The Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness has overall responsibility for the Training Transformation Program and, through the use of the Training Transformation Executive Steering Group and the Training Transformation Senior Advisory Group, oversees the execution of three capabilities or initiatives: JNTC, the Joint Knowledge Development and Distribution Capability, and the Joint Assessment and Enabling Capability. According to the 2006 Training Transformation Implementation Plan, these 3 initiatives are designed to prepare individuals, units, and staff for the new strategic environment and to provide enabling tools and processes to carry out joint missions. Specifically: The JNTC, focusing on collective training, is expected to prepare forces by providing units and command staff with integrated live, virtual, and constructive training environments. This initiative would add enhanced service and combatant command training that emphasizes jointness and enables global training and mission rehearsal in support of combatant command operations. The Joint Knowledge Development and Distribution Capability, which focuses on individual training, is intended to prepare future decision makers and leaders to better understand joint operations and the common operational picture, as well as to respond innovatively to adversaries. It develops and distributes joint knowledge via a dynamic, global-knowledge network that provides immediate access to joint education and training resources. The Joint Assessment and Enabling Capability is expected to assist leaders in assessing the value of transformational training initiatives to individuals, organizations, and processes, and to link the impact of the Training Transformation Program to combatant commanders’ readiness requirements. This initiative is also supposed to provide the processes and tools to continuously improve joint training. The JNTC initiative, the leading initiative for training transformation, is managed by a Joint Management Office within the Joint Forces Command’s Joint Trainer Directorate. This Joint Management Office, which was established in 2003, manages the operational, technical and program resources necessary to implement the initiative. The Joint Management Office coordinates its management efforts of the initiative with the Office of the Secretary of Defense through senior and executive advisory groups. The overall purpose of the JNTC initiative is to provide a persistent capability to combatant command and service training programs to create an appropriate, realistic joint operating environment within their existing training activities. To accomplish this, DOD plans to spend about $1.5 billion on the JNTC initiative through fiscal year 2011, or 84 percent of training transformation total funding. The JNTC initiative was deemed by the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Readiness to be operationally capable in October 2004—indicating that the initial infrastructure of networked sites and systems needed to enhance the joint environment of training exercises was in place. During fiscal year 2005, 16 combatant command and service training events were selected by the Joint Forces Command to enhance their joint training environment through the JNTC initiative. The JNTC initiative includes several key efforts to enhance the joint training environment of combatant commands and services. These efforts include the following: Development of joint task articles. This is an effort to enhance the level of details associated with joint mission essential tasks that are identified by the combatant commands as critical to joint operations, and to provide joint trainers specific guidance for developing exercises and other joint training activities. These task articles are a set of processes, procedures, or actions that address critical horizontal (actions between services) and vertical (actions between a service and a higher joint force command) elements of interoperability for specific joint mission essential tasks. Currently, the JNTC initiative has developed 156 approved articles and has 88 under various stages of development. Joint training and experimentation network. The joint network is intended to be a large-capacity communications network that will provide persistent support to joint training exercises, service stand- alone events, exercise preparation and rehearsal, experimentation, evaluation of advanced training technologies, and evaluation of new warfighting concepts. The network, when complete, will enable the Joint Forces Command to use live, virtual, and constructive simulations in concert to enhance the joint training environment for combatant commands and services. By the end of fiscal year 2005, the joint network had been expanded to 33 sites, including one in Hawaii and one in Germany. Accreditation and certification programs. The JNTC accreditation program works toward ensuring that combatant command and service joint training programs include the appropriate joint environment for the joint tasks being trained. Accreditation is program-centric, whereby entire service and combatant command training programs are evaluated and accredited for training selected joint tasks in a joint environment that meets specific joint standards or conditions. The intent of this effort is to establish a process that ensures delivery of a recurring, consistent, realistic training environment for all units participating in joint training, regardless of the locations from which they are participating. The Joint Forces Command accredited 4 training programs during fiscal year 2005 and is expecting to accredit 23 more programs during 2006. JNTC’s certification effort concurrently ensures that the technical aspects of the training programs—the sites and the systems comprising the training infrastructure, networks, and