Into the Storm: On the Ground in Iraq

HEIDELBERG, GERMANY, 17 JUNE 1991

"SIR, General Sullivan wants you on the phone," Toby Martinez announced to Fred Franks. General Gordon Sullivan had recently been named to succeed General Carl Vuono as the Army's thirty-second Chief of Staff. He would be sworn in on 21 June. This was not a social call.

At the time, Franks was at a luncheon with General Butch Saint in Heidelberg at USAREUR HQ; Franks excused himself and went to the club manager's office.

"Freddy, Sully," General Sullivan began. "I want you do something for me."

"Name it and it's done."

"I want you to command TRADOC. We have a lot of work to do, and you are the man to get it done for us."

It did not take long to answer. The Army could not have found a better fit for Fred Franks. It would be hard to imagine a job more suited to his talents and experience.

"I am honored and value your confidence. I'll give you the best I've got, and do my best to work your agenda. What about timing?"

"Figure sometime in August. You have to get Senate confirmation. Take some leave and get ready to go to work. We have a lot to do. Downsizing's going to take a lot of attention. We can't get dragged down by that. We have to keep our heads up and looking ahead. Tell Denise, but otherwise keep this to yourself."

"WILCO."

When Franks returned to the table, he tried to keep a poker face. After he told General Saint who had called, Saint seemed in no way curious about the nature of the call (he had been giving Franks advice on future assignments and probably already knew what it was all about).

When he got home and told Denise, she was as excited as he was. They were going home to the U.S.A. She knew TRADOC and what commanding it would mean to Fred, and she was familiar with Fort Monroe in Virginia, which was TRADOC headquarters. It was a good place to live.

After Franks's return from Desert Storm, he and Denise had held many discussions about their future. There were two possibilities: to stay in Germany and inactivate VII Corps in the spring of 1992; or come to Heidelberg to be DCINC in USAREUR (John Shalikashvili, the current DCINC, was about to become assistant to Colin Powell on the Joint Chiefs of Staff). Now there was a third: to go to TRADOC.

TRADOC it was.

SENIOR-LEVEL SELECTION

Congress makes three- and four-star rank available to the military services for specifically authorized positions, and as positions become vacant, the services nominate officers to fill them. Sometimes the Senate holds hearings on the nominee, sometimes it does not. After being confirmed by the Senate, the nominee normally serves in that position for a specified term (most often, two years at a time), and when that term is completed, there are options: the officer can be reappointed to the same position, moved to another job, promoted (requiring another confirmation), or retired. In the U.S. Army, there are twelve four-star generals and forty-two three-star generals in an active force of 495,000. Six of the twelve four-star generals fill command positions in the Joint Command structure (such as CENTCOM commander).

During the process of choosing nominees to fill both three- and four-star nominations, it is common practice for the serving four-star Army generals to make recommendations to the Army Chief. The chief of staff then takes the recommendations under advisement, combines it with his own counsel, and makes his recommendations to the Army Secretary, the senior civilian in the Department of the Army (in order to strictly observe the letter and spirit of civilian control of the military, the final approving authority at each step is the senior civilian in the Executive Branch). Next, the nominations are reviewed by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and approved or rejected by the Secretary of Defense. If the Secretary okays them, they are sent to the President for his approval. Finally, just as he would for any senior executive position, the President offers the nomination to the Senate for confirmation.

For Franks, the principals involved in his selection were Army Chief Gordon Sullivan, Army Secretary Mike Stone (who died in 1995; Stone was a successful businessman, a public servant of long standing who loved the Army), General Colin Powell, and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney.

Much later, Franks learned from Carl Vuono that it was he who had recommended him to Sullivan. Since Sullivan was about to become chief and needed his own team, however, the choice had to be his.

"I didn't pick you because the Army did not have any alternatives," Vuono added. "I recommended you because — based on your recent experience in Desert Storm, your two previous tours of duty in TRADOC, and your command of Seventh Army Training Command in Germany — you were the best choice for the times TRADOC and the Army were about to enter."

DEPARTURE

Leaving VII Corps was not easy. Leaving any command is not easy, but this one was especially hard, since everyone in the corps had been to war together. They had been family on the battlefield, and bonds formed there are forever. Franks went around the corps to say his good-byes, trying as best he could to keep everything as low-key as possible. But at the assembly on the parade-athletic field at Kelly Barracks on 31 July, there was a lot of emotion. "Soldiering with you has been the highlight of my life," Franks told them. "What we have done, we have done as a team. We will miss you all." It had been less than two years since August 1989, when he had taken the VII Corps colors as commander. Together, he and the corps had seen the fall of the Wall and the tearing apart of the Iron Curtain, the end of the Cold War, deployment and victory in the Gulf, and now this. It was a lot to absorb.

After the ceremony, Franks and Denise left Stuttgart.

When Lieutenant General Mike Spigelmire assumed command of VII Corps two weeks later, he had an unpleasant task before him, and in March 1992, in a ceremony in Stuttgart a little more than a year after the biggest armor attack in the history of the U.S. Army, VII Corps was inactivated and its battle colors cased (they are now on permanent display at SAMS at Fort Leavenworth). The Army leadership (with strong dissent from Fred Franks) had decided to keep V Corps as its residual corps in Germany. Frankfurt, not Stuttgart, was to be the headquarters. (Three years later, the V Corps HQ was moved from Frankfurt to Heidelberg. Kelly Barracks, former home of VII Corps, remains open as part of European Command.)

On Tuesday morning, 7 August, at 1000 hours, General Sullivan promoted Franks to four-star general in a small conference room in the Pentagon. The Senate had confirmed him late Friday afternoon. Denise and a few former JAYHAWKS from VII Corps who worked in the Pentagon were there; and Denise helped General Sullivan pin on the fourth star.

TRADOC

TRADOC was a sizable responsibility.

When TRADOC had been activated as a major U.S. Army command in June 1973, it had been a unique organizational concept, with no precedent in the U.S. Army or in any armies around the world.[57] As we have seen in previous chapters, TRADOC had two major responsibilities: to be the architect of the future army, and to prepare the army for war.

First, TRADOC determines the requirements for fighting in the future. To accomplish that aim, it makes sure that

• the Army continues to adapt and change to meet future national security demands as part of a joint military team;

• in the future the Army is as relevant and decisive a force as it is in the present;

• growth is coherent; in other words, that doctrine, training, organizational design, leader development, and materiel requirements for the Department of the Army are defined and integrated so that they all come together in time and investment — with particular attention paid to the requirements of individual soldiers to gain combat power.

Second, TRADOC is responsible for training standards across the Army, and it operates the Army's vast training and leader development school system — what Franks likes to call the nation's "Land Warfare University." With over 350,000 students annually; real estate the size of Puerto Rico; a faculty of over 11,000; ROTC and JROTC in close to 1,500 high schools, colleges, and universities throughout America; and with Education Board approval to award master's degrees, this is a university by any measure.

To accomplish these missions, TRADOC has an annual budget of over $2 billion; it has civilian and military manpower levels of close to 60,000; and it operates eighteen major installations (like the rest of the Army, it has been reduced over 30 percent in the past eight years). Each major installation and associated military school or individual training base (Fort Knox, Fort Benning, Fort Sill, Fort Jackson, Fort Leonard Wood, etc.) is commanded by a major general. In addition to the four-star commander, there are two three-star deputies, one[58] at the HQ at Fort Monroe, Virginia, and one at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, who is also commandant of the Army's Command and General Staff College and supervises all training in TRADOC.

