CAP's top priority for 2011

[Ned]

Fireman put out fires, they do not enforce the law.

Umm, of course firefighters enforce the law.  That's one of most important things they do.  The Fire Marshall keeps people safe by setting and enforcing fire safety standards for things like crowd capacities, smoke alarms, and sprinklers.(They write a lot of tickets for criminal violations.)

Arson investigators investigate suspicious fires and arrest firebugs.  They carry guns, put handcuffs on arsonists, and take them to jail

All are firefighters.

Policemen enforce the law, they do not put out fires.

Similarly, police officers put out a lot of fires.  Often because they are the first persons to detect the fires when the fire is still relatively small.  When I was a young police officer, we actually had Scott airpacks in the trunk of the patrol care to help us with this part of our duties.

Out here in California, we have a number of Public Safety Agencies that combine police and firefighting departments into  a single agency.  Google the Sunnyvale Department of Public Safety.  Officers spend time working in the fire house, and then can be reassigned to police patrol.  If a major fire erupts, police cars respond along with the engines and the "cops" go into firefighter mode.  The City saves money by being able to run smaller fire engine crews while still being able to have a large number of trained firefighters arrive at a fire.

The taxpayers seem to like it.

Kinda like CAP.  It's a good deal.

[Eclipse]

Your honor, the defense suggests you are going to hurt yourself stretching so far....

[Ned]

Your honor, the defense suggests you are going to hurt yourself stretching so far....

Bob,

See, I deal with this stuff all the time.  Every day at work, for instance.

Notice I don't try to make CAP / IT analogies, because I know that I would be out of my depth.


That may be one of the differences between us.

If there was a stretch here, the responsibility lies with whoever brought the police/firefighter issues into a perfectly good governance thread.

[Eclipse]

If there was a stretch here, the responsibility lies with whoever brought the police/firefighter issues into a perfectly good governance thread.

Within any profession we can find areas where specialization was found to be economically unfeasible and therefore occupations were combined, usually to the detraction of the function(s) being combined.

Municipalities don't create "Public Safety" departments with combined duties because they want to, it is because they have to due to the economic realities of their area - same goes for volunteer fire departments, allowing the sheriff to enforce local laws instead of a local PD, etc.

If anything, your examples make my point - the fact that people can do something, doesn't mean they should,

[lordmonar]

we need to define the mission and the customer

Good start but what do you do if CAP has more then 1 customer (it does) and the customers do not agree on what the mission is.

For starters, CAP customers are the USAF, the general public when it needs SAR, the general public for AE, cadets and senior members. The last two groups may or may not have the same mission in mind either.

One of the processes of defining your missions and customers is to also develop priorities of those missions and customers.

Once you know what the customers (all of them) want......you can tailor your missions to fit.....or decide not to do them if you can't satisfy all their opposing needs.

You can be Sears or Wallmart...that try satisfy all their customers needs....or you can decide to be Borders or Barns and Noble that only focuses on one target audience.

For the most part......I think CAP needs (at a national level) focus on what we already do.....but to bring the technology but to speed.....get WMRS, EServices, SIMS, On line testing, IMU, etc integrated and more user friendly.

Following that.....we need to look at fundraising outside of the USAF/government sources.

[ProdigalJim]

Couldn't agree more on the fundraising...and that means more than just dialing for dollars or asking for checks. A more coordinated effort on "in-kind" contributions could go a long way.

WIWAC, it was much, much worse; there was no free uniform program, as irritating as the present program seems to be for some people.

Working with local FBOs, for example, for training space or aircraft support; I know the regs cover this, but that doesn't mean it's done often enough. Just a tiny example.

[RiverAux]

We really need to take some time and money to outfit our units with updated equipment and other necessities to help better accomplish the missions. 

Just what equipment do you think needs updating?  The feds have been spending multi-millions on updating our radios for years, so those are in pretty good shape.  Sure, a lot of DF equipment is sort of old, but it still works and seeing as how it is used in missions that are in severe decline, not sure they would be a big priority in my book (but still every unit should have at least one, and I know we're short in my wing). 

[RiverAux]

2.  Rethinking of GT Doctrine.  When CAP got into the SAR business, there were virtually NO ground search assets.  Now every Sheriff Dept. has a SAR capability, and there are tons of ground search specialists with way better training and equipment than us.  What they lack is the skill and equipment to coordinate with an aircraft.  We have that.  Why not train small 2-3 man teams to work with another team as a "Air Coordination Element?"  The wheel has already been invented... at the Army battalion hq. there is always one AF officer pilot to coordinate air support.  Why not develop skilled aircrew as equally-skilled ground guys to coordinate with civilian SAR assets?

I think the teams you're talking about are a decent idea, but only as a supplement. 

