Almost green why not just call them 'soldiers?'.

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The Air Force and the Navy are grooming their own class of ground troops.

These new breeds of soldiers--known by names such as "common battlefield airman" and "Navy expeditionary sailors"--are being deployed to war zones and are expected to fulfill duties that would seem unnatural to most members of the air and sea services.

To expedite their preparation for deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, both services are launching a series of new training programs that cover the gamut from basic small arms marksmanship and truck driving to land navigation.

Under the Air Force common battlefield airman training program, or CBAT, as many as 14,000 trainees will be prepped for ground combat duties.

The program has been somewhat controversial in light of the ongoing downsizing in the Air Force, which decided two years ago to eliminate 40,000 jobs in order to fund equipment modernization.

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But a shortage of Army and Marine troops for Iraq rotations resulted in requests for Air Force reinforcements. These cross-service assignments are called "in lieu off because forces from one service substitute for the other.

The chief of the Air Force, Gen. T. Michael Moseley, criticized the use of the term "in lieu off and warned that the service is going to more closely supervise how airmen are engaged in ground combat duties.

"I resent that terminology because it assumes that we have people sitting around waiting for something to do," he said at an Air Force conference in Washington, D.C. "When we validate requirements from U.S. Central Command, we want to make sure people are not doing things outside their core competency," said Moseley. "Experience leads us to believe that people are asked to do things that they weren't originally trained to do."

Initially there were only a small number of airmen involved. More recently, the requests grew to 3,000 personnel per year, and the numbers are expected to get larger. Now the Air Force is asking Central Command to make sure airmen are assigned to blue-suit commanders, said Moseley. "We want airmen to work for airmen."

Moseley recently asked the chief of Air Force training, Gen. William R. Looney III, to organize a better program to prepare airmen for ground duties.

Looney said that training problems surfaced about two years ago when Air Force officials reported that many of the airmen who were assigned to Central Command could not be tracked by their own service commanders.

"We needed to create a command-and-control system," Looney said. We have that now ... We ensure people are equipped and trained. Some do not need full Army training."

Approximately 7,000 airmen went through the training last year. The Air Force now calls it the "common airmen training program."

It became apparent to Air Force senior leaders that "we were beginning to ask our airmen to do things they had never done before," Looney said.

One issue of concern is the vulnerability of forward-deployed Air Force bases to terrorist attacks. "Our bases used to be sanctuaries," Looney said. "When we fought in Vietnam, we were flying out of bases ... It was hours from that base before they entered bad guy territory. Today, the bases we're operating out of are in bad guy territory, so our threat is 360 degrees," he said. "It's more dangerous for a contracting officer to travel a block in downtown Baghdad to sign a contract than it is for an F-16 pilot to fly a close-air support mission."

"The reason we're doing CBAT, really, is that it's the chief's vision," Looney said at a news conference.

The Air Force said it will select a site for new CBAT training facilities by January 2008. Three sites are under consideration--Moody Air Force Base, Ga., Barksdale Air Force Base, La., and Arnold Air Force Base, Tenn. A temporary course is being set up at Camp Bullis, Texas.

CBAT will train airmen in areas such as search and rescue, emergency ordnance disposal, tactical air control and air liaison functions, urban fighting, land navigation and medical procedures.

In a sign that ground combat duties are here to stay, the Air Force in the 2008 war-emergency budget request is seeking $30.4 million for the purchase of M240 and M249 machine guns.

The Navy, for its part, has begun a series of new training programs for enlisted sailors and officers who eventually will be assigned to war duties in the Middle East and the Horn of Africa.

About 14,000 sailors currently are deployed in those areas.

In February 2008, the "Expeditionary Combat Skills Course" will get underway at the Naval Construction Battalion Center, in Gulfport, Miss., said Lt. Cmdr. Leslie Hull-Ryde, spokeswoman for the Navy Expeditionary Combat Command.

The course is a four-week program to teach sailors basic skills--shoot, move, communicate and survive.

Curriculum topics include: individual combat equipment, field hygiene and sanitation, field bivouac, combat casualty care, land navigation, small arms safety, pistol and rifle fundamentals and marksmanship, principles of crew served weapons, basic military communications, counter-IED awareness, combat mindset, judgment-based engagement training and good decision making (shoot/do not shoot).

The Navy also is expanding its use of high-tech simulators for joint-service training and to prepare officers for war command duties.

"Over the past three to four years, we've built a network that rivals the U.S. Joint Forces Command's," said Guy Purser, director of the Navy continuous training environment at the Naval Warfare Development Command. "We are starting to train fleet commanders and staff at the operational level of war."

Chief of Naval Personnel Vice Adm. John C. Harvey, Jr. said future training programs must prepare sailors to do their jobs more efficiently because the force is getting smaller.

By end of 2009, the Navy will have 80,000 fewer sailors than it had in 2000, Harvey said. "This creates new needs for training," he told an industry conference.

Simulators and virtual training are well-liked in the Navy, he noted. But the problem with most simulators is that they can't be brought aboard ships. "How do you deliver training when you have a dispersed, mobile force at sea that does not have a T-1 line?" Harvey asked.

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