[scott.henry]

Nuke quotas are essentially driven by the ability of the pipeline to put students through. In recent years, at least one of the prototypes have been down for one reason or another and not able to train students. This causes a backup in the training pipeline and it goes all the way to the Recruiting Command, driving down the number of slots that they have available. When I was an instructor at NPS, we routinely had upwards of 600 (effectively 2 entire NPS classes) people in our hold pool waiting to go to Prototype. With MARF being slated for decommissioning in the near future and the SC Prototype retiring the old MTS's and transitioning to the 688 Class MTS's, I would expect the backlog to continue for quite some time. If all of the Prototype plants are ever up and running at once and training students, Recruiters will not be able to keep their available Nuke billets filled.