As the new Army Chief, Gordon Sullivan saw the coming years as a time of rapid transition for the U.S. Army. The Cold War was over and won. There had been victories in both Panama and the Persian Gulf. There was a clamor for a "peace dividend." Sullivan and Franks were both aware that we had gone through similar periods many times in our history, between World War II and Korea, for example. During such times, in the words of General Colin Powell, we "screwed it up." In July 1990, when speaking to veterans of Task Force Smith, the first U.S. combat unit into Korea in 1950, Army Chief General Carl Vuono had said, "Never again can we allow our soldiers in America's Army to march into battle without the weapons and training essential to their survival and victory." This thought of unpreparedness for the next war haunted Army leaders and propelled a sense of urgency to prevent it. Sullivan's challenge to the Army was "to break the mold," to make the transition different this time.

Most of the transition was physical: the Army had to reduce manpower levels by 30 percent from Cold War levels, with significant reductions in the resources available for modernization and for investments in the future. As a major commander, Fred Franks not only would have to live within these new resource levels, but also look for ways to accomplish the TRADOC mission that were different from what had been done in the past.

But the Army would also have to make the transition from Cold War to post-Cold War in the area of ideas — or doctrine. Like General Vuono before him, Sullivan put great emphasis on keeping the Army trained and ready to fulfill its current responsibilities, while it adapted for the future, and doctrine (as Sullivan put it in a letter to Franks in July 1991) had to be the Army's "engine of change." In other words, the Army had to continue to revise its basic operational manual, the 100-5.

The Army had to continue to be able to adjust and adapt rapidly. This also seemed to be what the nation expected, given the uncertain nature of the new international security scene.

During his four years as Army Chief, Sullivan succeeded in reshaping the Army from twenty-eight active and National Guard divisions to eighteen. Meanwhile, there could be no time-outs from operational commitments. On the contrary, during that same period, the Army saw its operational commitments grow by 300 percent over what they had been during the Cold War. U.S. Army units found themselves in south Florida repairing hurricane damage, in Somalia on humanitarian missions, in Haiti restoring democracy, back in Kuwait to deter Iraqi aggression, and in Bosnia to enforce a peace agreement. At the same time, the Army was withdrawing over 160,000 troops and twice that many families from Europe, and closing over 600 installations overseas. This was a monstrously difficult job. Success was not preordained. In fact, no corporation in America has ever downsized and reorganized as well or as quickly as the U.S. Army had in those few short years.

It was Fred Franks's and TRADOC's job not only to lead the intellectual change in ideas and in doctrine that would ensure that the Army could quickly adapt to the new strategic situation, but to lay the groundwork for the changes needed to meet the requirements of the first two decades of the twenty-first century.

Franks and Gordon Sullivan had several things in common. They had both "grown up right," as General Vuono liked to put it, and that gave them a leg up (an expression Franks uses with a smile) as they worked together. They both had been in tanks and cavalry and had known each other for their entire professional lives. When Franks had commanded the Blackhorse in Fulda, Sullivan had been 3rd AD chief of staff (after commanding a brigade in 3rd AD). They both liked ideas, they liked to conceptualize and brainstorm, and they talked frequently, often long into the night. Now and again, Franks and Sullivan took off together to smoke cigars and fish in the lower Chesapeake in Franks's newly purchased twenty-foot Shamrock boat, the JAYHAWK. And each Labor Day weekend, during the three years Franks was at TRADOC, Sullivan and his wife, Gay, assembled a few families at Fort Story so that they might enjoy one another's company and talk Army and national security business.

ENGINE OF CHANGE

Franks had seen for himself that, while it was absolutely necessary, it wasn't easy to stay ahead of the curve. He was reminded of that every day at his own headquarters at Fort Monroe, Virginia. Monroe was the largest stonemasonry fortress in the United States, yet it had been built after the fact — after the British had sailed into the harbor during the War of 1812 and destroyed Hampton.

When Fred Franks assumed command of TRADOC from General John Foss, he knew that he and his team had to be the agents of change, yet he also knew that the prevailing attitude in many places was, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." The Army had just come off three huge successes in the Cold War, Panama, and the Gulf. Why not leave everything else alone and just get through this downsizing period without breaking the Army?

After the victory in Desert Storm had demonstrated the value of the AirLand Battle doctrine, Franks was one of the leaders to call attention to that success. Now here he was, moving away from it into new territory.

It's always easier to make physical change in the Army than to change ideas. Though it might take a lot of work to convert a tank battalion from M60A3 tanks to M1s, you won't encounter much resistance to it.

Changing ideas is harder. "The only thing harder than getting a new idea into a military mind," Liddell-Hart wrote, "is getting the old one out." The great military historian Alfred Thayer Mahan said very close to the same thing about a hundred years ago: "An improvement of weapons is due to the energy of one or two men, while changes in tactics" — that is, in doctrine—"have to overcome the inertia of a conservative class. History shows that it is vain to hope that military men generally will be at pains to do this, but that the one who does will go into battle with great advantage." This is not surprising… or even a bad thing. It is a healthy skepticism, if it is kept in balance. You have to expect resistance to ideas that threaten known ways of doing things — and especially if those ways are successful. New ideas are unproven on the battlefield.

At times, new and revolutionary war-fighting ideas have been assimilated rapidly, for example, the U.S. Marine Corps's development of amphibious doctrine in the 1930s; the U.S. Navy's adoption of the aircraft carrier; and the U.S. Army's development of air assault, air mobility, and the use of rotary-wing aviation in firing rockets and antitank munitions.

There have also been blind spots: In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Army's long attachment to horse cavalry and its policy of tanks in support of infantry held back the development of mechanized warfare. Later, the Navy had its battleship advocates, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that aircraft made battleships obsolete. And the Air Force's strategic bomber theorists still persist in believing that wars can be won from the air alone.

People often dream of a super-weapon that will guarantee victory on the battlefield. Super-weapons make for nice dreams, and sometimes for exciting escapist fiction, but it is only rarely that a revolutionary new technology is needed to win in land battles. Rather, victory usually comes from adapting existing technology to particular advantages on the battlefield. The ways in which you combine that technology and your organizations to fight and to win is another way of saying doctrine. Earlier in the book, we saw that maneuver warfare is dominated more by ideas than by technology. Indeed, in 1940, the French and the Germans had the same technology. They both had airplanes, tanks, self-propelled artillery, and radio. But as Colonel Bob Doughty points out in his book, Seeds of Disaster, the Germans got the doctrine right, and the French got it wrong. Their soldiers fought well but their leadership had the wrong war-fighting ideas. It is an instructive period.

Again, the Army is a conservative institution, and you want that. They deal in life-and-death decisions. In no other profession is the penalty for being completely wrong so severe and lasting. The price for failure to prepare is not loss of revenue in the marketplace, it is loss of your most precious resource, your soldiers. That was demonstrated in the American Civil War, when leaders used Napoleonic methods of attack in the face of rifles that were ten times more accurate than when the tactics had been devised. The result: noble failures such as Pickett's charge at Gettysburg. Later, in World War I, leaders continued to use masses of soldiers to gain combat power and failed to win because of machine guns and devastating artillery. The challenge for TRADOC was to prevent something similar to that from happening the next year… or in 2003 or 2010.

