Search and rescue: Pentagon seeks joint doctrine, training for Personnel Recovery.

Despite accounting for each and every missing soldier in the Iraq war--a first in U.S. military history--the combat search and rescue community is stretched thin and grappling with gaps raging from policy to training.

Officials said that success is a double-edged sword. Gaining support for additional resources and new ways of operating can be difficult given the performance in recent conflicts.

"The personnel recovery community is in an interesting position the job is getting done. What more can you ask for?" said Air Force Lt. Gen. Norton Schwartz, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

While personnel recovery is associated with the Air Force and its special operations forces, each military service has its own rescue elements and its own way of doing things. And for most, personnel recovery is an additional duty.

Now, military commanders are moving to make personnel recovery operations more interoperable, through a greater emphasis on joint training and new technology. But a number of high-level officers agree that there still is a long way to go.

"Personnel recovery" is the umbrella term for the aggregation of military, civil and political operations to obtain the release or recovery of those captured, missing or isolated from uncertain or hostile environments and denied areas. Personnel recovery includes a vast array of operations such as theater search and rescue (SAR); combat search and rescue (CSAR); survival, evasion, resistance and escape (SERE), and the coordination of negotiated as well as forcible recovery options.

What the military leadership should he seeking is a joint, dedicated personnel recovery force, Schwartz said. "Interoperability is as much a result of people on the ground making it happen as much as it is a result of adequate planning," he said at a recent National Defense Industrial Association personnel recovery conference. "We need a dedicated versus dual-use personnel recovery force."

Current dedicated recovery forces are stretched thin by supporting ongoing combat operations, he said. Most of these consist of special operations forces. "They can't afford to respond to requirements inefficiently," he said. "With the war on terrorism, those forces are in even higher demand for their primary combat tasks.

The war in Iraq--where insurgent organizations recognize the value of exploiting kidnappings and captures for political gain--has challenged the notion of personnel recovery. Added to the mix are civilians from the United States and allies (see related stories p. 38; p. 39) wire are increasingly being taken hostage. The Defense Department faces the challenge of changing its policies to encompass all elements, officials said at the conference.

The urban guerilla war now taking place in some Iraqi cities makes it easy for the enemy to hide kidnapped personnel, said Marine Maj. Lance Landeche, from U.S. Central Command. "The main difficulty is locating the missing," he said. "Once we know where they are, it's fairly simple to go in and get them."

Despite the fact that kidnapping and hostage taking are on the upswing in the Middle East, "personnel recovery does not have a priority internally in any military service for the personnel, equipment and funding commensurate with its frequently stated importance," said a July 2004 report on interagency national personnel recovery architecture, published by the Institute for Defense Analyses. Furthermore, there is no approved joint doctrine for personnel recovery, according to the report.

For Operation Iraqi Freedom, CENTCOM pooled resources from other combatant commands to establish 27 rescue centers. The Joint Search and Rescue Center for the area has a staff of about 17. This consolidation has degraded other commands' personnel recovery capabilities, said the IDA report.

By its own definition, the JSRC is the primary recovery entity that is designated by the joint forces commander or the joint forces air component commander for planning, coordinating and executing joint CSAR operations.

At the U.S. joint Forces Command, the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency is pushing for the integration of doctrine and training. JPRA is leading an effort to rewrite joint doctrine as well as tactics, techniques and procedures.

"JFCOM relies very heavily on JPRA to make thinks happen," a JPRA official said at the conference. "We have not done the best of jobs over recent years of integrating personnel recovery into the processes down there [at JFCOM]. What I have seen in the last four-and-a-half years in personnel recovery are some very embedded barriers to implementation."

In order to work together, the services need to deliberately plan their requirements, Jerry Jennings, deputy assistant secretary of defense for prisoner of war/missing personnel, told National Defense. Jennings requested the IDA study to push for the top-down integration of personnel recovery operations.

"We need to hammer out a common vision," he said. "We need to agree that this is a requirement where we each would be more successfully focusing on it jointly than as an individual service."

But old habits are hard to change, he said. "You cannot move overnight to a different approach," he said. "You have to convince those that feel they had a measure of success doing it the old way that they need to change. Then, you have to convince those who control the resources that the change will enhance your performance on the battlefield."

"We have to get away from the notion that says that services do their own personnel recovery," said Air Force Lt. Gen. Victor E. Renuart Jr., vice commander of Pacific Air Forces. "Certainly, each of the services has a capability to do that on the battlefield. We have to change the mindset a little bit."

He pointed our that anomalies exist within the process: "We provide very similar training to our CSAR units that we provide to our AFSOC units, yet we exclude them from training together," he said. "We have to integrate that training. We have to integrate enough of the capabilities."

So far, integrating training has been a struggle for Joint Forces Command, said an official from the J-3 office.

