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Too much ground combat training?

The House Armed Services Committee does not want the Navy and Air Force to reinvent ground combat training to prepare their people for deployments to Iraq.

“The committee is very concerned about the creep of nontraditional missions, such as ground combat skills, into the Navy and Air Force and the resulting potential weakening of those services’ core competency skills,” the committee says in its report accompanying the 2008 defense authorization bill.

The report notes that sailors and airmen are being asked to deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan for missions that historically have belonged to ground combat troops, such as driving trucks, protecting convoys and providing base security. These assignments could diminish with the manpower increases in the Army and Marine Corps included in the 2008 budget, the committee says.

The House and Senate versions of the defense policy bill would add 36,000 soldiers and 9,000 Marines above the Bush administration’s budget request, which had assumed increases of 7,000 people for the Army and 5,000 for the Marine Corps.

“The committee remains concerned that the budget request for the active components of the Army and the Marine Corps is too low for the current requirements placed on those services by the national security strategy,” the report says.

For the Navy and Air Force to help out in a pinch is fine, the committee says, as long as the help is considered temporary.

“Jointness dictates that the services operate within their core competencies and seek the expertise of the service whose skills lie in a particular competency,” the report says. “While training of sailors and airmen in ground combat skills may be a necessity given current combat operations, the committee believes it should be treated as an exception rather than a reason to establish permanent training.”

But permanent training is exactly what the Navy and Air Force have been considering.

The Navy is planning its own eight-week course for all sailors assigned to the Navy Expeditionary Combat Command that will focus on movement, shooting, communicating and first aid. The report said the Navy is planning to set up East Coast and West Coast training courses.

The Air Force already has a combat training course for airmen at an Army base in Texas, Camp Anderson-Peters. The base, formerly known as Camp Bullis, was named for two airmen killed in Iraq while doing convoy security.