- Reaction score
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- Points
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I don't think there actually any classified stuff on the MARTECH side, and usually the instructors are a mix of service members, retirees and civilians, it's more the capacity has been reduced, some functions taken over by the west coast (with the school on the east coast), and not much capacity to actually expand. Some training has already been farmed out, and expect more to, but it's also pretty expensive, and there is also a QoL impact if you keep sending people out of area for months at a time to do trade training (so they can come back and leave again on ships).
For context, HMS Sultan facility has a few old hangars full of old equipment plus a fairly large building of classrooms with a lot of retirees and civilian instructors. The classes include large bench setups where you can do things like live trouble shooting on 440V circuits, fridge loops, hydraulics, pneumatics etc, plus normal classes for academics. But you can learn about a topic, practice a topic on a bench, and then go see it on full size and running equipment in the hangar setup. It's pretty world class, but fantastic training.
We have some bench top setups and some static trainers, but far less, with very little room to grow, but it works. Once that is done, there is still the OJT phase on ships, which is usually limited by number of empty bunks, but that's all managed now so ships aren't supposed to sail with empty bunks. If you have a large number of trainees, you usually have additional people added just to oversee and drive their training, but still takes resources from the crew, who also generally are working on some kind of OJT package on their own for the next qual as well.
In general, there are some extra things we could do, but we don't really have people, funding or the infrastructure avaialble to surge. There is also a lot of training that needs updated generally to maintain existing throughput, as well as occupational reivews. @NavyShooter went into a great example of the impact at the school of some of the changes to actual number of instructors available.
It would be doable, if we had a bunch of money, focused effort, probably a reduction in ops tempo to do more training (so, Reconstituion) and ideally a replacement for the asbestos filled and worn down 1930s CFNES building that had more class rooms, hands on trainers, and staff/support to match, but none of that is in the cards, because the GoC actually increased demand on the RCN 2 weeks after Reconstitution.
I think a few CPFs are going to self-retire soon, and we can't actually afford another decade with each refit starting to tip the scale at $500M, so it's already forced some hard decisions and will probably create some more. Lots of the safety systems are past the end of their life as well (halon comes to mind) with no resources for a replacement so there are a lot of cumulative issues coming to a head.
