So....when I was a Senior Instructor at CFNES, I had 12 MS/PO2 working for me. I could support 6 classes of sailors under training, with 2 instructors per class, giving me a safety person when required for doing training on systems, I had depth to send my instructors on training, help develop CBT, go on Nijmegen training, go on PATA, swap out with a buddy that needed to be landed from a ship for XYZ reason and so on.
When CFNES became NFS(A), that same section went from a P1 + 12 to a P1 + 4.
There was also a Standards cell in S-37 that could support us, with the new NFS(A) construct, the P1 was 'standards.'
So, in the past 9 years there has definitely been a throughput change - please don't pretend that the restructuring of the school didn't have an impact.
The depth of field that we had in the school is gone - the breadth of experience is gone (losing 56% of the CSE Chiefs on the East Coast within a 24 month period will do that...)
The ability to surge trainees through NFS(A) into the Tech Trades is gone. I was there when we pushed through 450+ W Eng JR trainees. The bad part of that was that we pushed them into the fleet to get their OJT work done at the same time as the fleet was undergoing the MLR, and we had minimal sailing platforms, with too many trainees.
Departments were theoretically staffed with 20 x QL5 and above LS-PO2's, with 4 of each of the 5 specialty sub-trades (PO2, MS, LS, LS) Most sections had 3 or 4. At one point we had 16 of these 20 billets filled.
You were theoretically supposed to get 9 trainee billets. In reality, with W Eng, we had 32-35 trainees posted to the ship.
If you have 20 people training 9 JR's, then you've got over 200% supervision - that's a pretty good ratio.
What we really had was 16 people training 32 trainees - which is 50% supervision. That's NOT a good ratio.
That's why the CSE trades lost so much depth of experience - when the PO1 is the only guy in the entire department that knows how to spin a lathe and make parts....that's a bad thing. (Used to be every NWT learned to spin metal...not anymore.)
The concept of W Eng was to push the training from the school to the fleet with a focus on OJT instead of time in classrooms.
So, good luck pushing a bunch of sailors through classrooms with an instructor cadre that doesn't exist anymore.
Unless things have gotten significantly better in the past couple of years...which I hear they haven't.
Bringing a new class of ship online without some sort of plan to deal with training the crews is...dumb.
Yes, the MCDVs will need replacement, and these Corvettes sound like a neat idea, but the program is going to need to incorporate not just building and equipping the ships, but also a program to build a training center for the ships.
We may be at the point where contracting out the technical training might be a viable solution.