Into the Storm: On the Ground in Iraq

Founded by the Continental Congress in 1775, the U.S. Army is older than the country it serves. It is and always has been an army of the people, and over the course of our nation's history, it has probably reflected American society more than any other uniformed service. As a consequence, it is the service that has most frequently felt the nation's mood swings concerning foreign military ventures. Such ventures have rarely sat well with the American public, or with their representatives in Congress, and because of that, and the nature of American geography, Congress has historically had little patience for a large standing peacetime Army, preferring early on to rest secure behind our ocean boundaries, and later to rely on the technology of the Navy and Air Force.

In the early 1970s, neither the United States nor the Army was in good shape. You can blame the condition of both on the outcome of the war in Vietnam, and you won't be wrong, but there were deeper causes. Fortunately, the Army's leaders were willing to face up to them.

What was happening? What did they see?

By 1972, most U.S. ground forces were out of Vietnam, and the war had been turned over to the ARVN, though with support from U.S. logistics and airpower.

No matter what you may have heard, however, when our Army left Vietnam, they had not lost.

Before they left, U.S. Army tactical forces had performed superbly. They were victorious in every tactical engagement, some at considerable cost in soldiers, and technical and tactical innovations, such as air assault and attack helicopters, had proved successful. The NVA had to wait until some time after the departure of U.S. ground forces before they dared to start major operations in the south, and even longer before they risked undertaking a major invasion of the south with mechanized forces and tanks. Yet, even then, U.S. airpower was still assisting ARVN forces.

And then the air support stopped.

When that happened, U.S. military professionals, especially those in the Army, felt that the long, terrible sacrifice by young Americans had been betrayed. Just as bad was the loss of national honor: we abandoned an ally we had pledged to assist. The professionals would never forget that.

There was little support for the war on the home front, and it was reflected in attitudes toward the military. It was a bad idea to wear the uniform off post or base. Protests at the Pentagon became news cliches, and when National Guard troops were called out to keep protesters in check, feelings against the military intensified even further.

Meanwhile, the whole society was passing through a major upheaval: polarization of whites and blacks, testing of authority, insensitivity to minorities, drug problems, the sexual revolution. The Army was not immune; as drug use and racial tensions divided America, so, too, did they divide the U.S. Army.

An army has a spirit, an identity, an image. Part of it comes from its own institutional personality and traditions; part from the people from whom it springs. In the 1970s, the U.S. Army's public image was in ruin, its spirit in danger of being broken, its identity in danger of being lost.

A prime example could be found not in Vietnam or the United States, but in Europe, where the Army faced its greatest challenge, in the Warsaw Pact. How ready was the Army, as part of NATO, to stop a Warsaw Pact armored sweep aimed at Western Europe?

Not very.

The years of fighting in Vietnam had drawn Europe-based forces down to unacceptable strengths. Worse, the insatiable appetite for personnel had stripped our forces of officer leadership, and almost destroyed the Army's professional noncommissioned officer corps, long the backbone of the Army. A series of hasty training programs to fill depleted ranks had left the Army with NCOs who all too often were poorly trained in basic leadership techniques. Because the NCO is the first-line leader in the Army, the one person primarily responsible for the basic individual soldier skills on which every successful operation depends, training and discipline suffered. In some cases, it went to hell.

In Europe, many in the Army were on drugs, mostly hashish, but some were on heroin. There was racial violence in the barracks, which sometimes spilled over into the streets. Gangs ran some barracks. Leaders — officers or noncommissioned officers — were physically attacked. The chain of command in units struggled day to day simply to maintain good order and discipline.

It was not an Army that expected to win, or was ready to win.

Equally serious, while the Warsaw Pact had strengthened their forces during the previous ten years, U.S. Army capabilities had steadily declined. While fighting in Vietnam, the Army had missed a whole equipment modernization cycle. Many Army units would have been expected to fight with equipment from the early 1960s, with no prospect for change anytime soon.

Just as important, though less immediately visible, the Army warfighting doctrine — the ideas with which it fights — had not undergone a serious examination since World War II.