Ideas lead change. If you want to influence the future, you have to have ideas about the future. In any campaign — in any venture — success begins with a clear vision of where you want to go and what you want to do. In Fred Franks's words: "How you think about the future determines what you think about the future and what you ultimately do about the future." Or, as Gordon Sullivan put it, "The intellectual leads the physical."

That's easier to say than to do. Leading with ideas is damned difficult. It is hard to provide new vision and focus; it is harder still to shake off old paradigms. It's a surprising paradox that the profession that takes on the greatest form of chaos possible — war — is at times so tied to order and fixed paradigms. This doubtless comes from trying to impose order on that battlefield chaos.

Thus, in the Army of 1991, there was something of a tension for some between what was needed to meet present-day training demands and what had to be done to meet the needs of the future. It was a healthy tension, but it was there.

As Franks sees it, organizations change for three reasons:

• they are out in front and want to stay there;

• they are about to be overcome by the competition and have to change in order to stay competitive;

• they have already been overcome, and they must change in order to compete and survive.

The Army was in the first category. Of course, not all periods require modifications. You have to watch out not to bring about change for change's sake… or to make them simply in order to leave your imprint on the organization, or to leave a "legacy." That attitude is dangerous. Sometimes the best a senior leader can do is to raise standards of current operating procedures.

And yet, the Army could not ignore the future. How would the next war be fought? Not to be ready was to invite failure, which could take many forms, from the loss of a war (seriously unlikely) to the loss of battles, or worse, humiliating defeats and the unacceptable loss of American lives (seriously possible).

Most often failure is caused by resistance to change in war-fighting ideas, the use of the wrong ideas, or a lack of preparedness — and, as we've seen, preparedness comes through tough performance-oriented training that gives soldiers and units battlefield experience even before combat.

Franks knew that he and TRADOC needed to look hard at all the institutional paradigms to see which ones needed to be transformed, which ones needed to remain, and which ones only needed to be adapted to the new strategic realities. In other words, they didn't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

In a sense, it had been easier to reshape the Army in the mid-1970s. There had been a clear threat then. The Army itself had been in bad shape. Army leaders had just witnessed the awesome speed and destruction of the modern battlefield in the 1973 Mideast War. When they looked at the Army's ability to fight and win on that battlefield, they did not like what they'd seen. There had been a clear need for strong action.

The 1990s were vastly different — more like the years between the two world wars. The Army was coming off a great victory. Leaders and military thinkers were discussing new ideas of warfare, but without any urgency. They simply wanted to get the troops home and out of uniform. With no measurable threat, there was little hunger for a large standing military.

Still, Fred Franks found that even though he might have to work hard to overcome resistance, in today's Army, if ideas had merit and if their worth in actual operations or in field trials could be demonstrated, then there would be a chance to make those changes stick.

The Army in the early 1990s was a remarkably adaptive organization. Recent leaders had seen to that. Thus, if point men for change, such as Fred Franks, did not always have their complete attention, it was not so much because they were resistant as that the Army was already handling responsibilities that were close to unmanageable. They just had so much to do in order to take care of the increased commitments, the rapid downsizing, the budget cuts, the massive drawdown in Europe — just to name a few. At the same time, they had to master new ideas, face up to new strategic realities, and look forward into the next century, while simultaneously taking in about 60,000 new recruits annually.

To bring about reform, you have to know the culture with which you are dealing. The Army culture does not so much resist reform as it has to be convinced that it is in the best interests of the entire organization. It wants proof, then it wants broad acceptance by the whole Army. Thus, it is highly suspicious of suggestions advocated by small groups, unless the small groups can eventually bring about that broad acceptance. We have seen the difficulties with the Active Defense FM 100-5 of 1976. Though Active Defense had been the right doctrine for the time, it had been developed by a relatively small group at TRADOC and thus it was initially misunderstood within the Army.

In the Army, you achieve consensus not by following the path of least resistance and compromise, as in a legislative process, but by arguing and debating. You go out there in the Army marketplace of ideas and try to sell your wares… and you improve them until you get them right. In the process, you teach them and bring others to accept them.

With these thoughts in mind, Franks and his staff at TRADOC devised their approach to revising the 1986 FM 100-5—the book's last Cold War edition. They consulted as broadly as they could within the Army — for the sake of both the substance of the book, and of its acceptance. They talked the ideas out; they debated them. In that way, they got not only a broad sense of what the Army was thinking, but also good ideas that hadn't occurred to them. By the time the book was published, the ideas were well known, and change had already begun.

IDEAS FOR CHANGE

This was the world the Army faced: The Soviet Union had collapsed, the worldwide communist monolith had crumbled, the Cold War had ended, and the world had entered a new era with a vastly different strategic landscape. A relatively predictable strategic environment was gone. A predominantly forward-deployed military posture was gone. The focus of potential warfare within the confines of a highly developed structure of joint and combined relationships was gone. And gone with that were the operational constraints of the Cold War and its clearly defined potential enemy.

In place of all that was a new strategic landscape, marked by a broader and much different set of conditions, in a more unstable and ambiguous setting. As events since 1989 have demonstrated, we now live in a world that is more complex and uncertain than we ever imagined. "After forty-five years of fighting a dragon, we finally killed it," says R. James Woolsey, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, "and now instead, we find ourselves standing in a jungle with a bunch of snakes."

This new strategic era demanded an entirely new security stance for the United States and, in turn, a distinctly different posture for our Army.

As he went around and about the Army, Franks used five categories — warning lights — to define the need for change, which came out of his own battlefield experience and his longtime study and reading of history. They were:

• threats and unknown dangers,

• the national military strategy,

• history and the lessons learned from it,

• the changing nature of warfare, and

• technology.

At times only one indicator may be lit, and that one dimly. At other times, maybe two or three burn. As Fred Franks looked out at the world of the early 1990s, he saw all the indicators burning brightly.

Both Just Cause in Panama and Desert Storm in southwest Asia had set off the lights. Franks calls them "Janus Wars." They had both been fought with twentieth-century tactics, technology, and doctrine, but they both had shown signs of twenty-first-century warfare.

They showed that the United States' competition — whether rogue nations or rogue groups — could quickly acquire and field new technologies and advanced weapons — including weapons of mass destruction — without research-and-development establishments of their own. Even if these weapons were acquired in relatively small numbers, they would give considerable battlefield leverage.

To counter such threats, rather than looking back at twentieth-century industrial-age technologies, the Army had to look ahead to the potential of virtual reality, digitized communications, and other information-age technologies for sharing, retrieving, and transmitting information; they had to talk to futurists about where the world might be heading; and they had to try to make the right decisions about how to put it all together. The last was particularly important. Yet it wasn't the technology itself that they had to examine; rather, they needed to synthesize various disparate pieces — some new, some old — into a new concept for the battlefield. This was not easy, as history has shown.

What were some of the other warning lights?