"The commander that is preparing sets the training objectives from the joint mission essential task lists for that exercise and, if we haven't educated that commander and his staff, then he does not put personnel recovery on his training objectives," the of official said. The solution would be to have "personnel-recovery smart planners" who can influence the training objectives, said an official.

Even when forces train for recovery missions, services abide by their own training systems, said Renuart.

"We sort of have three, four, five different parallel efforts of training, what I would call part-task training," he told National Defense. "We train an Air Force helicopter crew and para-rescue team to do a particular task on the battlefield, and each of the services has similar kinds of individual service-unique training."

What the Pentagon does not do as well is force the integration of those training systems, he explained.

"We bring those service-unique training elements together in a way that forces the integration of each of their capabilities," Renuart said. "Our Navy flies a great rescue helicopter, but [the Air Force does] not train routinely together with the Navy."

In addition to working together, troops need to adjust their survival, evasion, resistance and escape training, Renuart said.

As a survivor of an F-14 engine failure in Iraq, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Robert McDonald recommends that more rehearsals, or as he calls them "chair fly," of the procedures are necessary.

"Preparation and 'what-ifs' are the only ways to ensure that when cold, in-shock, injured and at night, you will have the presence of mind to enact the proper actions," he said in an interview. "It is a testament to the training we received that we were able to overcome some command and control hurdles and, by the flexibility of the rescue mission commander, effect a successful recovery."

While the training that forces receive for CSAR capabilities is "superb," the real gap that McDonald sees is in the need to emphasize that "this can happen to anyone, anytime."

"Hostile fire. mechanical failure or being in the wrong place can put you in a situation where you may be seeking recovery," he said. Prepare, plan and devise backups would be the best advice I could pass on," he said.

Only 4,000 of the 385,000 officers and sailors in the Navy have even limited code-of-conduct training to help them understand how they should behave if captured, said Cmdr. Andy Whitsen. There is a shortfall in peacetime detention and hostage-situation training, Whitsen said. Only 200 of 17,316 eligible sailors will get that training this year, he said.

In the Army and the Marine Corps, ground combat forces have not been employed very effectively for recovery operations, officials said. "In the Marine Corps, we consider that all combat forces [ground, as well as aviation] have some capability for personnel recovery. All they're thinking about is helicopters. That's something we've got to work on," said Lt. Col. Patrick Kelley, from the service's plans, policy and operations office.

SERE training is no longer being offered to only select personnel, such as combat aviators and special operations forces, but it is being opened up to "a much larger spectrum of Marines," he said.

There is, however, one problem. Much of the information Marines need to know about personnel recovery is classified, but many Marines don't have clearances, Kelley said. "Why have we classified all of this information? You're denying my privates and privates first class information that might save their lives."

The Army, meanwhile, has to figure out what role personnel recovery should play in the service, asserted an Army official. Personnel recovery initiatives are in their infancy, the official added.

While training and procedures are essential, technology plays a major part in personnel recovery, said McDonald. "Capabilities such as GPS [Global Positioning System], multiple frequency radios and night vision have expanded the envelope of the CSAR forces," he said. On the operators' "wish list" would be a single, easy-to-employ secure communication or signaling device with location and navigation capability, he said.

Renuart rates current technology at about a seven out of 10. "The things we need to improve on are self-reporting technologies," he said.

"Blue-force tracking is a way to describe some of that, but it really goes beyond that because it is a means to identify an individual who is in distress so that the command and control structure shifts its attention over there, even to the narrow part of the battlefield."

When it comes to fielding radio technology, there has been some squabbling in the Defense Department's acquisition circles.

"We have been developing the CSEL [combat survivor evader locator] radio since 1996 and have only recently begun to field this exciting new capability," said Jennings.

However, that has been so long in coming that interim fixes such as Hook-112 have been fielded, and "that has raised other issues," he said. "While continuing to look to the transformational survival radio of the future, we must stop wasting out time arguing which survival radio is better and commit to integrating what we have."

CSEL is a joint program between the Air Force, Navy and Army, which is supposed to provide a reliable 24-hour two-way, near-real-time secure messaging and voice communications system, used for rescuing downed aircrew members. CSEL includes a hand-held radio, an over-the-horizon segment for satellite communications and multiple command, control and communications workstations located in JSRCs. CSEL, produced by Boeing, is expected to possess a communications range of thousands of miles through a satellite relay system.

The Hook-112 survival radio system is designed far Air Force and NaW pilots. The radios come preprogrammed to improve flight and mission planning, said General Dynamics, the radio's manufacturer.

"I would like to see one of the services step up to the plate and find the transitional architecture for the new CSEL and Hook-112 family of systems," Jennings said. "Let's face it. We are going to have both the CSEL and the Hook-112 in the inventory, and probably a few other types of radios."