Services cope with demand for joint training.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.

Military officials recognize that the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps will need to adjust their training exercises and equipment to make them less service-centric and more joint-service oriented.

But it is not yet clear how the services will go about doing this, given the lack of specific guidance from the Pentagon on how to implement joint training programs.

Feedback from military units that fought ill Iraq pointed to the need for the services to train together at the tactical level, in areas that traditionally have not gotten much attention, such as learning how to speak each other's vernacular and how to share targeting information.

"One of the problems we have today is that we get together in a joint exercise, but we play it at the operational level," said Capt. Dave "Roy" Rogers, a Navy aviator who served as a joint air-war planner in Operation iraqi Freedom.

What is needed is "integration at the tactical," Rogers said at a conference of the National Training System Association. "That does not typically happen, you can make the argument, to the level of detail that it needs to."

A case in point is joint close-air support, he said. "Refining JCAS doctrine and training is a hot-button item right now."

The war in Iraq illustrated the value of joint training in CAS operations, said retired Rear Adm. Fred Lewis, president of NTSA. "The Navy trains with Marine ground units all the time," he said. "That is why we saw great performance in OIF."

When Navy and Marine aircraft had to support Army missions, however, things didn't work out as smoothly, Lewis said. "They don't train together. Very rarely does the Navy or the Air Force train with the Army."

Close air support, he said, has been a "major training deficiency in the joint world for a long time." The Army's National Training Center, for example, rarely hosts joint CAS exercises.

The Army relies on Air Force CAS, but they don't work very well together, said Lewis. That is why the Army has attack helicopters.

Gen. Michael Hagee, commandant of the Marine Corps, said that many of the interoperability problems in Iraq between the Marines and the Army were solved once in theater, but should have been addressed much earlier, in training exercises.

Marine gunship helicopters, for instance, fought along the Army V Corps' Apache attack helicopters. But the Marines didn't learn about the V Corps' tactics and procedures for deep attack operations until after the war started, Hagee said at a conference of the U.S. Naval Institute. "We found that we could support them if they got in trouble," he said. "But you shouldn't be working that out as you cross the line of departure. ... We need to do more joint training at the tactical level, so we can identify these seams and fix them before we are ready to cross the line of departure."

Air Force Gen. Charles F. Wald, deputy chief of U.S. European Command, said the Air Force often gets an undeserved bad rap for not being committed to close-air support training.

He admitted, however, that the service had let such CAS capabilities as advanced air-to-ground modems and communications...