Towards_the_gap said:
2 CER (in)famously ran an in-house QL3 in Petawawa back in the late 90's, early noughties, before my time it should be said. Why could it not be done again?
I agree there is some benefit to running later (DP3 and up) career courses at centres of excellence (Ha!), but for DP1/2 why can't they be exported to field units, with oversight from the C's of E? I would happily teach courses in house, compared to being 12 hours away from my family for 6 odd months.
Food for thought.
Edited to add: In the case of Petawawa, we have the training area (bridging hards, dems ranges), the resources (2 EET), just give us the money, the time free from dog and ponies and other silly taskings and the ammo and I am sure it can be done.
I was one of said instructors; the Regt ran two QL3s - one run by 4 Tp and the other by 5 Tp. Although in theory it seems like it's easy to do, the execution of it turned out to be really quite different. At the time, 24 Fd Sqn was running the QL3s and 23 was getting ready to deploy to Kosovo with most of the available and fit bodies. Which left 8 instructors running the training for their respective course. Each Tp had a TC, Tp WO, Recce Sgt, 4 Sect Comds, 4 Sect 2ICs and 4 drivers, and a Tp Storeman with some ridiculous number of students assigned to each Sect. We did all of the trg within our lines, and even had a dry gap dug by HET out where the LAV calibration area is now for the MGB, Acrow and EWBB portions. The downer was we had to travel to Gagetown to conduct the Dml phase for some reason, although we made it work as always.
When you factor in other taskings and career courses or PD training, at any one time we had about 6 instructors on the ground in our Tp. Taking into account PT started at about 0500 or so for the course, the end of trg day was somewhere around 2000 before the students were left to complete their kit and quarters, and lesson preps for the next day were completed after that - it turns into some VERY long days for the staff. Multiply that by 7 days/wk for 5 months or so, and you suddenly realize why damn near all of the staff in the Sqn were beginning to get very run down towards the end.
"But we have all of these resources and manpower" say ye? Yes there is - unfortunately, the Bde doesn't see it that way, and all of the normal taskings and other crap keep coming. Compare that to what is in CFSME, where you have an entire Sqn who's sole mission is the production of graduates and have the resources to accomplish that (the resources are physically there anyways). Even if DP1 Tp doesn't have the staff to cover off on certain days, they can backfill from other parts of the Sqn. The discussions about the number of instructors currently posted there who actually understand what their mission is is a topic best left for the mess.
From what I have gotten through the pipeline, the Spr output of CFSME is slowing down, with upcoming QL3 courses being cancelled or zero loaded. FETS is not in any way overloaded (at least at the DP1 level) like it was in 1999 when we conducted those courses. Add to that the reorg of FETS back to the former topic-based cell system rather than the DP-based system, and the workload will be distributed over a much larger pool of instructors instead of the same 10 guys looking after 30 students for months on end.
All that to say - if FETS can't handle the throughput - definitely farm those courses out. While they can handle it, let them. It's their gig - and as much as it may seem like an easy five months of "a break", it's really not. The old adage "the grass really isn't greener..." really applies.
One last point - in the O-Gp a couple weeks back, we were told LFDTS wants to stop having incremental instructors come to G'town, so that should in theory reduce the extra load on being away from home for the field force guys coming to CTC to instruct....in theory....
My :2c:
YMMV.
