COLUMN ONE : Rewards of Joining Forces : After years of isolation, the services learn to work together. Air Force pilots train on Navy ships. The central command gains clout. ‘Jointness’ cuts costs and may avert such gaffes as failed ’79 hostage rescue.

Usually the nerve center of this cavernous warship is strictly a Navy affair. Naval officers and enlisted personnel bend over their radar screens, straining to keep tabs on nearby ships. They leave bombing to the Air Force and ground-fighting to the Army.

But on this deployment--a special four-service training exercise off the North Carolina coast--all that has changed.

Besides the sailors, the ship’s computer-filled air-control center is crammed with Army, Air Force and Marine Corps officers. And the Mt. Whitney has become a command post for coordinating everything from high-level bombing raids to tank and artillery attacks on a make-believe Third World country.

Such scenes are becoming common as the four armed services, whose isolation and rivalries once were legendary, turn more to integrated operations as a key to survival in the post-Cold War world.

Advocates say that “jointness”--the Pentagon’s catch-phrase for such interservice collaboration--uses defense dollars more efficiently, improves the effectiveness of military operations and avoids some of the planning and communications gaffes that led to earlier fiascos such as the attempt to rescue U.S. hostages from Iran in 1979.

Moreover, the concept has become deeply imbedded in today’s military. “It’s the new way of doing business,” says Capt. Tom Scolarici, a 33-year-old Air Force tanker pilot who is serving as fuel-delivery coordinator aboard the Mt. Whitney. “We’re all working as part of a team.”

Don Snider, a former Army colonel now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, agrees. “The military is much more joint than it was even a few years ago,” he says. “It’s becoming deeply accepted by officers at all ranks.”

The evolution includes these developments:

* The Joint Chiefs of Staff, once merely a forum for the heads of the four services, now runs the entire military. Its chairman, who is the principal military adviser to the President, may present his own views without reflecting those of individual services.

* The Pentagon’s Joint Staff, which hammers out doctrine for all four services, has evolved into the most influential staff organization in the military. Including the Joint Staff, there are 9,100 joint billets throughout the military and no officer can make general or admiral without serving in one.

* Joint doctrine--how to operate in conjunction with other services--is part of the curriculum at all the military and naval command and staff colleges. And the services are working together to develop aircraft, missiles and other weapons.

* More than ever, the military is organized into joint commands, in which elements of all four services take orders from a single admiral or general. And almost every major combat action is a joint operation.

Just last summer, the Pentagon established a joint U.S. Atlantic Command, designed to train, package and deploy U.S.-based forces from all services for overseas operations including Somalia and Bosnia.

Adm. Paul David Miller, who is in charge of the operation, has already proposed restructuring U.S. military forces overseas using “adaptive joint force packaging”--in which units from all services are assigned to joint task forces to be ready for action at any time.

The change has been dramatic. Former Secretary of Defense Les Aspin, who served in the Defense Department in the 1960s as one of then-Secretary Robert S. McNamara’s whiz kids, says that jointness has significantly improved the quality of the Pentagon’s military staff.

“It used to be that all the hot-shots from the services never went into a joint assignment because it was looked (upon) as a sidetrack,” Aspin says. But today “the quality of people on the Joint Staff is a lot higher now than it was. . . . (It’s) a very impressive pool.”

Military experts say that the change has come for several reasons:

* Army Col. C. Kenneth Allard, a strategist at the National War College, says that the advent of sophisticated technology “has speeded up the pace of combat operations and blurred the differences among the individual services.”

An example: The new J-Stars aerial reconnaissance system uses an Air Force plane equipped with state-of-the-art electronics to pinpoint enemy vehicles and armor for Army ground troops and Navy ships. All three services must know the others’ needs and use compatible gear.

* Budget cuts and force reductions are prodding each of the services to share its workload, rather than using large parts of its budget to perform tasks that the other services can do.

* Congress has been explicitly pressuring the services toward more jointness. It passed legislation in 1986 elevating the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to be the de facto head of the entire military. The trend has intensified steadily.

* Finally, lessons learned from previous snafus have prompted the services to make their operations more compatible.

During the Vietnam War, Navy and Air Force warplanes often crossed signals--and complicated entire operations--because they were under separate commands that acted autonomously.

Desert One, former President Jimmy Carter’s disastrous effort in 1979 to rescue U.S. hostages in Iran, failed largely because the equipment, doctrine and training that each of the four services used were not compatible.

Marine helicopter pilots were not accustomed to working with Army special forces hostage-rescue teams. And the refusal of the services to combine the operation left important gaps in planning that doomed the venture.

During the U.S. invasion of Grenada in 1983, Army and Marine ground forces were under separate commands and used different communication equipment so were were unable to communicate with each other. That led to delays--and excessive U.S. casualties.

“If there’d been real opposition, we’d have had a disaster,” one officer says.

And during the Persian Gulf War in 1992, the Navy found that its computers and communications equipment were not compatible with those used by the Air Force, effectively preventing its aircraft carriers from receiving daily air tasking orders.

As a result, the elaborate daily air operations plan, drawn up by the Air Force each day and distributed to the other services, had to be flown to Navy aircraft carriers by special messenger plane--at considerable effort and delay.

