I wonder how much time (and therefore money) the Government has to spend dealing with all these FOI requests...
After a lot of chatter about the current issued watches for the British armed forces, most of the info is based from 2012...
I have submitted a new FOI request to find out exactly what the current issued watches are that out boys and girls are wearing on the front line...
I received an official response back stating the request has been accepted and will be answered in full within 20 days.
Here is my worded request :-
I have been following a previous FOI request that was issued by the MOD back in June 2012. This request is in relation to the wrist watches issued by the MOD to the various different military groups and divisions.
I am an avid collector of military watches from all eras, but more specifically modern warfare watches.
I therefor request the following information ( under the freedom of information act):- please can you tell me what make and models of wrist watches are in current use by British Armed Forces, the dates they went into service, and how many of them are in service currently? Can you also tell me what sections the models are issued to within UK forces? As I previously understood from the old FOI request of this nature, their were two pulsar/seiko models for infantry and aviators, and one citizen eco drive 300m divers watch for divers and special forces. Are these still in use also?
Please can you confirm the above request, or as many parts of it as possible, in order to help me to accurately procure the same makes and models of watches that our boys and girls go to theatre wearing in the name of queen and country.
I will post all info I get back on here to put to bed all these rumours of what watch is issued etc.
One thing I know for sure is that the dive watch in service is still the Citizen bn0000-04h 300m Eco drive.. As my RMC mate has had his replaced due to "a breakage in the field" let's say, with exactly the same watch he had before.
So I'm glad I have purchased the citizen as my everyday beat about :-)
Cheers,
Simon
I wonder how much time (and therefore money) the Government has to spend dealing with all these FOI requests...
What a waste of peoples' time.
No, I would be interested to know the outcome of your rerquest, and FOI is a good thing for the public, but I just also wonder how many wasteful / vexatious requests are made for petty reasons (in general), and therefore how much time and money this costs.
Gotcha, I'll post all replies etc as soon as I get them..
I think they must have a lot of other wasted and useless requests.. At least to most this is a genuine request that will benefit allot of people, unlike one that I've read whereby someone asked on a shooting forum that I'm a member of, " what brand of bullets do you shoot?" I mean heck!
Anyway...
You'd be truly amazed at the requests submitted. FWIW the cost limit on these is £600 - if it costs more than that to answer they are denied on prohibitive cost grounds.
OP, see how you get on, I'd suggest you may want to simplify the request somewhat, the complexity of it makes it easy to avoid on various grounds. Good luck.
There are probably a number of people who are curious about MoD-issued watches, but I think there are far better ways of showing support for the Armed Forces and those who put their necks on the line for their country, than by wearing the same watch. And I wouldn't want a civilian to be mistaken for, or pass themselves off as, a member of the Military on the grounds of wearing the same watch - it just seems weird if you don't mind me saying.
My son-in-law, an officer, did his tours in Afghan wearing his own cheap digital (non-G-Shock Casio) which is a treasured possession for what they went through together and not for its technology, value or MoD issue. Many of his comrades apparently also wore their own watches in the field, so any official issue doesn't have a great deal of validity.
I assume that they don't just choose one at random out of the Argos catalogue but test it to a onerous specification, which makes it very interesting to know the list.
This was the subject of a recent thread on MWR. Plenty of info' here.
http://www.mwrforum.net/forums/showt...-Issue-Watches
What the hell is a pxd433?
Good luck everybody. Have a good one.
I suspect this thread might be more aposite
http://www.arrse.co.uk/community/for...nkommando.192/
I'm betting it's the same three crap watches it was two years ago, and only about 5 will have been issued, because everybody wears their own anyway.
The divers citizen isn't crap can't comment on the other 2...
I asked my RMC mate if he knew what the bulk of troops wear.. The majority wear either..
1) suunto core all black
2) some form of g-shock - (quite a few liking the suunto alternative g shock rangeman)
3)cheap Casio non g-shock
4)issued watches from stores
So a varied spread.
Please don't misuse FOI requests for frivolous purposes. I had to spend 2 working days of my time responding to a request for details of how many goldfish were kept in aquariums in Police Stations. The comedic journalist who made the request should get a life!
Surely the OPs question would take all of 5 mins (if that) to answer, I don't see the problem. I assume he pays taxes.
Malicious use is another matter.
I think it's important for government to be accountable. Overall the FOI requests do more good than not
Six years ago I has to spend a day gathering data in response to a FOI request from the Church of Scientology. A sect that more sensible countries do not recognise as a religion and afford no official status to.
Reading up on them following this I discovered that they do not believe in the concept of mental illness (the FOI request was about admissions, sectioning and length of stay) and that they have a well funded department based in the UK to forward their aim of challenging established mental health care practice.
OK, now given I'm not British and so really don't have a horse in this race, but just looking at it from the outside, TBH that would be my take too UKMike. Don't get me wrong, as another watches nerd I can well understand Sread01's curiousity, but it does feel a little bit dodgy or something, for the real want of better words. Not a political thing either, just a feeling, such as it is. It's just that little bit too close to current reality for people out there. It doesn't have the historical distance of say discussing German watches of the Luftwaffe. Not logical I grant you but there it is. For me anyway.
