Regiment hopes to engage young people in recruitment drive
The Royal Bermuda Regiment’s Commanding Officer hopes to boost recruitment and revitalise its coastguard service with new boats capable of staying longer out at sea.
In a wide-ranging interview with The Royal Gazette, Lieutenant-Colonel Duncan Simons, who succeeded Ben Beasley as the CO at the end of May, said people leaving the island and an ageing population had hit recruitment.
He said although the coastguard had been “incredibly effective” it had a small number of people with relatively old boats and facilities.
Colonel Simons was conscripted to the regiment in 1999 aged 19 and completed a junior non-commissioned officer course before being promoted to lance corporal.
He then went to Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, the British Army’s initial officer training centre, for a commissioning programme and later became a platoon commander in the RBR.
After studying architecture in New York City and working as an architect for ten years, Colonel Simons said, he felt that he “owed it to the regiment to come back”.
He rejoined the RBR’s full-time staff in 2016.
Colonel Simons said: “The Commanding Officer sort of picked me out and convinced me to join up. For me the timing was right, because I’d got enough experience under my belt as an architect.
“I’d sat all my registration exams and I figured, ‘You know, if I’m going to step away and have a second career, now is the time to take advantage’.”
The RBR has about 280 soldiers, compared with its full complement of 400, with recruitment a challenge.
The Commanding Officer explained: “We are at an age where the population is declining. We notice that there’s emigration and, with an ageing population, we’re trying to attract people from an increasingly smaller pool.
“That is fundamentally our biggest challenge in terms of being able to maintain the capability we’ve always maintained.
“From my standpoint, the solution is really engaging with young people early and often, so that when people are of age, they understand who we are, what we do and are receptive to our offer of service.”
Colonel Simons said talks were under way about taking into schools the RBR’s Junior Leaders programme, which could include a day a week of military training and would be aimed at students aged 13 to 18.
He added: “We are working towards September of next year.
“We’ve had preliminary discussions with some schools and we will progress those conversations and see where we end up, but there’s certainly an appetite.”
Colonel Simons said in the three years the RBR Coastguard has been in place it has been “incredibly effective with a very small number of people with boats and facilities that are quite old and not ideal”.
The Royal Bermuda Regiment Coastguard has been involved in some “pretty incredible search and rescues”, its Commanding Officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Duncan Simons, said.
“There was an instance last winter where there was a fishing boat off the reef line on the north side of Bermuda which was hit by a rogue wave and sunk,” he said.
The vessel’s rescue beacon sank, then resurfaced ten minutes later and started going off.
“The Harbour Radio Maritime Co-ordination Centre flagged it and we were on the scene within half an hour and were able to pick these two or three people out of the water.
“You know, if the coastguard had not been there, they’d be dead.”
Colonel Simons added: “There are too many instances like that in Bermuda and it is really about changing the culture around maritime safety.
“Marine and Ports is certainly working towards improving or increasing the standards of competency for people operating on the water and that would go a long way to help.”
“We are working to put things in place so that we can recapitalise our fleet and shift our structures so that our command structure around the coastguard is more efficient,” he added.
Asked if that meant trying to get new boats, he said: “We’ve done an incredibly good job of maintaining what we have and refurbishing them, but that process can’t go on for ever.
“There are also limitations in terms of duration of patrols. Right now, our responsibility is to patrol within our territorial waters up to 12 nautical miles.
“Argus and Challenger Bank are farther out and then the exclusive economic zone is 200 nautical miles.
“That's a lot of water and while there’s no aspiration to patrol that, we want to do our current job better and be able to have longer duration patrols in sea states that are more severe than what we go out in now.”
Put to him that that was a very significant upgrade, Colonel Simons: “A new boat is $600,000 to $700,000 each. We need about four of them.
“It is a major cost, but it’s part of doing the job.
“It would allow us to do our role better with the people we have.”
He said the RBR aspired to grow the number of people in the coastguard, where the personnel includes 14 full-time members of the regiment as well as one officer from the Bermuda Police Service, which also has staffing challenges.
Colonel Simons added: “It’s important that we have a more sustainable staffing of the coastguard unit.
“That would allow us more flexibility, particularly around training so that soldiers are not on patrol and watch all the time.
“I think Bermudians recognise that we are very much a maritime nation, so we should have a reasonable presence and capability on the water. That makes sense.”
• Watch the full interview on the attached video
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