There are two aspects to recruiting.
There's recruiting for the reserve force, and we're takings steps with the Canadian Army to expedite that activity. The commander of the army and I are working with our teams to come up with a model by which, in our perfect world, someone would be able to enter the door of a militia unit or a naval reserve division and within a month be recruited. That's what we're really working hard to try to accomplish.
We recognize that the recruiting for the regular force is done by the chief of military personnel. The chief of the defence staff and General Whitecross are working extraordinarily hard to try to streamline those processes as well, so that we can recruit sailors expeditiously.
I think when young Canadians take a look at their navy, much as they would a stock, they want to see if it's on the rise or the fall. If there's a bright future for the institution and for the army or the air force, I think they're willing to invest themselves. From my perspective today, the request for proposal for the Canadian surface combatant acknowledges that there's a bright future for the Royal Canadian Navy. The fact that we're building the Harry DeWolf Arctic offshore patrol ships is real. The great imagery on the Internet to reinforce that fact portrays that bright future.
As it pertains to retention, that's something we own. That's why you'll hear us refer to “people first, mission always”. It's why we're trying to take our training system out of PowerPoint and into hands-on experiential-type training activities.
We were actually putting our sailors to sea too long. We were putting them in a position of having to choose between their family and the navy. As I've said to them, if I had to choose between the navy or my family, I'd choose my family, so why should they be any different? We're making sure that we can track their sea/shore ratio. Where there's a requirement that we have to break the number of days allocated, it will actually be a flag officer making that decision.
When I was at sea on board HMCS Vancouver during RIMPAC, I asked a number of sailors how many had been attach-posted. In an attach posting, we take you from one ship and move you to another ship, or we take you out of your shore posting and send you to a ship that needs that skill set to go to sea. Some people had been attach-posted, or taken away from their family at short notice, up to five times. Once again, that's problematic. We're forcing them to choose between their family or the navy. We've implemented a process by which we'll also track the number of attach postings our sailors are doing.
Now, we have to recognize that some of those attach postings are good cholesterol and some are bad cholesterol. If it's taking a sailor who actually wants to deploy into the Asia-Pacific region and go to Vietnam, then that's good cholesterol. If we had to rip that same sailor away from his family with 24 or 36 hours' notice, then that's bad cholesterol. We need to make a differentiation between those types of attach postings.
We're very much trying to leverage business intelligence tools in order to be able to provide those reports and to be able to identify where we may have challenges or issues as we go forward. As you've indicated, we need to retain those sailors. As the chief of the team will say, how long does it take to get a petty officer with 15 years' experience? Fifteen years. That's why we're very much focused on retention.
Chief, do you have anything to add?