DOD Training

Opportunities Exist to Reduce the Training Infrastructure Gao ID: NSIAD-96-93 March 29, 1996

One source of funds to pay for the acceleration of the Defense Department's (DOD) modernization is to reduce infrastructure. This report summarizes the status of DOD's efforts to reduce its formal training infrastructure--a small but important part of the total infrastructure. DOD defines its training infrastructure to include billeting, mess facilities, classrooms, equipment, software packages, and instructors. This report determines (1) the size of the active forces' formal training infrastructure and (2) actions to reduce or streamline it.

GAO found that: (1) the formal military training and education cost per student increased about $4,200 between fiscal years (FY) 1987 and 1995; (2) despite a decrease in the training workload, training costs have increased about $745 million more than normal inflation between FY 1987 and 1995; (3) DOD officials reported that the main reason for the increase is the use of private-sector and civilian instructors; (4) planned or ongoing actions to reduce training infrastructure include reducing the number of locations at which a service teaches a particular course, increasing interservice training for similar curricula, increasing the number of private-sector instructors, courses, and training facilities, and closing or realigning bases that provide formal training; (5) DOD lacks an overall plan to guide and measure training infrastructure reduction (6) the number of locations that provide training decreased from 265 to 172 between FY 1987 and 1995; (7) DOD estimated that increases in interservice training have resulted in about $300 million in savings and that future course consolidations and collocations would result in one-time savings of about $4.4 million and annual recurring savings of about $7.28 million; and (8) despite expected base closures and mission realignments, DOD expects that excess training infrastructure will continue to exist.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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