And finally, Army leaders realized — with shock — that the U.S. Army was not prepared to fight and win in a mechanized battlefield that had the speed and lethality of the 1973 Mideast War. A whole generation of leaders had seen Army unpreparedness in World War II and Korea, and knew its cost in the lives of soldiers. The thought of unpreparedness haunted the U.S. military perhaps more than it did any other major power. It would be hard to underestimate the sense of urgency with which such feelings drove the Army reforms of the 1970s and 1980s.

Meanwhile, in 1973, the draft law expired, which meant that from then on, the armed services would have to exist as an all-volunteer force. The initial results were almost entirely predictable. It was difficult to find true volunteers, and of those who joined up, all too many were not high-quality recruits. Too many were at the lower ranges of intelligence, and some of them came in only after they were given the choice of prison or military service. All that made an already deteriorating discipline situation worse.

Some professionals left the Army then. They'd had enough of an Army gutted by Vietnam, indiscipline, low morale, and betrayal. Others left involuntarily, as the Army rapidly drew down from its peak strength during Vietnam. But many stayed. They stayed because they wanted to be soldiers, because they wanted to be part of the solution, because they saw an Army never defeated on the battlefield struggling for its very existence as a viable force, and they wanted to help in these times of trouble. They stayed because the Army was wounded and needed help; you do not abandon a wounded buddy on the battlefield. They stayed because it was their duty. They were in for the long haul. It wasn't always easy or fair, but they knew that sometime, someplace in the future, the nation would need her Army to go fight and win, and it had better be ready.

Senior Army leadership knew all this when they took a look around their institution in the early 1970s. That they did not like what they saw goes without saying. And so they set out to change it.

There was much work to be done.

MISSION AND FOCUS

To begin with, in order to rebuild the Army, it was not enough to publish directives and policies. The entire Army had to internalize the need to remake itself, and do it so pervasively that all its members felt the same urgency. In order to renew its focus, the Army needed to renew its sense of its mission — or rather, it needed to understand what exactly its mission was.

An Army's mission is to win wars on the ground. But what did that actually mean for the U.S. Army in the early 1970s? And what would the Army have to do then to accomplish it?

The answers were provided for them by Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, Army Chief of Staff Creighton Abrams, and Secretary of the Army Bo Calloway.

James Schlesinger was sworn in as Secretary of Defense in July 1973, after spending several years at the Rand Corporation, one of the premier strategic and military think tanks. In those years, the United States had tended to rely more on nuclear weapons than on conventional forces for the defense of Central Europe. Schlesinger's experience at Rand had left him with the conviction that the United States needed to turn that balance around. There was an urgent need, in his words, "for a stalwart conventional defense in Europe," a need that was not likely to be met immediately, given the "dreadful" condition of the U.S. Army at the time. He had in fact seen a growing indication that the Europeans had given up on American forces in Europe. Because of the drawdown of our forces there to support Vietnam, the Europeans had concluded that our army in Europe lacked credibility.

That situation had to stop, and stop soon. Thus, as a first order of business, Schlesinger determined to "rebuild deterrence" in our conventional forces in order to fight and win in Europe. That was his answer: Focus on Europe. Focus on stopping the Warsaw Pact, if it decided to start something. Focus on winning a war there, if we were called upon to fight one.

In Creighton Abrams and Bo Calloway, Schlesinger found effective partners.

Abrams became Army Chief in October 1972, well aware that the Army needed to intensify the work begun by his predecessor, General William Westmoreland, to remake itself in the wake of Vietnam. Abrams had just come from four years as the senior U.S. commander in Vietnam; he knew the Army in the field. He also had a justly deserved reputation as a soldier's general; he was not given to airs or to spit and polish, but to hard, tough soldiering and aggressive actions on the battlefield. Abrams had also been arguably the Army's most celebrated and successful tactical small-unit commander in World War II in Europe. He brought with him a spark, a steady hand, and impeccable integrity. When General Abrams talked about the Army to the public or to Congress, he did it with a candor and with an emotion born of genuine love.

General Abrams was to repeat his theme over and over again: "You've got to know what influences me. We have paid, and paid, and paid again in blood and sacrifice for our unpreparedness. I don't want war, but I am appalled at the human cost that we've paid because we wouldn't prepare to fight."

Together, Abrams, Schlesinger, and Calloway made the case to Congress for necessary resources. The national security interests in Europe were simply too high, they argued; the Europeans' regard for U.S. credibility was too low. Something had to be done now. They began to get their money.

