There is a sliding scale here that some obviously get, some clearly don't.
If you want to land on a carrier you can do it in a few seconds. Bell them up, ask where they are, gear down and VV jsut in front should crack it. If you want to be good at it you need to put aside a few days and find all sorts of weather.
If you want a whole squadron to be up to speed (defined as 'unlikely to crash if left to their own devices') then the aircrew will need about three weeks once you have taken the 1 in 7 days off and factored in weather and servicability.
If you want the fighter controllers to be good at the force marshal thing, and the ATC chaps to be good at getting you all down safely in ever increasing numbers you need to be onboard for at least a week after you were prepared to start pushing four ships off the front.
The deck team will take about a week of fourships etc to get used to it and then you can start the complex evolution of recovering fourships at the same time as launching them. Your chaps will start complaining at this point about not being able to get to the jets to fuel and arm them because someone else is quite selfishly trying to launch.
Once you have that cracked you can start thinking about holding a GCAS pair at alert whilst flying your four over four frag.
Not to worry though, because contrary to popular opinion you can actually be training on all these missions - it's not just about wasting fuel. But your planners and Fleet N7 probably need a kick every now and then to make sure the training is actually available.
At about this time Flyco can cope with just about anything up to the planning assumptions you told the ACC at the get go you could manage.
Which means it's time to embark the staff and get ACC talking to MCC about priorities etc and seeing if the deck, ship and weapon supply can cope with changing frag, dynamic targets, aircraft coming home late, ship needing to nip off to avoid submarine threat etc.
So. Assuming you want to be at high readiness as a driver takes a few days, delivering the UK a capability can takes about eight carefully scripted weeks.
Then you can go off to Bright Star, Magic Carpet whatever you fancy, and not embarass yourself. And yes if you are driver you will think one of two things. 1. "But I could do all this ages ago." or 2. "Wow, jets ranged, weapons correct, Green Crown actually there, E-3 talking to boat, Baggers talking to JTAC...it's all been worth it!"
And that is where JFH just about got (back) to when they were canned. I personally heard a OC JFH brief at Shriv that he considered his annual commitment to CVS to be 10 days. I was also there when the last one was stood in the ops room of a CVS briefing the 1 star on the DT his boys were about to service.
I personally thought the first an odd choice for OC of a Joint force the other (and the one before him) I considered a gentleman and one of the best officers I had served under.