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DOD relies on access to military land, airspace, sea space, and frequency spectrum to provide its forces a realistic training environment and ranges that will prepare them to face combat or complex missions around the globe. Section 366 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2003 (as amended) required DOD to submit a comprehensive plan to address training constraints caused by limitations on the use of military lands, marine areas, and airspace available in the United States and overseas for training, and provide annual progress reports on these efforts through 2018. The act also mandated that GAO submit annual evaluations of DOD s reports to Congress within 90 days of receiving them from DOD. In this report, GAO determined the extent to which DOD s 2014 Sustainable Ranges Report met the legislative requirements., Report to Congressional Committees

annually to prevent and mitigate corrosion of its assets, including military equipment, weapons, and facilities and other infrastructure.1 While the vast majority of these costs are related to corrosion issues on military equipment and weapons, the cost of corrosion at DOD facilities and other infrastructure2 was estimated to be about $1.9 billion annually.3 Corrosion is defined in Section 2228 of Title 10 of the United States Code as the deterioration of a material or its properties due to a reaction of that material with its chemical environment. DOD manages more than 555,000 facilities including barracks, commissaries, data centers, office buildings, laboratories, maintenance depots, storage tanks, and piers and linear structures, such as pipelines, roads, and runways, at more than 5,000 sites that cover more than 28 million acres. In its report accompanying HR 1540, a bill for the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012,4 the House Armed Services Committee directed DOD s Director of the Office of Corrosion Policy and Oversight (hereafter referred to as the Corrosion Office) to conduct an evaluation of corrosion matters related to the department s facilities and infrastructure, specifying that the study should (1) identify the key cost drivers5 for corrosion associated with facilities and infrastructure and recommend strategies for reducing their effect; (2) review a sampling of facilities that are representative of facility type, military department, and facility age; (3) include an assessment of at least one planned facility construction program; and (4) include information obtained from site visits and the examination of program documentation, including maintenance and facility engineering processes., Report to Congressional Committees

The Department of Defense uses live training, simulators, and other virtual training devices to prepare its forces to conduct military operations. Virtual training can help the services mitigate obstacles to training, such as the high cost of conducting live training or range access issues, while allowing military personnel to replicate many of the interactions and procedures they may encounter on the battlefield. In an effort to achieve greater efficiency, maximize training opportunities, and potentially reduce training costs, each military service is in various stages of developing concepts and training programs that mix live and synthetic training (which is how the Navy typically refers to training that relies significantly on simulators or virtual training devices). The Navy, in particular, believes that effective training requires an efficient balance of live and synthetic approaches. H.R. Rep. No. 112-78 (2011), which accompanied a bill for the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012, directed GAO to review the status of the military services training programs and report the results to the House and Senate Armed Services committees. It also stated that in reporting on each of the services, we may take a phased approach in undertaking our review and reporting to the committees. This Navy review is the first engagement in our phased approach, and an Air Force review is also underway. For this review, we assessed the following: (1) the principles the Navy considers in determining whether to use live or synthetic training to meet its training requirements, (2) how the Navy's mix of live and synthetic training has changed over time, and (3) how the Navy prioritizes its synthetic training investments. This report contains briefing charts.

Why GAO Did This Study From fiscal years 1994 through 2009, the Department of Defense (DOD) separated over 13,000 active military servicemembers under its homosexual conduct policy. These separations represent about 0.37 percent of the 3.6 million members separated for all reasons, including expiration of terms of service and retirement. In 2005, GAO reported on the number of separated servicemembers under DOD's homosexual conduct policy who held critical skills and the costs associated with administering the policy from fiscal years 1994 through 2003. GAO was asked to examine data from fiscal years 2004 through 2009 to determine (1) the extent to which the policy has resulted in the separation of servicemembers with skills in critical occupations and important foreign languages and (2) the services' costs for certain activities associated with administering the policy. GAO obtained and analyzed DOD personnel and cost data; examined DOD regulations and policy documents; and conducted interviews with officials from the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, the Defense Manpower Data Center, and each of the military services., Report to the Honorable Susan A. /Davis, House of Representatives.