Part of that money went for manpower levels. The Army needed to operate with steady and predictable force levels, and needed to know it would have those levels for enough time to rebuild a credible force without having to argue for them each budget year. In a since-famous "handshake" agreement, the Army got that. Schlesinger told Abrams, "I am prepared to freeze your manpower at 785,000," enough to set the total Army on a course that in the 1980s would reach to sixteen active and twelve National Guard divisions (it would remain at that level until after Desert Storm). This gave Abrams and the Army what it needed to blend together the active forces and Reserve components (National Guard and Army Reserves) into what came to be known as the Total Army Concept. Never again would the active forces be called upon to fight a war alone. The Reserve component — the force closest to the everyday fabric of American life, to the American people — would be fighting right along with them.

QUALITY

To rebuild the Army, however, meant finding the right people. Though it can't do without them, the Army is not weapons, or machines, or vehicles, or organizations, but is the quality of the personnel. The Army needed people who could train with all the fire, intelligence, and intensity of world-class athletes to fight on a battlefield that was more lethal and fast-moving than the leaders of World War II or Korea could possibly have imagined.

In rebuilding this foundation, the Army got off to a rocky start, yet to its credit, it did not wait for directives, nor did it get defensive and try to excuse its actions. The Army attacked its problems.

In the fall of 1968, as the Vietnam War had worn on, Army Chief Westmoreland commissioned a study to see if an all-volunteer Army could offset the growing morale and discipline problems. In the early 1970s, the Army leadership was already moving toward what they considered the inevitable ending of the draft. In 1971, to make service life more attractive to young Americans, they began Project VOLAR. It was a huge experiment, and it touched every facet of the Army's daily life, from haircuts to pass and leave policies, to reveille formations, to beer in barracks and mess halls, to the establishment of enlisted men's councils to give soldiers some say in the chain of command. In 1971, VOLAR adopted a slogan: The Army Wants to Join You. Barracks were even painted pastel colors.

In the main, the experiment didn't work. To attract young Americans, the Army had let itself slide into practices that could only fail. You can't have a "touchy-feely" Army.

In making Army life "nicer," VOLAR compromised some of the Army's basic principles of discipline; it began to resemble a social club where everything was up for discussion. Something was very wrong if the Army had to compromise its basic identity in order to attract volunteers. The enlisted men's councils, for instance, did not so much give ordinary soldiers a voice in the halls of power as they undercut the legitimate chain of command. Unit commanders were predictably unenthusiastic about this and other "reforms."

The Army Wants to Join You…?

"God, I just want to vomit," General Bruce Palmer, then Army vice chief of staff, announced when he heard that slogan.

It was not that they did not need good ideas to make service life more attractive, or that the Army culture did not need adjustment. It was just that those adjustments had to be made while simultaneously maintaining the good order and discipline necessary for the exacting duties of soldiers in combat. It was simply a case of too much too soon. The Army culture in the field was just not ready for such sweeping changes in such short order.

But some good came of all this tension. The professional Army learned quickly how to make necessary adjustments in discipline and equal opportunity without compromising readiness. And senior-level policy makers learned that overly directive and restrictive policies from Washington were likely to be met with failure in the field. The VOLAR experiment, though itself a failure, turned out to be a useful time of growth for the Army as an institution, and better prepared it for the time when the all-volunteer Army became law in 1972.

The Army moved on:

• It established major equal-opportunity policies, including work-shops, mandatory classes on prevention of sexual harassment, and ethnic sensitivity sessions to alert leaders to expected language and behavior.

• It established a zero-tolerance policy on drugs, with regular urinalysis drug testing. More and more soldiers came into the Army motivated and drug free — and these soldiers did not want to be around soldiers who used drugs. Peer pressure began to move soldier culture in a positive direction.

• Similar programs were instituted for alcohol abuse, and alcohol was no longer glamorized.

• Women were actively recruited, and in 1980, for the first time, women graduated from West Point.

• Weight-control programs were started. Passing physical-fitness tests became a part of officer and NCO fitness reports.

All these programs together created a winning and proud climate in the Army. Now soldiers not only felt like winners, they wanted you out of their outfit if you didn't feel the same way.