“The Desert One debacle really blew up in our faces,” says Robert W. Gaskin, a former Air Force strategist. Special operations for all four services now are under a single command.

Military personnel in joint billets now even have their own nickname. They are called “purple-suiters”--an allusion to a mix of Army and Marine Corps green and Air Force and Navy blue. (Fortunately, one officer says, no one actually has to wear a purple uniform.)

Even so, the push toward more cooperation has not been easy. To begin with, each of the services is deeply imbued with its own cultural mores. In the Navy, for example, a ship captain has far more autonomy than his Air Force or Army counterparts.

And strategists say that the armed services need to retain some of their interservice rivalry to help build spirit and morale. “To a certain degree, you want to instill that,” says retired Adm. David Jeremiah, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Just how far the services have come can be seen in one of the joint training exercises for which the Mt. Whitney serves as floating command headquarters.

The situation: A Third World government has been toppled, and the local capital is in chaos. The U.S. military’s mission is to secure the city and restore the rightfully elected administration to power.

As the operation begins, heavily camouflaged soldiers from the Army’s joint special-operations task force scout the potential battlefield. Three days later, B-52s from the 12th Air Force make long-range bombing runs to soften up enemy positions.

The next day, members of the 75th Ranger Regiment from Ft. Benning, Ga., launch a parachute assault to seize the country’s major airport and seaport, followed 30 minutes later by the 18th Airborne Corps from Ft. Bragg, N.C.

At the same time, infantrymen from the 28th Marine Expeditionary Unit make an amphibious landing on nearby “Blue Beach”--actually a neighboring island. Over the next three days, the Army and Marines link up in a joint assault and evacuate key civilians.

In all, about 20,500 soldiers, sailors, Air Force personnel and Marines take part--along with about 400 aircraft, 17 ships and dozens of tanks and armored vehicles. The Mt. Whitney carries three Navy admirals and four generals--two Army, one Air Force and one Marine.

Vice Adm. William J. Flanagan Jr., who served as commander of Joint Task Force 140, which conducted the operation, says that exercises such as this are rapidly becoming standard. “The key is in putting packages together that make sense,” he says.

Air Force Col. David Hall, a 45-year-old B-1 bomber pilot now on his third such exercise aboard the Mt. Whitney, says that joint operations give members of one service a keener appreciation of the problems and capabilities of the others--a must for combat operations.

The Air Force and Navy, for example, have had to overcome differences in everything from doctrine to operating procedures. Even the acronyms--the alphabet-soup of names given to organizational divisions and nomenclature--are different.

“It takes about two days to get that common language down and trust each other,” Hall concedes.

Gaskin, a major force behind the entry of the Air Force into joint operations, recalls commanding a joint military operation in which he was searching for ways to mark infantry positions for air support when a Marine volunteered that his unit would be able to do it from the ground.

“I’d never imagined they had that capability,” says Gaskin, who is now a vice president of Business Executives for National Security, a research group.

Even so, jointness has its limits. Except for the joint exercises and a few of the more senior billets, the individual armed services undertake day-to-day training and exercises largely on their own.

Despite the cooperation at the top, interservice rivalry remains alive as the services vie ever more intensely for declining defense dollars. “There’s no love lost among us at budget time,” one top admiral concedes.

And the U.S. military still is a long way from the total unification that Canada tried in the 1970s, when it essentially combined its armed services under a single command and rank structure and a single (forest green) uniform.

Experts say that Canada’s experiment fizzled because it undermined the specialization that had been the core of each service’s effectiveness and because it shattered the professional cohesion that had kept esprit de corps high. The move was abandoned in 1979.

Still, there are those who object that U.S.-style jointness has already gone too far. Some officers argue that the hours spent on jointness come out of the time that each service has to train and equip for its own individual mission.

They also warn that taking on some of the role traditionally played by another service can give a unit a false belief that it can do that service’s job as well. “People can get the impression that they can do things that they really aren’t prepared for,” one critic says.

Indeed, the Atlantic Command’s experiment with “adaptive force packages” ran into trouble earlier this year as battle groups carefully deployed with the precise mix of personnel and equipment to handle one set of problems found themselves ill-prepared to deal with others.

Many military planners say that such difficulties are all part of the growing pains that inevitably occur when any new concept is tried. And those who have had the opportunity to serve in a joint billet seem to emerge convinced that “jointness” is worthwhile and probably the way of the future for the post-Cold War military.

Military analysts say that jointness is only at about a third of its full potential. There is room for more joint staffing and more interservice expertise about other services.

Gaskin, for one, believes that much will depend on the military’s new role after the Cold War. If future operations turn out to involve mainly regional conflicts, as is expected, “jointness” will spread.

The concept may also be propelled by the growing pressure to revamp the roles and missions assigned to the individual services to help eliminate duplication and eventually save money. The services are already gearing up to merge their basic flight-training schools into a single operation, and they are studying other ways to consolidate operations.

Last month, a new, independent commission began looking for more ways that the services can pool their resources.

Meanwhile, Air Force Capt. Brent Baysinger, a 27-year-old B-1 bomber pilot--is learning more about the Navy than he cares to. Like many of the officers visiting from other services (and like some naval personnel as well), he got seasick when the Mt. Whitney left port.