I may be waaaay out of my lane now but, about twenty plus years ago, I challenged some of my friends in the upper echelons of some of the more attractive, technical branches to consider reviving and reforming the old LOTRP (Land Operations Trade Reassignment Programme – I think; maybe the Alzheimer’s is kicking in already).
Why, I asked, did we need to have private level soldiers in e.g. the C&E and EME Branch technical trades? Why could we not insist that soldiers ‘re-muster’ into these trades from combat trades – after, say, three and a half years of good service which would mean that by the time they completed trade training they would be corporals?
I understood that such a process could not happen all at once – those technical trades need a steady stream of people, but it could be accomplished, I thought over a fairly short, say three year, period. New Zealand, if I recall correctly used to do this – maybe they still do. (They also did much (most? all?) of their theoretical (academic) technician training in their polytechnic colleges which are the equivalent of our community colleges.)