One hurdle still remained in the quality of the volunteers. The aim was relatively simple in concept, though hard to implement in practice: the smarter the better. On the new battlefield, you were going to need not just physical strength, but knowledge, resourcefulness, mental agility, and leadership. For its volunteer force, the Army's initial goal was 70 percent high school graduates. By 1974, Army recruiting was up to 55 percent high school graduates, but that still was not enough. Something was needed.

That something was Max Thurman.

Major General Max Thurman assumed command of the Recruiting Command in the summer of 1979. From his previous position on the Army staff, he'd come to three conclusions: First, the Army was having a hard time recruiting high school graduates. Second, the Army had a lot to offer to young people graduating from high school, if only they could get the word. And third, young Americans wanted to be challenged.

The Army is a big organization, he reasoned, a melting pot, like the nation it serves. Quality people joined up and stayed for many different motives, some of them utilitarian, some closer to the heart and soul.

You feel you're a winner if you're on a winning team, he thought, if you feel you're living in a climate where you can truly realize all of your potential. Here was the Army: a place of equal opportunity for everyone — men, women, white, black, Hispanic. There were opportunities to work with new, high-tech weapons systems; opportunities for better pay; and incentives, such as help for higher education. Why not broadcast them to the world?

Before assuming command, Thurman had done his homework. He'd gotten himself a tailor-made course in modern advertising and recruiting techniques from the Army's advertising agency. Soon after that, Recruiting Command adopted a new advertising campaign, whose touchstone was a new slogan: Be All That You Can Be (a far cry from the 1970s' The Army Wants to Join You). It worked. Young Americans began to see what the Army could offer. And they joined up. By Desert Storm, the percentage of high school graduates numbered in the high nineties, and many in the NCO corps had college diplomas. (Thurman went on to four-star general as Army vice chief, TRADOC commander, then led the Panama operation in December 1989.)

Another thing that helped Thurman was what was happening in the world at large. A large part of a winning attitude comes out of the way you compare yourself to your opponents. If you know in your heart he is going to beat you — in a game, in a contest, in a fight, or in a war — there isn't much room for a winning attitude.

During the 1970s, we all saw the Soviets as "ten feet tall" — not without reason: the Soviets maintained a huge, modern, and (apparently) high-tech army. By 1980, the Soviets had a tank inventory of about 48,000; the United States had 10,700. Although there was never a U.S. Army intent to match the Soviets tank for tank as long as our tanks were qualitatively better than theirs, Army leaders were understandably worried when the Soviets fielded the T-64 and then the T-72 with 125-mm cannon, while part of the U.S. Army tank inventory included improved M60 series tanks and some tanks still equipped with 90-mm guns.

But then, in 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, and almost immediately proved themselves to be mortal. While their initial strike was quick and impressive, their ability to follow up and adapt to the terrain and tactics of the Afghan resistance turned out to be glaringly ineffective. Before long, it began to look as though the huge Soviet war machine could be beaten.

TRAINING

With the realization of the speed and lethality of the modern mounted battlefield came the deeper realization of what it would take to fight and win on such a battlefield. If it was going to win the first battle of the next war, the U.S. Army had to develop better training standards and performance levels.

Training for war is what an Army does in peacetime. How it does that, with what rigor, against what standards, and with what realism all determine how well it is prepared to fight and win the nation's wars. It was against that set of criteria that the Army began a revolution in training and leader development that touched every aspect of the way the Army prepared for war. If you fight the first battle unprepared, you pay for learning with the lives of American soldiers. Army leaders were determined to create conditions of training that replicated actual battle conditions as closely as possible. If you "lost" there, you learned better how to win in combat.

Because most Army leaders see themselves as trainers and have strong opinions about methods, they realized that the Army had to standardize its approach to training; it had to agree on tasks, conditions, and standards, from the individual all the way up to the corps. It had to publish those standards and stick to them, and hold leaders accountable for reaching them.

It began with TRADOC and FORSCOM.

TRADOC AND FORSCOM

On 30 June 1973, the U.S. Army's Continental Army Command ceased to exist. In its place the Army established two new commands, TRADOC, the Training and Doctrine Command, with headquarters at historic Fort Monroe, Virginia, and FORSCOM, Forces Command, with headquarters at Fort McPherson, Georgia.

