Quick mission rehearsals goal of joint training.

• Author: Peck, Michael
• Position: joint national training capability

Slashing the rehearsal time needed for joint training missions from months to days is one of the goals of the joint national training capability (JNTC), a concept designed to move joint warfare from rhetoric to reality.

Yet today's joint exercises are anything but quick. Major war games such as CJTFEX 04-2, a Joint Forces Command exercise that included 28,000 American and British troops as well as a carrier battle group, take six to nine months to plan, according to Warren Bizub, director of JNTC's advanced training technology program.

"It is a long process to do the planning piece, the design piece, the database development piece and then the after-action review," Bizub explained.

"If a commander calls and says, 'I need training for this particular area of the world because I've got to go there in 72 hours; give me a mission rehearsal capability from the operational down to the tactical,' I'll tell you right now that we couldn't do it. It takes a long time to take all the data, environmental, geospatial intelligence, targets, order of battle, and bring all these different databases together."

JNTC's goal is to shorten the joint exercise life cycle, from commander's intent to after-action reports, to days rather than months. "Some people have said it should take no more than 96 hours," said Bizub. "I like to say we'll get it down to the shortest possible time."

Currently some mission rehearsal can be done in as little as 48 hours, said Bizub. But these tend to involve special operations forces using archived data. Yet most planners don't have the luxury of information at their fingertips. They require quick access to databases scattered across the military, the intelligence community, academia and multinational partners. These databases are often classified and nestled behind the walls of turf-sensitive agencies with dismal histories of cooperation. Even such seemingly mundane areas as range instrumentation create headaches in a multinational exercise where allies are required to exchange data on the performance of their weapons.

Bizub sees the technical solution as a data management system capable of working with differing databases. Continuing progress on the Defense Department's global information grid will help matters. As for cooperation issues, "there will have to be organizational, policy and technological issues addressed," he noted.

Nonetheless, Bizub is confident these challenges can be surmounted. "I compare this to the issue of...