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Old 31-03-14, 05:14
rob love rob love is offline
carrier mech
 
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Shilo MB, the armpit of Canada
Posts: 7,594
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If you are talking about regular force service battalions, then here is the answer. The regular force Service Battalion. does the same work as a base maintenance, except it is mobile. It performs all the second line maintenance functions.

The old example is a head gasket. First line unit maintenance coy can change a head gasket, but if you need to change the head, that fell to second line...either a base maintenance or a svc bn, depending on the location.

In garrison, the service Bn would be responsible for that level of repair to unit vehicles, and would also have it's own veh platoon to look after it's own vehicles at the first line level.

Paint, welding and textiles would fall onto the materials techs (that trade came into being in 1985 as I recall). Prior to that, we had airforce techs attached to do some of that work.

Electronics/Fire control system work was done by the FCS (now EO) techs, again based on first line/second line repairs.

Contracting out wasn't done as much back then, especially on the green fleet. Nowadays it is done regularly as a cost saving measure on the commercial vehicles, although a little more limited on the rgular force green fleet.

As to all the tooling/shop equipment regularly going through CADC, that is just normal turnover. When you get the chance to get a new machine, you take it, cause you don't know how many years it might be until you get another chance. Sometimes it is end of year spending, other times it is warranted.

While a base maintanence usually has a heavy makeup of civilian personal, it is not so in a Service Bn. They are required to deploy, and civilians do not deploy. Also, with the small budgets these days, before you send components of the green fleet out for repair (outside of the normal supply channels) you will usually get authorization from the LCMMs so that their budget will cover it. I have worked as a civilian contractor at a few levels maintenance support for the CF, and at times it was astounding the money that would be spent needlessly so that the costs came out of the National budget instead of the local budget. The bigger picture does not always come into play when you have to spend your budget money.

The national contracts on some of the vehicle fleets like the Milcots and the Internationals (and in some cases the G-wagons) is built in to the initial plan on acquiring these fleets. It saves money to the DND longterm in not having to have such a large scale of infrastructure, as well as minimizing the number of cradle to grave employees. It also frees up soldier/technicians to be deployable.
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