The two major areas of responsibility set out for TRADOC were to operate the Army's institutional school system of training and education and to ensure that the Army was prepared to fight and win the next war. It was responsible for establishing uniform training standards throughout the Army, from individuals to units, and it was to operate the Army's considerable school system, including basic training of new recruits. It was also to look to the future, so that the Army would never again be caught unawares of the changing nature of war. TRADOC would establish requirements for material and organizations to fight that next war, and it would also write the operational doctrine for the employment of Army forces as part of a joint team. For the first time, the Army had a major command responsible for integrating doctrine, training, leader development, organization design, and material requirements. As a result, soldiers and units could now modernize and change much more rapidly and effectively.

This new and revolutionary organizational concept has since been copied by many armies of the world.

General Bill DePuy, the first TRADOC commander, was by background and temperament the right choice to get the new command. He was arguably the Army's preeminent tactician, a man of genuine intellect and a pragmatic soldier. By his own drive and intelligence, DePuy touched virtually every aspect of the Army's recovery, and he profoundly influenced those who carried his work on into the 1980s, following his retirement in 1977.

When DePuy took over TRADOC, he got off to a fast start. He set to work to root the Army in a set of training standards from individual soldiers to divisions; he revitalized the school system; and later, after seeing the results of the 1973 Mideast War, set about writing an operational doctrine for the Army, the first of a revitalized FM 100-5 series that focused on how to fight and win outnumbered in Central Europe. It fell to DePuy and to TRADOC to give substance to the Army's restated mission and focus. Just stating it was not enough. Much work had to be done.

Even before he assumed command of TRADOC, General DePuy outlined his vision of the future Army. "It seems to me," he said in a talk at Fort Polk on 7 June 1973, "that we all have to be aware of the fact that we are probably going to be members of an entirely different kind of an Army than we have belonged to for the last few years… Wars will tend to be like the Suez attack of the British and French, and are very likely to be turned off by the world politicians as quickly as possible. And it means, therefore, that the most likely thing that any of you guys will be involved in will be something short, violent, and important… " That means "we have to be better than" the Army of Europe in the 1950s and 1960s "by quite a large margin."

General Walter "Dutch" Kerwin assumed command of FORSCOM the same day DePuy took command of TRADOC.

FORSCOM had responsibility for the training readiness of all U.S. Army units stationed in the United States, as well as for training the Reserve component — the U.S. Army Reserve (the federal force) and the Army National Guard (who in peacetime are under command of state governors). To FORSCOM and its leaders fell the less visible but vitally important role of improving combat readiness while incorporating the new "volunteers" into units and solving the Army's discipline problems. Additionally, FORSCOM began to implement the Army's new Total Army Concept.

"Dutch" Kerwin was perfect for getting this task moving. A World War II combat veteran of North Africa and Europe, he had also commanded a division in the Germany-based U.S. Army. In Vietnam, he had been General Abrams's chief of staff, and had commanded II Field Force. He was a senior officer of impeccable integrity, with a firm yet compassionate way with soldiers and leaders. Kerwin knew winners and how to build winning teams, and he was to typify all those leaders, both NCO and officer, who held the Army's units together in the field and slowly began to turn them around.

THE 1973 MIDEAST WAR

If the Army needed help in heightening its sense of urgency to rebuild itself, it got it when the eighteen-day war broke out in the Middle East in October 1973. This short war shocked Army leaders into a new awareness of the speed and lethality of the modern battlefield and the density of tank-killing systems. During those eighteen days, more tanks were lost than what the U.S. Army in Europe had in its whole tank inventory.

The Yom Kippur War was a surrogate for what the Army expected to face in Central Europe should a war break out against the Soviets. On the one side were forces organized and equipped like the Soviets, and operating according to the Soviet echelonment doctrine of attack. On the other side was a force with a large quantity of American equipment.

But it wasn't just numbers that disturbed the Army leaders, it was the quality of equipment. The T-62 Soviet-built tank (used by the Syrians and the Egyptians) had a 115-mm smoothbore tank cannon fully capable of defeating U.S. tanks, with a 50 percent probability of hit and kill at 1,500 meters. Worse, many reserve U.S. tanks had only 90-mm cannons. Moreover, antitank guided missiles were killing tanks at ranges in excess of 3,000 meters. And artillery had doubled in lethality and increased in range by about 60 percent since World War II.