The Goldwater-Nichols National Security Act of 1986 was one. It changed the way service departments would be involved in operational matters, increased the authority of the regional war-fighting CINCs, and increased and streamlined the war-fighting chain of command. A new national security strategy was published, and a new national military strategy was emerging. Regional conflicts, and even what were then called operations short of war (such as the peacekeeping mission to Bosnia), were replacing the Cold War. Information-age technology was spreading to all parts of the private sector, and there were exciting new possibilities for its application to the military. The days of mobilization of a large standing army to fight the Soviets were over. The U.S. Army was now becoming a smaller army. It now needed to become a force-projection army. It now had to be able to deploy large organizations overseas quickly. In essence, World War II ended in 1989.

The change in size of the Army was dramatic — from a Cold War size of 18 active divisions, 10 National Guard divisions, 5 corps, and 50 percent stationed overseas, to 12 active divisions (later 10), 8 National Guard divisions, 4 corps, and about 80 percent stationed in the U.S.A. The active component strength of the Army dropped from 770,000 during the Cold War to 495,000. In the total active armor force today, there are twenty-eight tank battalions and twelve armored cavalry squadrons. In Desert Storm, VII Corps alone had twenty-two tank battalions and seven armored cavalry squadrons.

In short, battle and operational environments were going to be hard to predict. This meant that the Army had to be able not only to fight and win in several different types of battlefields, but also to accomplish several types of operations other than war. And this in turn meant that the Army's doctrine had to address the issue of the smaller force's versatility. It also meant doing away with the term "AirLand Battle" — not because the concept was no longer useful, but because it suggested the linear battlefield of central Europe. Though such a battlefield might turn out to exist in the future, Army commanders had to be capable of adapting to a very different kind of battlefield.

So this is what they did:

LAND BATTLE

Changes to the land war doctrine fell within four areas: Force Projection, Operations Other Than War, Joint and Combined Operations, and Conduct of the Land Battle.

Because the likelihood that the Army would fight or operate close to garrison locations (as it did in Germany during the Cold War) was about zero, it had to become skilled at quickly putting together tactical teams to fit fast-arising mission requirements that were hard to predict in advance. Then they had to get to where they were going and, depending on the nature of their mission — from fighting their way in to operations other than war — they had to figure out how to place the force on the ground consistent with the way they wanted to conduct the operation (an error in initial disposition, as Moltke said, might not be corrected for an entire campaign). Meanwhile, they had to get early intelligence as rapidly as possible in order to deploy the units. And finally, once there, they had to supply themselves, perhaps half a world away from the U.S.A., or else hundreds or thousands of miles from their garrisons, and sometimes in areas where they wouldn't get local help.

The Army taught itself how to do all that. An entire chapter on force projection was put into the 1993 100-5. Force projection scenarios became the object of study in Army schools. Training programs were begun. Army Chief Sullivan and his principal logistician, Lieutenant General Lee Salomon, began prepositioning Army equipment in key locations around the world, to allow sizable land power to be sent into a region quickly. The recent deployment of a 1st Cavalry Division brigade from Fort Hood to Kuwait has demonstrated that the Army has indeed become a strategic force for the 1990s.

More and more, the Army is finding itself involved in non-war-fighting missions, in operations such as VII Corps's humanitarian relief efforts in southeastern Iraq following Desert Storm; Provide Comfort in northern Iraq; and peacekeeping operations, such as that which the U.S. Army has been performing in the Sinai Desert since 1979. In a world that is no longer bipolar, regional conflicts or crises are sure to demand the peaceful use of U.S. forces.

There is a sharp distinction between the two types of operations: On the one hand, there is war, the deliberate use of force to gain a national or coalition strategic objective. The Army's purpose is to fight and win the nation's wars as part of a joint team, and it trains, equips, and mans itself to do that. In war you want aggressive, tough soldiers and units. That behavior does not always work best in an operation other than war.

On the other hand, military forces can be used to gain objectives by means of (usually) non-combat operations, and (usually) in combination with other elements of national power. Though occasionally some of these operations might involve actual combat, force is not the principal means to the strategic ends. However, the discipline, skills, teamwork, and toughness that come from preparing to fight and win can be used in these operations. (You cannot go the other way. Soldiers and units trained only in skills for operations other than war are not prepared for the rigors of the land battlefield.)

OOTWs, as such operations are called, are not new. The Army has long conducted them — beginning with George Washington's use of the militia to put down the Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania in 1794.

How do you conduct OOTWs?

You need

• a sense of objective: the ability to focus all your efforts on achieving that objective; and the discipline to stay within those parameters;

• unity of effort: all the various military, government, and non-government agencies have to work toward the same goal;

• a sense of legitimacy: the operation must be conducted in such a way that the authority of the local government is reinforced;

• perseverance: OOTWs tend to take much longer to reach objectives than the use of force;

• restraint: you have to stay within specified rules of engagement; and, finally,

• security: you need to protect the force against a variety of threats while it is conducting its operations.

One interesting anomaly that the Army began to notice about OOTWs: while the actual battlefield was becoming less dense with soldiers, these OOTW missions tended to be manpower-intensive. Such a contradiction would lead to tensions, as budget analysts attempted to reduce the Army end strength.

Passage of the Goldwater-Nichols legislation in 1986 ensured the pre-eminence in the U.S. military of joint operations over operations conducted by a single service alone.

Does that mean that Goldwater-Nichols created joint warfare? Far from it. It's been practiced almost from the beginning of the nation's history. World War II saw the largest joint operations in the history of the U.S. military, and the landing at Inchon in Korea was a joint operation masterstroke. Later, however, the long Cold War fixed the services into set patterns of operation. They were ready to fight if that conflict grew hot, but were perhaps not as ready to combine forces to operate quickly in other environments. That changed when Desert One and Grenada inspired a reemphasis on the skillful conduct of joint operations. After that, Desert Storm proved the worth of the new legislation.

Before 1986 little joint doctrine had been published, and actual warfighting doctrine was published by individual services (principally by the Army and, to a lesser extent, by the Marine Corps, since operational doctrine seemed most useful to land forces). The services would then informally meld their doctrines together — essentially with a Cold War scenario in mind — to achieve whatever harmony was appropriate. Starting in 1973, for instance, and lasting into the 1990s, the Army and the USAF had struck up a close working partnership at TRADOC and the AF TAC (Tactical Air Command). The result was the AirLand Battle doctrine. Similar close relationships between the Marines and Army had for years harmonized land battle doctrines — while recognizing the special nature of amphibious warfare.

Yet no body of joint doctrine existed when forces of two or more services were combined to conduct operations. Goldwater-Nichols changed that, but it was General Powell who drove the first real operational joint doctrine, JCS Pub 1, published after Desert Storm, that laid out operating guidelines for joint forces. Soon after that came JCS Pub 3.0, which was a joint version of the Army's FM 100-5.

The June 1993 FM 100-5, written by Fred Franks and his TRADOC team, contained an entire chapter on joint operations, which gave members of the Army the basic outlines of joint operations, joint task force, joint command, unified commands, and command relationships.

