It would almost be impossible for a Canadian soldier to be recruited and end up overseas in an operation inside one year. A Canadian soldier goes through recruiting through Saint-Jean, and a basic military qualification can take two to three months. Oftentimes, there'll be a period of a few weeks, perhaps even a month or two, before the next series of training would begin for their various occupations.
Let me use an infantryman as an example. They would undertake training at one of the army training centres across the country and become qualified. They would then be posted to their battalion. They immediately embark on another series of qualifications on platoon level weapons, and things that they would be expected to use.
Then when they go into the collective training cycle of that particular unit--say if this recruit were in a battalion that was going to go out the door for operations--they would begin by conducting a series of what we call levels 1-to-7 training. They would go through individual battle task standards, then they would work as a team within the section under the leadership of a sergeant, with a master corporal as the second in command, and work through the tactics, techniques, and procedures in the drills they would be expected to perform. Then they work within the context of a platoon, then within the context of a company. There's a lot of that training that has to be done in garrison before we get to the field.
When they get to the field, they're ready to work together as a team, normally implying they can go to the field and train at a platoon level. So a platoon can literally just go out and do its training and normally that platoon commander would be training the younger sergeants beneath him. And so it goes all the way up to what you saw, which was a brigade and a brigade commander. And although we were doing things to help train his staff, the primary training audience was actually the companies inside the battalions.
So there's training ongoing at multiple different levels concurrently, because we have to do that. Resources are finite, but the primary audience there was a level 4 to 5, within a level 6 context. To us that means the company level within the battle group.