SIDEBAR

November 2004

Allies Essential in Personnel Recovery

by Roxana Tiron

While Pentagon officials acknowledge that it is critical to work with coalition partners and allies to rescue and recover isolated troops in combat, the facts indicate feeble movement in that direction.

The impediment lies in the United States’ reluctance to share classified information with foreign nations and the lack of standard procedures and equipment among allies.

Some officials call sharing classified information with the coalition a “complete failure.”

“This has been an issue since 1997, and it is such an easy fix,” said a Pentagon official. “They even paid millions for a study on how to proceed, and it still comes up as an issue.”

The problem lies in the fact that the U.S. government over-classifies information across the board, said Jerry Jennings, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for prisoner of war and missing personnel affairs.

“Maybe one approach might be going after that classifier,” he suggested. “Should this information be classified at all?”

While certain information gets de-classified on a need-to-know basis, especially for NATO partners, other allies still do not have access.

In Operation Iraqi Freedom, Central Command “did a really good job sharing information with coalition partners,” said Chief Warrant Officer 3 John Carey, who fought with the Army’s 5th Corps in Iraq.

“You really have to embrace coalition, because you have Fiji medics, Mongolian engineers that are out doing these things, and those traditional coalition procedures do not apply. When you think coalition, please think of the entire world,” he said at a National Defense Industrial Association personnel recovery conference.

Joint Forces Command struggles with the issue of sharing information every day, said retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Jack Holbein, now the executive advisor to JFCOM on personnel recovery issues.

“Every exercise that we do down at JFCOM, we include coalition forces, and we have five or six officers, and they are working, and you are on the SIPRNET [classified network] and tell them ‘Sorry, you cannot have that information,’” Holbein said at the conference.

Some strides, however, are being made. At a recent NATO search and rescue panel meeting, the members moved closer to completing a combat search-and-rescue doctrine document, said Jennings.

“The problem with most NATO countries, nevertheless, is that they do not even want to talk about personnel recovery,” said an official who works on the issue for European Command. “It does not help them ... that those people who control the money do not know anything about combat search and rescue.”

Currently, NATO countries’ personnel recovery capabilities vary considerably. Also, survival equipment, radios, communication procedures and personnel recovery tactics are not standardized, and frequently are not compatible with those used by the U.S. forces, according to the Defense Department.

General Dynamics sold 13,800 AN/PRC-112G—more commonly known as the Hook-112 radio systems to 15 U.S. coalition partners, out of which 11 are NATO members, said Arne Olson, the company’s international business manager for search and rescue. Hook has been the system of choice in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Balkans, said Olson. While it is compatible with another radio used by U.S. forces, the Boeing-manufactured Combat Survivor Evader Locator, the Hook radio cannot communicate with the Israeli-produced PRC-434 that some members are using, said Olson.

Combined exercises also are important to streamline some of the processes. The Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office is in the process of coordinating a first-ever Danish-British-U.S. combined personnel-recovery exercise scheduled to take place next year.

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