Joint operations were clearly not always going to be on the scale of a Desert Storm. In today's more multipolar world, a smaller joint task force would be formed quickly to deal with fast-moving situations in areas such as Somalia, Haiti, or Bosnia. Each would be commanded by a joint task force (JTF) — a headquarters comprised of members of all the services, with component commands of each service reporting to the JTF. Normally, the commander of the JTF would be from the service with the most forces represented, while individual members of the joint task force staff would have to be skilled in working with a joint team. This was a marked change from the Cold War. Learning how to do this — and teach it — required a significant redesign of curricula in the service and joint schools: another provision of the 1986 legislation requiring joint education and joint duty.

In a combined — as opposed to a joint — operation, the U.S. military conducts missions with the forces of another nation, either in coalition warfare or coalition operations other than war. In the emerging multipolar world, with U.S. Army forces now smaller than in generations, most future operations will likely be combined.

Combined operations are not new to the U.S. military, either. Without the assistance of the French army and navy, Yorktown would not have happened. And in the twentieth century, combined operations have been the norm rather than the exception. During the Cold War, most combined operations were within the NATO framework… or, to a lesser extent, within the framework of the alliance with South Korea. Procedures within those two alliances had long been worked out.

In Desert Storm, the U.S.A. put together a political and military coalition of a very different kind — ad hoc, more or less improvised, but highly effective. As Fred Franks and the thinkers at TRADOC looked about the world, they saw that this was likely to be the model for future operations. If so, TRADOC needed to teach the upcoming generation of Army leaders how to do their part in putting such a coalition together, and then operating within it.

Some of the lessons learned in Desert Storm proved applicable:

• Teamwork and trust among members of the coalition team are absolutely essential.

• You have to consider how to combine the forces. Normally, you like to retain a single command; you don't want to break up the allied force and put it with your own. Such a principle governed the use of Pershing's U.S. forces under the French in World War I, and they governed Fred Franks's use of British forces in VII Corps in Desert Storm.

• Forces placed under a single operational command must be employed in accordance with their capabilities and assigned missions with a reasonable chance of success.

• National pride is often at stake… and so is mission accomplishment. Assignment of a mission to a subordinate national force that results in failure of the mission or in high casualties has serious consequences for the combined commander and the nations involved.

LAND OPERATIONS: BATTLE DYNAMICS

Land war changes. It will always be changing. In order to make sure that the Army stays ahead of it, and to give it an institutional lens directed at the future, Fred Franks and his team created a concept in 1991 under which all the various ideas about the evolving battlefield could be included. These ideas would then form the basis for experimentation in simulations and in the field. Out of the experimentation would come new insights and discoveries, which in time would lead to changes in the individual ideas. This concept TRADOC called "Battle Dynamics."

There were five central ideas to Battle Dynamics:

BATTLE COMMAND. The battlefield envisioned during the Cold War was almost scripted. After the Cold War, the U.S. Army found itself in a strategic situation where ambiguity ruled. How best to combat ambiguity?

• By reviving the art of command — command in the fluid and constantly changing attack instead of in the defense, which is more orderly and controlled.

• By rapidly applying principles of doctrine to situations that commanders might not be able to predict far in advance.

• By rapidly assessing situations — that is, by rapidly seeing oneself and the enemy and the terrain.

• By focus on the commander, not on the command post. The information and command system would be so constructed that the commander could make decisions and focus combat power from wherever he needed to be on the battlefield. Thus he would be freed from what Fred Franks calls "the tyranny of the command post."

Battle command is decision making. The commander will visualize the present friendly and enemy situations, then the situation that must occur if his mission is to be achieved at least cost to his soldiers, and then devise tactical methods to get from one state to the other (which is what leadership skill is all about). The more completely and accurately a commander can share his pictures of both situations with the rest of his command, the more effectively he can move his organization at a high tempo and focus his own combat power with the combat power available from outside. He will do all this while being with his soldiers, while feeling their pain and pride, and then making the necessary decisions.

BATTLESPACE. In the Cold War, we arrayed our own forces to defend against a powerful force that echeloned itself in depth in order to constantly feed forces into battle and thus maintain momentum. To defend against that threat, the United States laid out geometric lines for its own forces (phase lines, etc.) in order to determine who was responsible for real estate on our side and for carving up the enemy echelons deep in their territory.

That was a special situation against a special enemy. In the future, enemies will look and behave differently, yet we will still want to attack him in depth. To do that may not require the precise geometry of the Cold War battlespace. We may not need forces to be right next to one another. In fact, units will likely operate out of visual range of one another — though they will be in close electronic contact. And battle lines between opposing forces may well be much more amorphous than they are now. Thus, Franks wanted Army commanders to think their way through the tactical problems of the (likely) fluid, free-form, and ambiguous future battlefield without automatically applying Cold War battlespace templates. Since these templates had been so closely associated with the term "AirLand Battle," the Army dropped that term.

DEPTH AND SIMULTANEOUS ATTACK. In the past, there had been a segmented, sequential battlefield model of rear, close, and deep. That model would change and be redefined in future operations. In these operations, we would attack the enemy (or control a situation in operations other than war) simultaneously — not sequentially — throughout the depth of the battlespace.

EARLY ENTRY, LETHALITY, AND SURVIVABILITY. In a fast-moving situation, when a force has to go into an area quickly (called early entry), you want to be able to tailor it so that it goes in with power and protection. Just Cause in Panama was an example of a force so well tailored for that mission that it finished the fight in hours. Similarly, the 10th Mountain Division was rapidly tailored for its Somali mission, and later for Haiti. The Army wants to make a habit of such situations — especially in a world where the likelihood of early-entry missions has increased (and likely to be over a very wide range of situations).

Thus, early-entry forces must be tailorable in a number of ways. They need

• to meet changing conditions and a variety of missions;

• to provide the commander as many options as possible;

• to be able to protect themselves;

• and to have punch, not only close in, but out deep.

In short, they have to be able to win the first battle.

COMBAT SERVICE SUPPORT. In the Cold War, most of the focus was on tactical logistics. Force projection puts a premium on strategic and operational logistics. This new strategic environment will demand rapidly tailorable logistics systems, which must be capable of providing support for joint and combined operations, sometimes over great distances.

Tactical logistics will also continue to be one of the keys to more rapid tempo operations. Anticipation, long a goal of logisticians, will sometimes be aided by what are called telemetry-based logistics. Telemetry on equipment will allow support personnel to know when something is needed before it is needed. Total asset visibility, or the ability to pinpoint supplies worldwide, should help strategic logisticians to provide more precise support in future operations and in more than one operational theater.

BATTLE LABS

Ideas are not enough. The Army is a pragmatic profession. It makes things happen. It gets results for the nation. Army professionals are military practitioners, not military philosophers. As noted, the worth of a new approach has to be demonstrated before Army professionals will change over to it.

During Fred Franks's professional lifetime, he himself was powerfully impressed by the success of air assault and attack helicopter ideas. The pioneers who brought these ideas to the Army banded together in the late 1950s, got senior-level support, some resources for experiments, and by 1963 had a full-scale experimental division going. In 1965, the division was the 1st Cavalry, which fought successfully in Vietnam from 1965 until its departure in 1971. Air assault and attack helicopter pioneers demonstrated the worth of both their war-fighting ideas and their organizational changes, and they supported them either with new technology or with technology that had long been available in the civilian sector.

