Yes Whalley, we're all lying. The entire recruiting system is a devious plot to find potato peelers for the Officers' Messes.
The training system is working at full volume. When everything falls into place, a recruit will move smoothly from course to course to unit. But this doesn't always work out, due to many factors, and sometimes there are long waits between training courses. In some cases, available staff and equipment are being used by other courses at the schools, so they are allocated in rotation. In some cases, there is only the possibility to run so many course serials a year for a particular trade and training level, so if you hit the school at the wrong time, you wait.
One of the failings of the last recruiting surge a few years ago was that the Recruiting System stood up extra training companies across the country and produced far more recruits than the Army, Navy and Air Force could possibly handle at the trades training courses. Unfortunately, this meant some people spent an inordinate amount of time sitting in PAT platoons - because the necessary coordination of training efforts wasn't done to minimize the effects of a surge training effort at the recruit level before all those Recruits were produced.
The current CF forecast is that we can take in no more than 1000 more than historic recruiting/training levels, this is primarily to minimize the effects of another unbalanced surge. Is the system perfect – no - but few human endeavours are. Is it better now than its worst moments of the past decade? Yes. Throughout your career the intent and the practicality of your circumstances will conflict and you'll wonder how that happened, unfortunately it's the problem of running a complex organization which sometimes has to react to many external factors.
(Edited for format.)