Quick to seize on these points, General Bill DePuy sent a team to Israel to gather lessons, and the Israelis generously shared the things they'd learned with the U.S. Army (they even sent a number of captured T-62 tanks to the U.S. Army for examination). This contact opened a continuing dialogue with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), which greatly benefited the U.S. Army's preparations for fighting on the new battlefield.

From General DePuy and TRADOC's many briefings and studies, two concepts came out of the lessons of the Yom Kippur War. These concepts became rallying cries:

• "Fight outnumbered and win."

• "Win the first battle of the next war."

These drove the Army's thinking, training, and equipping throughout the Cold War, and they were the basis for much of what happened in Desert Storm.

THE TRAINING BEGINS

The training revolution started during the years from 1971 to 1975, and though it was the work of many people, it was principally sparked by Bill DePuy and Paul Gorman.

Gorman was an innovator, a soldier with a highly fertile mind and a passion for training. Gorman had been General DePuy's G-3 when DePuy had commanded the Big Red One in Vietnam, and it was DePuy who arranged to have then-Brigadier General Gorman assigned to the Infantry School as assistant commandant.

There Gorman headed the Board for Dynamic Training, and later what became known as the Combined Arms Training Board (CATB), established by Westmoreland in 1971. At CATB, a systems approach to training and what would be called Tactical Engagement Simulation (TES) were developed.

Working with scientists at Florida State University, the CATB developed a system whereby every major function on the battlefield could be broken into discrete tasks.

First, you made a front-end analysis to determine what tasks had to be performed by individuals and by teams in the company, then you determined the standards of performance that had to be executed to ensure the mission was successful. The list of individual tasks were then arranged according to the skill levels of soldiers, and these were put into books called Soldiers' Manuals. Soldiers could then study these manuals, and NCOs could teach from them. Next came what was called a "skill qualification test," which required each soldier to demonstrate proficiency once a year in his or her specialty.

Unit tasks, meanwhile, were put into booklets called ARTEPs (Training and Evaluation Plans — an evaluative list of tasks). ARTEPs permitted commanders to judge better and more systematically their units' ability to accomplish particular battlefield unit tasks.

TES was simply train as you fight. It was a system of shoot-back simulations that replicated the battlefield with great fidelity, and its concept was both eye-opening and (after the fact) blindingly obvious: If you survived your first combat engagements, you would go on to perform at much higher levels. This was shown to be true of both individuals and units. The Navy created their Top Gun School in the late 1960s, after they realized they needed to train their pilots through their "first fights" before they had their real first fights in the skies over North Vietnam, and the Army decided to build a similar school for land warfare.

What Gorman wanted to do with TES was to develop simulations that would allow an opposing force to maneuver and "shoot back" in training. Such a system would objectively score target hits and kills in training fire with opposing forces. The problem was that Gorman didn't have the technology for it. Right now, units fired blanks at each other, and an "umpire," or neutral observer assigned to the exercise, judged who won or lost and by how much.

That all ended when Gorman came upon the technology eventually called MILES — Multiple Integrated Laser Targeting System. It was an eyesafe laser beam that used the normal sights on a weapon, and it allowed units and individuals to "fire" at each other and to "hit" without danger to either side. All individuals and equipment had receivers, and when a laser hit your receiver, you either heard a loud ring or a light went on signaling a "kill."

Meanwhile at Fort Benning in CATB, Gorman and his group proposed a revision of tasks to make them more relevant and so that they could better meet standards. This came to be called "performance-oriented training," which meant that training was no longer conducted according to some arbitrary time criterion. Rather, you kept at it until standards were met. This was as simple as it was profound: You stayed at it until you got it right. In April 1975, the Army officially changed its training regulations, and from then on, performance-oriented training was the law. It also laid the basis for the evaluation system of the ARTEP. Army training would never be the same again.

With this kind of training, soldiers and units would become veterans before they actually went into combat. To complete that vision, the Army more than ever needed a world-class national training facility that included rigorous practice battlefields with large-unit live fire.

Other training innovations came out of practical experience in the field, and some of them had long-term consequences.