From this, Franks concluded that the Army needed to do some experimenting. Specifically, it needed an organization to try out new directions in land warfare… something like the air assault division experiment in the early 1960s and the series of field experiments known as the Louisiana Maneuvers in the early 1940s, just before World War II.

TRADOC had a major advantage over earlier experimenters — computer-assisted simulations. These simulations, including the new virtual reality simulations, had reached such a level of accuracy that they could replicate the battlefield with great fidelity, which permitted experiments to be performed. This was not only cheaper than running experiments in the field, it also allowed many more repetitions in a given time. When results justified full-scale field experiments, they could then be set up. This approach became the basis for the TRADOC Battlefield Laboratories formed in April 1992. There were five of them, each corresponding to a core idea of Battle Dynamics — a single area where the land battle was changing.[59]

In the labs, various organizations, not only from within the Army, but from academia, civilian contractors, other services, and the like, came together to work on a common battlefield idea. Such teamwork was unprecedented in the Army.

But there was more to the labs than that.

In fighting, as we have seen, at each echelon (battalion, brigade, division, etc.) you integrate arms — including tanks, infantry, artillery, aviation, and fire support — to get the combined-arms orchestra effect. Franks wanted the same approach in the Battle Labs. There, new technology and ideas were to be integrated at each echelon, rather than vertically by arm.

For example, in the past, the next generation of night-vision equipment might go to Abrams tanks, but not to Bradleys or other members of the combined-arms team. That would no longer be the case. Franks also demanded in the Battle Labs that war-fighting experiments be done with what he termed "real soldiers in real units." That way the Army would get normal soldier and leader behavior. He also wanted the experiments done at the NTC or JRTC, the most tactically competitive environments. Both these directives would increase the fidelity of the results.

Battle Labs proved to be such an innovative idea that the Air Force recently announced the formation of six of their own, and the USMC adopted the concept three years ago.

During those days at TRADOC, an excited buzz of activity could be found at Fort Monroe. People were eager; people were brimful of ideas; there was a lot of productive talk… there was a glow of energy about the place. Fred Franks used to tell people that he wanted the energy level at Fort Monroe to be so high that when a satellite passed overhead, the fort would glow in the dark like a diamond. Now and again in those days, I would look into my own Maryland night sky south toward Virginia and catch an unusual brightness over Fort Monroe…

FUTURE BATTLEFIELDS

Battlefield technology evolves and develops, as does the nature of threats, tactics, strategy, and doctrine. Yet the military is a hierarchical institution. It needs to be in order to impose some order out of the chaos of battle. The way that order normally is imposed is by adherence to a strict hierarchy of command and by the physical means of control, such as formations, the ability to see others, the assignment of sectors to operate in, and phase lines. When radios came along, units could become more dispersed and still retain a semblance of control, yet adherence to physical means of control continued — and for good reason. There was no better way to bring the team of teams together at the right place at the right time in the right combination relative to the enemy and terrain, and then to fight and win physically.

The outcome of land battles is still decided by physical force. In army versus army, on a given piece of terrain, forces that prevail kill the enemy, destroy his equipment, and capture his soldiers, then control the area. Raw physical courage, physical toughness in all types of terrain and weather, combat discipline, skill with weapons and in units, and leadership in the face of chaos and life-and-death choices are still very much needed. Lethality, survivability, and the tempo of the operation are still measurable quantities that very often determine the physical outcome of the battles and engagements.

Deciding where and when to fight, and at what cost, and where battles and engagements will lead, continue to be the province of what the army has called operational art and strategy. These continue to be influenced by a variety of factors, some physical and some not.

TRADOC and the Army have long been very much aware of what other high-performing organizations also have learned — that information not only passes through the normal hierarchical chain of command, it flows in other ways to get quickly where it's needed. In order to take advantage of that fact, the Army needed to structure its own organizations and problem solving so that information flowed in ways that enhanced unit performance. Then the Army had to invest in technologies that promoted it.

Today there's a lot of buzz about winning the information war, as though that in itself wins battles and engagements, as though it were something new. In point of fact, since the early days of warfare, one side has always tried to win the information war over the other. Sun Tzu advised us to see ourselves and see the enemy. The goal of units in combat has always been to know the enemy and to see the terrain, then to decide what to do… and to have the skills to do it faster than an enemy. The information age just provides new ways to do it on the battlefield.

That does not mean that the information age is not changing the battlefield. Far from it.

The emergence of information technology, operated by truly high-quality soldiers, is bringing about a revolution in land warfare. In the not-at-all-distant future, commanders will find themselves on a battlefield where all soldiers and weapons platforms will carry sensors. With their help, soldiers will not only know precisely where they are, they will also be able to engage the enemy directly and at the same time to transmit information about the enemy to other platforms that also can engage the enemy. Thus, combat power can be applied simultaneously throughout the depth of the battlespace to confound and stun, then rapidly defeat any enemy.

And that's only the beginning. Other changes may follow:

• telemetry-based logistics;

• broadcast and warrior pull-down intelligence on demand;

• an expanded direct-fire battlespace;

• battle command on the move; and

• rapid tailoring of combat capabilities.

This transformation will have enormous implications for how units are commanded and soldiers are led into battle; for the size and function of staffs; for the interaction of combat-support organizations in such a high-tempo context; and for interactions among joint partners.

Thus, for example, the trend in land combat has been toward fewer and fewer friendly forces in a given battlespace. They will no longer have to be confined to preset physical control measures. They won't even have to be contiguous to one another. Though massed effects on the enemy will still be possible (and usually without the need to mass physically), dispersal will be the norm, physical mass the exception. If it is necessary to physically mass in order to achieve an intended purpose, you can still do it, and then rapidly disperse again afterward. Such dispersal has the added benefit of increasing survivability probabilities.

In other words, we are moving toward what the British writer Paddy Griffith calls "an empty battlefield" — a battlefield where the trend in direct-contact battle is away from gaining coherence by means of physical mass to gaining it by means of a common picture of the situation, one that is constantly updated and available to all elements in the team of teams.

The U.S. Army vision for the future battlefield has been driven by the following overriding concept: quality soldiers and leaders whose full potential is realized through the application of information-age technologies and by rigorous and relevant training and leader development.

Two recent technical innovations symbolize that vision in a small way.

In September 1992, when the Army took its first M1A2 tank platoon to the National Training Center, Fred Franks and Major General Butch Funk, his old 3rd AD commander in Desert Storm, and at the time the commander of the Armor Center at Fort Knox, visited the NTC in order to see how well the soldiers could handle the rapid display of information while they fought their individual tanks (they did it very well, incidentally, and with initiative). It was the first de facto experiment of the future.

Inside the M1A2 were two revolutionary devices. The first was an independent viewer for the commander. With its addition, both commander and gunner now had sighting systems that could fire and find targets simultaneously. Thus the tank's lethality was almost doubled. As the gunner was engaging one target, the commander was independently finding another, which allowed the gunner to go right to the next.

The second device was even more significant. It looked something like a laptop computer and it was called the Intervehicular Information System (IVIS). IVIS was initially invented so that units would be able to know the location of all vehicles, transmit orders, automatically update logistics information about each tank, and consolidate that information for virtually automatic resupply.

Following the NTC tactical exercise, Franks and Funk huddled with the tank platoon and their platoon sergeant, Sergeant First Class Phil Johndrow, and listened to their experiences. What he learned from the unit was more than just eye-opening.