FYI, There are huge swaths of the country where there are no county sheriff SAR teams.  I know that in my state fewer than 10% of counties have such teams.  I daresay that there are more than a few states where CAP has more qualified ground SAR personnel than all the county teams put together.  And no, they don't have significantly better training than us for the types of missions that we do.  As discussed on this board many times there are very few differences between CAP and NASAR standards and where there are differences they are in very specialized areas that CAP chooses not to participate (high angle rescue) in anywqay.  I'm not saying our GT training standards are enforced as well as NASAR standards, but thats a different story. 

[JohnKachenmeister]

^I guess we're spoiled here in Florida.  Sheriffs have airboats, big trucks full of gear, and trained guys always on duty that can assemble for a wilderness search.

SOME counties have their own aviation assets, but not all.

[The CyBorg is destroyed]

Aptitude test, if not standardized and administered from a higher lever, can lead to ruin, political infighting and a lot of other stuff that can be divisive.

Of course it would be standardised, done under AU auspices, and administered by a testing officer.

[jpizzo127]

Step 1. Speak to the customers and determine what they expect from us.

Step 2. Refine our training to meet these missions.

Step 3. Develop a real national curriculum of training standards.

Step 4. Revamp Equiptment where necessary

Above all else, we need strong leadership at the top and a real sense of urgency and purpose.

[cap235629]

REWRITE 39-1!!!!!!!!

[manfredvonrichthofen]

Step 1. Speak to the customers and determine what they expect from us.

Step 2. Refine our training to meet these missions.

Step 3. Develop a real national curriculum of training standards.

Step 4. Revamp Equiptment where necessary

Above all else, we need strong leadership at the top and a real sense of urgency and purpose.

I absolutely couldn't agree more.  :clap:

[JeffDG]

Step 1. Speak to the customers and determine what they expect from us.

Step 2. Refine our training to meet these missions.

Step 3. Develop a real national curriculum of training standards.

Step 4. Revamp Equiptment where necessary

Above all else, we need strong leadership at the top and a real sense of urgency and purpose.

Other than 1 and 3 being somewhat at odds, this is a good approach.  Otherwise we'll constantly have solutions in desperate need of problems.

Now...why are 1 and 3 in conflict a bit?  Different wings have different customers, and different customers have different requirements, causing inefficiencies in "national" training materials.  For example, requiring a Mission Pilot to be able to properly execute a canyon turn might be essential in CO, but in ND, not so much.  Likewise, a comms person in ND better understand frequency issues of conflict with Canada, but here in Tennessee, that's not a major issue.

[manfredvonrichthofen]

Even though different wings need to know different things to operate in their AO, there still needs to be a national minimum standard to train to.

[davedove]

Actually, there should be a step before any of this:

Determine who our customers are/should be.  We should be looking at just who our core customers are and determine how to fill their needs.  Then, and only then, we can look at taking on additional customers if we have the resources.

Step 1. Speak to the customers and determine what they expect from us.

Step 2. Refine our training to meet these missions.

Step 3. Develop a real national curriculum of training standards.

Step 4. Revamp Equiptment where necessary

Above all else, we need strong leadership at the top and a real sense of urgency and purpose.

[Paul Creed III]

1) Increase retention of cadets and seniors

2) Fix 39-1; too many supplements and confusion

3) Create workflows for more of our paperwork (promotions and awards for example) in eServices so that there is less lost paperwork.

4) Adopt an online payment system that can be used to accept payments to Wings/Groups/whatever for events like conferences, encampments, etc.

5) Membership-wide "official" email accounts

6) A CMS-based website system that can be used by any entity that needs a CAP-branded website; too many sites out there look horrendous.

[exFlight Officer]

1) Increase retention of cadets and seniors

2) Fix 39-1; too many supplements and confusion

3) Create workflows for more of our paperwork (promotions and awards for example) in eServices so that there is less lost paperwork.

4) Adopt an online payment system that can be used to accept payments to Wings/Groups/whatever for events like conferences, encampments, etc.

5) Membership-wide "official" email accounts

6) A CMS-based website system that can be used by any entity that needs a CAP-branded website; too many sites out there look horrendous.

+ 1   

[JeffDG]

3) Create workflows for more of our paperwork (promotions and awards for example) in eServices so that there is less lost paperwork.

You know, it would be nice to build all the awards and such into a DB, link it to a "Rack Builder" so a person could look at all the stuff they're entitled to in one spot.  At least the CAP awards could be done that way, the military awards on the AF uniform could be difficult to gather.

[A.Member]

3) Create workflows for more of our paperwork (promotions and awards for example) in eServices so that there is less lost paperwork.

You know, it would be nice to build all the awards and such into a DB, link it to a "Rack Builder" so a person could look at all the stuff they're entitled to in one spot.  At least the CAP awards could be done that way, the military awards on the AF uniform could be difficult to gather.

If you're one of those sheep with an iPhone ( ):
http://www.rawapps.com/74881/rack-em-upem-up/

Don't know how well that one works but maybe I'll build one for Android users.