During my time in the army, I saw precisely two issued watches. Both were in the stores, dead.
70% of squaddies wear a low-end G Shock. 25% wear cheaper Casios. The other 5% wear any old thing, Citizen, Fossil, Gucci, Adidas, Suunto. No-one in the forces has any interest in the issued watches, they're for civvie watch nerds to collect and kid themselves they're getting something "authentic" and "issued" while they dream of the tours the watch has been on. That'll be none.
i dont think there is any harm in trying to find out facts from the source on a subject which is bandied about a bit by people interested in the subject. i mean, we like watches, we like knowing about them and if this FOI request comes back with some official information, i think it would be a benefit of sorts to anyone interested in military watches surely?
i dont know much about the cost of FOI requests but i am assuming someone is employed to answer questions and im pretty sure this one isnt going to be that hard to get an answer for.
The problem I have in my organisation is that nobody is employed to answer FOI requests. We get bombarded with "fishing" requests by dodgy journalists and the usual quota of obsessive wackos and are required to answer them. I have a job to do and can't do it as well as I would wish because of FOI requests. I wouldn't remotely object if they were intended to expose malpractice, waste or illegal activities. But they very rarely are.
I also served in the army for a long period. I never saw a "military" watch and did not know they existed. An industry seems to have grown up to create "military" watches to sell to the gullible. The same goes for "Nato" straps. Does NATO really approve a pattern of strap? Of course they don't. I don't know of a serviceman, serving or ex, who would be seen dead in one.
^^^^ Exactly this!
(It is also worth remembering that the "issued MoD" watch is something designed down to a specification and is unlikely to be the best timekeeper or most robust watch available in the market - it is merely the minimum acceptable standard item to meet the specification, for the price they are prepared to pay.)
I had an issued Omega in 1971, I don't think that would have been of "minimum acceptable standard". There's a common misconception that watches are routinely issued to all and sundry but this is not correct, they are usually issued on an "as and when required" basis to those personnel requiring an accurate timepiece for the efficient execution of their duties. In my artillery unit there were only 6 chronographs which were issued when needed and then signed back into the stores until next time they were needed. These chronographs had the same Valjoux movements found in comparatively expensive civilian watches of the day.
Eddie
Whole chunks of my life come under the heading "it seemed like a good idea at the time".
Maybe I've misread the thread and this is covered somewhere - so what are the current issued watches that we know of?
That was before the advent of the cheap and accurate quartz, it made more sense back then to issue a chronometer standard watch to a few people for operational reasons. I'd imagine the last thing an artillery gunner would want to do is send some shells to an area he isn't expecting his own colleagues to be for another five minutes, only for his watch to be five minutes slow.
With the modern Bowman radios, GPS, and everyone wearing a digital quartz more accurate than any chronometer, there's no need for issued Omegas in this day and age. It could easily be argued that there's no real need for issued watches at all, but then an industry has been built up around the collection of these distinctly average watches for no other reason than they're "military". You know yourself the added value of an NSN on a watch...
Plus going back in time to say WW2, few enough young lads would have had a watch of their own. They would have been an expensive enough item for the average working man and most that would have been bought for daily wear probably wouldn't have survived much shock, dust and damp.
Apart from the "stores are for storing, not for issuing" and the "FOFAD" excuses from the RQMS, the only guaranteed issued thing around one's wrist that I ever saw was the dosimeter thing during NBC training. If they were ever issued then I doubt by that stage there'd be any point wearing a non mechanical watch!
I had no idea that an interest in military-issued watches and the pursuit of information about them could be such a controversial issue on a watch forum.
I'm interested, please keep us up to date. Aren't CWC G10 supplied anymore? Don't like mine anyway, it's a very poor, overly expensive piece of.....
The upper limit of £600 still seems excessive and hardly value for money. Osprey body armour costs about £1000 per unit; wouldn't that money be better spent on the safety of soldiers rather than satisfying the curiousity of watch collectors?
Of course, the 450 deaths in Afghanistan can't be attributed to frivolous FOI checks, but the fact that a request can cost in the region of 50% of such an esential piece of kit, wouldn't that make any reasonable person accept that this particular request is just silliness for the sake of nosiness?
To save the "£600" in order to reinvest it in kit, you've got to remove the person or persons, who spent time answering the FOI request, from the payroll first. But, answering FOI requests will not be their only job, and taking the requests away is unlikely to reduce their contracted hours and save real cash (in my experience).
Cheers
Foggy
Depends who get dumped with the request what effect it has. Some QM finds himself having to research this nonsense, forgets to order some kit for his battalion's upcoming tour. Damn, no flares.
I agree with what you're saying, the way you put it, but it isn't purely about the cash; it's about the misdirection of resources for no real reason other than some guy wants to buy some watches to build some tenuous link to the military.