Navigation was no longer a concern. Nor was the location of other tanks in the unit. The IVIS told them not only their own exact location, but the exact location of each of the other tanks in their unit (there were screens for both drivers and tank commanders). Thus, they did not have to see each other physically in order to keep unit coherence, which meant that they could disperse more. The tank commander only had to give drivers a way point on which to guide, and the drivers did the rest (the driver steers between way points, which are provided automatically from the vehicle commander's screen). Consequently, the commander didn't have to spend as much of his time on navigation as before, which meant he could spend more time fighting the tank. (In Desert Storm only commanders had GPS, and the rest of the unit had to guide on his tank. Moreover, since his GPS was handheld, the vehicle commander constantly had to give course corrections to the driver.)

Before IVIS, all a tank crew knew was what they saw or were told by voice over the radio. They would peak to attention when the tank commander barked out a battle command, then they faded back to an awareness simply of what was available to their immediate senses. Now that the picture of what all the pieces of their unit were doing was available to them, the tank crew were much more able to anticipate platoon tactics and to engage in tactical tasks without being told. Independent action. Their heads were in the situation all the time. Even if another tank in the platoon became a casualty, they were able to continue the mission without missing a beat.

Imagine the power of quality soldiers, in highly trained units, all of whom have a continuing sense of the situation and the direction needed to defeat the enemy. It is the power of information. Further war-fighting experiments at Fort Knox in March 1993, then with battalion tank forces at the NTC in April 1994 by then-Major General Larry Jordan, confirmed the vision.

Some time after that, Franks visited TRADOC's dismounted Battle Lab at Fort Benning, where Major General Jerry White was conducting experiments in advanced night-vision equipment.

The working hypothesis: With an ability to see better, troops can disperse more and, with even fewer soldiers, inflict more damage on the enemy.

Later, troops at the Battle Lab were equipped with a communications link that let them all talk with each other on a common radio net. Soldiers don't like to be out of touch with the others in their team, but they don't need physical contact, as long as they can talk to one another. If they can do that, and if they can see the enemy at ranges greater than those at which the enemy can see them, they will take it from there.

Dispersion: Fewer soldiers in a given battlespace wielding the same lethality against the enemy. That means you don't have to protect so much of your own force.

Power of information: All your troops know what is going on.

But what then? What happens to the hierarchical military command structure? Does it remain the same? Do units remain the same size? Do they need to be as big? Can you expand the leader-to-led ratio while you disperse units, keep them informed, and place fewer troops in a given battlespace? What happens when you horizontally integrate all members of the combined-arms team (tanks, infantry, artillery, engineers, aviation, etc.) the same way you wired that tank platoon? Do you increase the tempo of your operation? Can you bring more lethal fires on the enemy?

By the spring of 1994, results from the Army's Louisiana Maneuvers and TRADOC's Battle Labs, both in TRADOC and at JRTC and the NTC, led to the decision to field an experimental force to explore further issues concerning changes in doctrine and technology investments. Army Chief General Sullivan directed that an experimental unit named Force XXI be established at Fort Hood, Texas, with a goal of a full-brigade war-fighting experiment at the NTC in 1997. The Army had come a long way toward the future since 1991.

As the Army forges into that future, it faces a multitude of questions of ever-growing complexity — but it knows how to go about solving them. Fred Franks retired from TRADOC in 1994, but today TRADOC continues to experiment, continues to work on the answers. At TRADOC's Battle Labs, Fort Hood, Fort Knox, the NTC, and JRTC — everywhere, activity flows. The rebirth of the Army is not a one-time thing. Thanks to Fred Franks and his colleagues, the generations before and the generations that will follow, the Army is a living, breathing organism. It has seen the twenty-first century — and it welcomes it.

Fred Franks has the last word…

REFLECTIONS

On 5 May 1970, the day I was wounded near Snoul, Cambodia, I could never have predicted the course the next twenty-five years would take — years that ended at a retirement ceremony at Fort Myer, Virginia, after I had completed thirty-five and a half years in the Army.

There is no mystery to what we do as soldiers and as an Army. When called to do so, we fight and win our nation's wars as part of a joint team. We spend a lifetime getting ready to do that. I was no different.

I make no apologies about my pride in our nation, our Army, and our soldiers. From that day in July 1955, when I proudly put on the fatigue shirt with "U.S. Army" over the pocket and took my place in the line with my West Point classmates, I was excited every day to be an American soldier. I loved the Army. I loved soldiering. I loved the cause we served. It is a profession as much about the heart as the mind. There is much passion in what soldiers do. What matters most is the cause we have been privileged to serve and those we've been privileged to serve with.

Someone asked me a few years ago why I wanted to be a soldier. I thought a few seconds before answering. Then I said, "If you like what our country stands for and are willing to fight to protect those ideals, you ought to be a soldier.

"If the sound of the national anthem and the sight of our flag stir something inside you, then you ought to be a soldier.

"If you want to be around a lot of other people who feel the same way about all that as you do, you ought to be a soldier.

"If you like a challenge, are not afraid of hard work, and think you are tough enough to meet the standards on the battlefield, you ought to be a soldier.

"If you and your family are strong enough to endure the many separations, often on a moment's notice, and can live that kind of life, then you ought to be a soldier.

"If the thought that at the end of your life you can say — or have said about you — that you served your country, if that appeals to you and you need no other reward than that, then you ought to be a soldier."

I think of the selfless and total commitment of our men and women and their families. The soldier in Captain Dana Pittard's tank company, who said, "We're family." The troopers of the 1st Squadron, 3rd Cavalry, who in 1975 accepted an amputee Lieutenant Colonel as their commander and who made me feel whole again as a soldier three years out of the amputee ward. The members of the great Blackhorse fist in the Fulda Gap in the early 1980s that we had ready and cocked for the Warsaw Pact.

They are the JAYHAWKS, Blackhorse, Brave Rifles, and Iron Soldiers. They give all they have. Sometimes their lives. They speak in whispered tones, or not at all, about what they have done. They are the best we have in America. I can see their faces and remember their names. They look like America. They are America. Some of them are Cooper, Wiggins, Hallings, Johndrow, Vinson, Hawthorne, Johnson, Bolan, Burkett, Linberg, McVey, Cotton, Williams, Murphy, Butler, Wilson, Woodall, and Paez.

They are my generation of Vietnam veterans and fellow amputees, for whom there were no yellow ribbons or parades, but who did what our country asked and did it so well and at great personal sacrifice. They are our Desert Storm generation, who also did what our country asked and did it so well and at great personal sacrifice. They are America's army. Who would not be proud to serve in the ranks of such Americans and to be called to lead them in battle? "No mission too difficult, no sacrifice too great, duty first," they say in the Big Red One. "Allons" — "let's go" — they say in the Blackhorse. "JAYHAWK" in VII Corps. Iron Soldiers, Spearhead, First Team, Always Ready, Brave Rifles. Values such as selfless service, heroism, sacrifice, honor. Values given real meaning by soldiers' actions in service to our nation on battlefields and at duty posts the world over.