Early in 1976, Lieutenant General Donn Starry assumed command of U.S. Army V Corps in Germany. (Starry, of course, had been one of the 11th ACR commanders at the time Fred Franks served with the Blackhorse in Vietnam.) He was immediately faced with two especially daunting challenges: In V Corps, he found a unit that doubted its ability to fight and win against the combined armies of the Warsaw Pact (a serious overmatch, at least in numbers). And the U.S. V Corps was essentially all that stood in the way of a rapid Warsaw Pact thrust over the short 120 kilometers to Frankfurt, the industrial and financial capital of West Germany.

Deeply troubled by all this, Starry went to work to fix it. His aim was to restore confidence to his corps by showing them how they could fight and win there, even outnumbered.

Starry came to V Corps from TRADOC, where he had been one of the principal authors of the soon-to-be-published 1976 FM 100-5. He put this new doctrine to use immediately. Using videotapes, he pointed out that the avenue of approach that ran from the West German city of Fulda to Frankfurt had to be hugely tempting to Warsaw Pact planners, and that it was vital to deter such an attack. Starry's presentations called attention to what was forever after referred to as the "Fulda Gap."

But Starry did more than talk. He instituted an innovative, mission-focused training program that related the specific tasks of training to the specific tasks needed to accomplish a wartime mission. And he started what he and the Army came to call "terrain walks": Once every three months he required all commanders and leaders to go out on the actual ground where they anticipated they would fight. There they would explain in detail to their next-higher commander just how they intended to conduct the fight. (Starry and all his subordinate commanders personally attended these sessions.) Afterward, they were required to construct "battle books." In these, commanders detailed unit and weapon positions, how they intended to manage the flow of battle, and how their actions fit the overall corps plan.

Starry's training methods, and his terrain walks, proved so effective that they were used in all of Europe up to the end of the Cold War. And they went a long way toward restoring confidence to V Corps and other U.S. units in Germany.

By the 1980s, the Army was infused with the objectives leaders had begun articulating in the previous decade: Fight and win the first battle of the next war. Fight outnumbered and win. Fight a "come-as-you-are war" — a war with a short preparation and warning time. Train the way you fight.

Unit training facilities were being constructed or modified to re-create with great fidelity the modern highly lethal battlefield. Principal among these was the new National Training Center at Fort Irwin, in California's Mojave Desert.

Three components were needed to make the NTC work:

• A professional opposing force (OPFOR). Its full-time mission was to emulate in maneuver, in war fighting, and in doctrine the most likely enemy of the U.S. Army. In the 1980s, that enemy was the Soviets. Hence the OPFOR at the NTC became the Red Army, down to the last uniform detail.

• A core of maneuver experts to accompany the Blue (training unit) and to help and advise them as they learned by doing. The Army called these experts observer controllers (OCs).

• A system to promote learning.

At the heart of the learning system was the AAR, or After-Action Review.

After a training event, the OC led a small seminar for participants during which they could discover for themselves what they needed to do — improve commander and unit performance. Generally, AAR seminars used the following framework: What was the unit trying to do? What actually happened? And why the difference? The aim of an AAR was not to blame or judge, and AARs required active participation by all attendees, both commanders and subordinates. Subordinates had the freedom to bring up issues that reflected both favorably and unfavorably on their commander's decisions and actions. Commanders opened up and analyzed their own performance. All of it was based on the objective data furnished by MILES and by the observing and recording instruments that covered the entire maneuver area.

It required a significant cultural adjustment for commanders to let themselves be openly questioned by subordinates in the presence of video cameras and to overcome the feeling that the NTC experience was training, not an official report card. Many militaries around the world still cannot get over those hurdles. Though it took a while, the U.S. Army did make that adjustment, and in fact, the AAR process led to significant and positive behavioral changes more than any other training innovation. After training and the AAR process, commanders and leaders at all levels have become less arrogant and more willing to listen… without sacrificing bold acts and decisions. AARs have reduced the aura of expected infallibility around commanders, without absolving them of ultimate responsibility or taking away their will to win.

It's no surprise that the AAR method has spread throughout the Army. In fact, it's now required after every event where performance can be improved.