ranges— support the accredited training program. The JNTC initiative, now 1 year after being deemed initially operational capable, is expected to reach full operational capability in 2010 when it will provide a global joint training network that allows live, virtual, and constructive participation by services, combatant commands, and coalition and interagency partners in accredited training programs. The full extent to which the JNTC initiative has improved the ability of the services and combatant commands to train jointly is not clear because DOD has not yet assessed the full impact of the JNTC initiative efforts on joint training or developed a strategy for conducting such an assessment. Based on our examination of 5 of the 16 fiscal year 2005 exercises that the Joint Forces Command helped to fund and enhance through the JNTC initiative, we found indications that the JNTC initiative has begun to improve joint training. Examples we found include increases in the use of joint objectives and increases in participation by other services. Without a comprehensive assessment of the JNTC initiative’s enhancement of joint training programs, DOD has no assurance that its investment in the initiative will produce the desired results. DOD has not yet assessed the full impact of JNTC efforts on joint training; therefore both the overall impact the JNTC initiative is having on joint training programs and the extent to which it is achieving the program’s goals are unclear. The Training Transformation Implementation Plan does not include a requirement for the JNTC Joint Management Office to assess whether the JNTC initiative has improved the ability of the services and combatant commands to train jointly. The JNTC Joint Management Office receives feedback through working with the services and combatant commands, but no formal evaluation of JNTC efforts has been conducted. The individual services and combatant commanders are aware of JNTC enhancements to their specific training programs and resulting improvements and are documenting some of these enhancements in after action reports and lessons learned reports. For example, the Navy’s preliminary assessment of its Fleet Synthetic Training — Joint 05-2 exercise stated that the value added through rapid delivery and improved interoperability and repeatability of the Fleet Synthetic training capability and the joint network will save operating costs while providing quality joint and coalition training to the warfighter. Additionally, as a result of a lesson learned during Terminal Fury 05, JNTC funds were used to develop an analytical tool that enabled analysts to search through recorded exercise model data and replay selected training exercises, which helped explain to the exercise control group and the training audience how and why a particular event occurred. However, these types of reports do not provide an overall assessment of the collective impact JNTC efforts are having on joint training. DOD’s most recent assessment of its training transformation efforts, conducted by the Joint Assessment and Enabling Capability in support of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, is known as the training transformation block assessment. This block assessment, conducted for the first time in 2005, is the primary mechanism for providing feedback to senior DOD leadership on how well DOD is meeting its training transformation goals. The block assessment is to provide an assessment every 2 years that measures, guides, and evaluates the progress of the training transformation initiatives, including the JNTC initiative. These evaluations are intended by DOD to be an innovative use of performance assessment tools, techniques, and policies, using well- defined metrics to provide a feedback capability to the leadership. Additionally, DOD recently announced its plans to conduct a Joint Training Program Review during mid-2006 to examine training transformation efforts and to realign these efforts with the recent Quadrennial Defense Review Report and program strategic guidance. Our prior work, the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review Report, and DOD’s Training Transformation Implementation Plan emphasize the importance of establishing performance metrics that set up time frames and measurable outcomes to gauge the success of a program implementation. GAO’s Human Capital: A Guide on Assessing Strategic Training Programs and Development Efforts in the Federal Government emphasizes the importance of using program performance information to assess the progress that training and development programs make toward achieving results. The guide states that agencies should keep in mind that they need to collect data corresponding to established training objectives throughout the implementation process to refine and continually improve, deliver, and enhance learning. Furthermore, the guide asserts that it is important for agencies to develop and use outcome-oriented performance measures to ensure accountability and to assess progress toward achieving results aligned with the agencies’ missions and goals. The Quadrennial Defense Review Report emphasizes that each initiative is accountable for measuring performance and delivering results that support the departmentwide strategy. DOD’s Training Transformation Implementation Plan requires periodic reviews to assess the success of its Training Transformation Program. According to the plan, every 2 years, a formal program assessment should be conducted to measure the impact of training transformation initiatives on joint force readiness. The results of those assessments are intended to help leaders decide strategy modifications and subsequent investments. DOD’s initial 2005 training transformation block assessment did not evaluate the JNTC initiative’s collective impact on joint training.