The toughest value has been duty. It demands more and gives less than any value I know. In the mind-numbing cold of a Grafenwohr, Germany, tank range in the pitch blackness, in the lonely outpost of a border OP staring into a dark void across the Iron Curtain, in the daily battles in the jungle while far away, others decide their worth and where they will lead, in the loneliness of a decision to send your soldiers into an all-night tank battle, in the echo of taps in an otherwise still and silent landscape, in all of that, duty calls and you do it: you, and so many who have gone before you in those and sometimes even more demanding circumstances. You are aware of them. You know them from history, but you also know them because you and they are kindred spirits. You hear them talk to you across the centuries. You will not break the faith. You and your generation will do your duty as our country needs it done while you are there, then you will pass the torch to those who follow, those you have helped prepare to take the torch.

Perhaps that is why our Army has proven to be a splendidly resilient institution in service to our nation. The Army's ethic — perhaps mirroring its battlefield behavior — has been to do its duty with a quiet professionalism and competence. It is quite simply service to nation. That is no different now. Yet, as a result, some have missed the enormous and profound transformation in our Army — first from the early 1970s to the late 1980s, and then from that period until now, and then to the challenging threshold we now stand on to the future. Our current Army's identity has been marked by change or growth and informed by ideas thought through by professionals, while simultaneously maintaining standards of performance in the demanding missions our nation expects of us in scenarios as diverse as at any period in our history. There have been substance and depth to our growth, just as there have been demonstrated results in our operations. None of that happens by accident, nor is it preordained. We have described some of that in this book.

I have been privileged to have the sometimes awesome responsibility of commanding soldiers and civilians in peace and in two wars. Battle command is not complicated. To me it has three parts. The first is character: values, such as physical courage, mental courage (the courage to be who you really are), integrity, loyalty and selfless commitment to your mission and your troops. These all make a difference. The second is the competence to know what to do. Soldiers have every right to expect their commanders to know the nuts and bolts of the profession, to know how to make decisions, to outthink the enemy, and to put their units in a position to outfight him. The third is leadership — the skills to motivate and otherwise lead an organization of people to accomplish its mission at least cost to them, and sometimes in directions and in situations where they would rather not go.

I think about what generals do. I was a general for ten and a half years. Many have been generals for far longer than I was. But I have thought about what I did and what might be the essence of generalship, at least for me in this time.

I believe generals get to focus on and solve big problems in peace and war. They must know details and occasionally dip into those, but essentially they must figure out the few deciding issues or battles for their times and conditions and focus their energies on those. These are what I called points of main effort. They cannot be many. You have to decide what they are, and make them stick.

Generals must have an imagination that lets them visualize what needs to be. They must synthesize to create a whole when others cannot see, and then communicate that whole with so much clarity and so much conviction that others will see it, too, and follow it. That is command. That is leadership at the senior levels.

Generals decide where to be bold and where not to be bold.

They must be strong and decisive, yet they must also keep their ego from clouding their judgments. Instead, they must use that ego to stick to doing what is right, even in the face of adversity.

Generals decide where to intervene and where not to intervene.

They decide where to tolerate imperfection and where not to tolerate imperfection.

They must be intensely competitive. They must hate to lose.

They need to demand a climate of dignity and respect, and to know that to lead is also to serve. They can do a lot of good for individuals every day.

They must continue to grow. They must not be complacent.

If they can, they should rest easy in the saddle and have a sense of humor. Smile once in a while.

If generals can remember "Don't worry, General, we trust you," and do their best to fulfill that trust, they will have done their duty.

Finally, there is my own family. Denise, my high school sweetheart and Army wife of now thirty-eight years. My best friend and a woman of great compassion and courage. Margie, our special treasure of a daughter. Our intense love and depth of wisdom about each other and about what is of value born in the Valley Forge crucible.

Now there is Margie's family — her soldier husband, Greg, and our three grandchildren, Jake, Mickey, and Denise.

There is my dad, who gave me an inscribed clock when I retired: "A boyhood dream becomes a reality. Congratulations, son, on your retirement from a distinguished career of faithful service to the U.S. Army and your country. Love, Dad." My mom, gone, but never forgotten.

The Army has been like a bigger family for Denise and me. As she is fond of saying, she remembers "new friends, old friends, and forever friends." We had both grown up in West Lawn and West Wyomissing, Pennsylvania, in the 1940s and 1950s, so there were many excellent models for us. Each place we lived we tried to make our hometown. Those we served with became like family. Just like family, there was an intense loyalty in the units. You protected your family. You kept in touch with your family.

Those years after Valley Forge in the Brave Rifles at Fort Bliss, then in the Blackhorse in Fulda from 1982 to 1984, were like magic. Although it was not easy duty, and there were the usual separations and even deaths from accidents and in training, the magic was in the shared pride in being there in proud units. In Fulda, there was even the constant threat of war, as we stared down the 8th Guards Combined Arms Army across the Iron Curtain. But in all that there was emotion, strong bonding, shared duty, proud moments of winning over the adversity of weather, time, or other units in head-to-head competition. All of this forged intensely strong and lasting loyalties. These were units with no pomp or airs of office or even much observed protocol. It was as pure soldiering as you could get, and it was just a hell of a lot of fun for those of us privileged to take part.

It was not all easy. We had our tough times, our time at Valley Forge. I suspect everyone spends time at a Valley Forge sometime in his or her life. None of us goes looking for trouble, but it finds us all. How we handle it and grow from it is a measure of who we are. We had lots of help. Mostly we had each other. Denise and I and Margie still have each other. We have a steel tempered in fire that will surely be tested again, but that helps us gain perspective on each day and value those many blessings we have and not worry much about what we do not have. And it helps us reach out a hand where we can to those who need it, as we once did, to help them climb out or get up again.

Among my last places to visit while commanding TRADOC and before retirement were Fort Jackson, South Carolina, to see new soldiers in basic training, and Hampton University, Hampton, Virginia, to see ROTC cadets. I wanted to do that last because those soldiers and those cadets represent our future. Our nation is well served by those talented, motivated, selfless young men and women. Truly our Army and our nation will be in great hands if we continue to attract such quality young Americans; if we allow them to grow in a climate of dignity, respect, and challenge; and if we continue to focus on what wins and not compromise on those standards. In that way, we will fulfill our mission to fight and win our nation's wars.

To put the thought another way, and as I have emphasized so strongly, fulfilling our mission comes down to trust. That basic bond of leadership. I had seen the trust fractured in Vietnam. I had seen the trust reunited following Desert Storm. "Don't worry, General, we trust you." Trust us to do what? To stay focused on what wins and on who does it. You train a lifetime to make the few tough decisions you need to make to accomplish the mission at least cost to your soldiers. We expect that of ourselves, our soldiers expect that, and those who send us their sons and daughters expect that. It all comes down to that.

One of the lasting truths about being a soldier is that friendships formed with comrades in arms are the deepest and most enduring. Denise and I were privileged beyond words to have made those friendships.

I was humbled and proud to have been able to serve our nation and "to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America" in the United States Army in peace and two wars. That I was permitted to remain on active duty following the amputation of my left leg below the knee, and that I was given every opportunity to serve by Army leaders, by policy, and by my fellow soldiers, has been life's great privilege. My everlasting thanks to this great and noble institution, to our nation which it serves, and to the soldiers in whose ranks I was permitted to serve for thirty-five and a half years.