FALLON -- In classrooms, on desert bases and in the skies above, military trainers and educators in Nevada and nationwide are tweaking lectures and reworking battle scenarios to teach troops the lessons of the war in Iraq.
Less than three months after President Bush declared the major fighting of Operation Enduring Freedom at an end, formal adjustments already are seeping into the wide-ranging and nearly continuous cycle of education that prepares the U.S. military for combat.
A new elective class on the Iraq war is planned for the fall semester at the National War College in Washington, D.C.
Air Force leaders from U.S. Central Command -- the Florida-based control center for the Iraq war -- met at Nellis Air Force Base near Las Vegas this week for a discussion of lessons learned fighting Saddam Hussein's military.
But in the hierarchical U.S. military culture, trainers and troops here say a surprising number of significant modifications stem not from top-level Joint Chiefs analysis but from on-the-ground personnel transforming their own experiences into subtle lesson updates.
Officers at individual bases such as the Naval Strike and Air Warfare Center about 55 miles east of Reno are choosing new terminology to be learned and new imagined enemies for fresh recruits to fight in war games.
They're reshaping the modern war school.
Cmdr. Scott Calvert returned from three months in the Persian Gulf region to northern Nevada's Navy flight school and immediately began using new language in teaching pilots how to bomb a target on short notice.
"'Investigate that target' meant a certain set of things in Iraq. We'll go ahead and adopt that," he explained.
New terms and other seemingly minor updates will help reduce "friction points" between the Navy and other branches of the military -- and could save lives by reducing wartime friendly fire incidents, according to Calvert and base spokesman Zip Upham. At least two dozen U.S. and British soldiers and Kurdish civilians lost their lives in Iraqi war incidents in which they were mistakenly fired on by allied forces.
The Fallon base -- home of the famed "Top Gun" naval aviator training program -- regularly hosts intensive four-week sessions to prepare troops for the chaos and fierce fighting of real war. But what if the routine is outdated?
"Most of our scenarios are Iraq-like right now," Calvert said. With no further formal warfighting needed in Iraq, he and others in charge of lesson plans at the base are considering dropping entire missions and reworking others to reflect the capabilities of a new enemy.
"One of the big questions is are we going to tailor the general baseline threat to something else," Calvert said. "We'll need to have some significant discussions as we want to go away from that sort of thing or gear things toward North Korea or something like that."
For the two dozen Fallon officers who went to Iraq, lesson revisions can be highly personal.
"You saw lots of things happen over there -- some of them good, some of them not so good -- so it's natural to want to try to iron those out and prepare the next folks so they won't have to gnash through those things again," said Calvert, who helped select targets in Iraq from the air operations center at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia.
Cmdr. Steven Miller, part of an East Coast-based aircraft carrier air wing which trained recently in Fallon, said he appreciated the evolving lessons presented on the high desert base and in its air space the size of Connecticut where training missions are flown.
"There's a history of standards," he said. "I'm feeling very comfortable with the program that NSAWC's putting out right now, that we know what the heck we're doing."
Elsewhere in Nevada, the major "Red Flag" war games around Nellis Air Force Base might incorporate some modifications as analysis of the Iraq war continues, said Master Sgt. Richard Covington, a base spokesman.
Nationwide, rapid postwar lesson updates are common at bases such as Nellis or in Fallon, but slower in military academia, said Mark Clodfelter, associate dean of faculty at the National War College.
"Wholesale modifications of our curriculum are unlikely anytime soon," said Clodfelter. However, the military history professor said he would incorporate Iraq events into his "Nature of War" class and expects a new elective class to focus specifically on the recent conflict.
Officers at Fallon continue coordinating training missions in which F-14 Tomcats and other fighter jets drop real and concrete-filled bombs on steel buildings, burned-out tanks and shipping containers scattered across the desert.
"The American taxpayers' value right there is their sons and daughters have a chance to screw up royally here and not pay for it with their lives," said Miller, who expects to head to the Mideast with his air wing on the USS Enterprise in September.
