, less productive, and ultimately if it isn't fixed,
the situation will get worse, not better.  Sadly, in a lot of cases the only things that gets them attention from higher HQ is the shower of sparks when the tire breaks down to the rim.

[ZigZag911]

A simple solution might be to tie maintaining one's grade to contributing ongoing staff service.