During the 1980s, the Army began to systematically exploit computer simulations in training. For individual weapons crews, for instance, the Army developed conduct-of-fire trainers. In realistically configured crew stations, using computer simulations of the actual fire control in their vehicles and computer-simulated scenarios, crews would engage computer-simulated targets. Following its development by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), the Army began a program called SIMNET, or simulations networking. Whole units were placed in simulators and linked in a live scenario. Units drove around and fought, and commanders controlled them, just as they would have done on the ground. AARs were conducted. In time, over linked networks, it was possible to do all this simultaneously, with units separated geographically.

Other training improvements went forward, as well. For instance, firing ranges all over the Army needed to be modernized to replicate the tasks, conditions, and standards of combat. At Grafenwohr, Germany, a program was begun to put in stationary and moving targetry. Such a system could be varied through software adjustments to allow units to fire according to consistent standards but with tasks varied to resemble wartime situations more closely. Range-firing standards were revised upward, for example, to require individual tanks to kill up to five enemy tanks by themselves. Firing ranges at Fort Hood and other installations in the United States underwent similar modernization.

Thus, with a combination of simulations using computer-assisted scenarios, actual live training using simulated enemy targets on ranges, and force on force using MILES, the U.S. Army gained combat experience without having to fight a war. This generation of leaders was realizing and carrying on the early visions of DePuy and Gorman.

As far as I'm concerned, the most interesting battlefield simulation is in the Battle Command Training Program (BCTP) for division and corps commanders, which was developed at Fort Leavenworth in 1986-87. BCTP did for those commanders what the NTC did for smaller units — but all in simulation. The idea for BCTP came from Lieutenant General Jerry Bartlett, commandant of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. Fred Franks was the deputy commandant at the time, and together they named the program, and Franks selected Colonel Dave Blodgett to give the idea form and substance. In 1987, General Carl Vuono made the program part of the Army's combat training centers.

Here is Fred Franks describing a BCTP WARFIGHTER exercise in Germany just before he left command of the 1st Armored Division to command VII Corps:

That BCTP exercise capped an intense period of command experience in the 1st Armored Division. Franks and his division chain of command had been the umpires for the annual two-week fall 1988 REFORGER exercise of V Corps vs. VII Corps. There he had seen two corps in action, made tactical judgments as the senior umpire with his commanders and staff, and observed General Butch Saint command an Army Group. He would also gain experience in commanding the division both at Hohenfels in their own training maneuver exercises, and in their training exercises on their actual wartime terrain near the German border. The 1st Armored Division was also undergoing force modernization, receiving new M1A1 tanks, Bradleys, and Apaches. Because of his strong belief in the importance of fundamental skills, Franks trained as an individual tank commander with a tank crew and successfully went through the annual M1A1 tank crew qualification exercises at Grafenwohr to ensure that, as an armored division commander, he could command a tank. It was a tight combat-ready team in "Old Ironsides" (the 1st AD nickname). Franks was seeing for himself how far he and the Army had come since the early 1970s.

BIG FIVE

None of this could have been possible, of course, without the right equipment — and that was another major element in the rebirth of the Army.

In 1972, even before the '73 Mideast War, the Army was already aware of its urgent need for new and better fighting equipment. Under the leadership of General DePuy, then the Assistant Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, the Army adopted an approach with Congress and the Department of Defense that communicated this urgent need in a focused and disciplined way. They called this program the "Big Five," for the five new systems the Army could hardly live without: a new tank, an infantry fighting vehicle, an attack helicopter, a utility helicopter, and an air defense system. These would become the M1 Abrams, the Bradley, the Apache, the Blackhawk, and the Patriot. With the help of the 1973 Mideast War and James Schlesinger's continuing focus on restoring credibility to U.S. conventional defense in Central Europe, all five systems were approved.

Though today these systems have shown themselves to be hugely successful, none of them went through the acquisition process without serious debate, downright skepticism, and opposition inside the government and out. (Critics have been hard to find since Desert Storm.)

Let's look briefly at three of the five — the Apache, the Bradley, and the Abrams.[8]

— During Vietnam, the U.S. Army pioneered the concept of air assault and attack helicopters. There, because its air assault capability added a third maneuver dimension, the 1st Cavalry Division proved a superb tactical success. Likewise, rocket-firing helicopter gunships, and later the Cobra, proved equally effective. Later still, the Army attached TOW (Tube-launched, Optically tracked, Wire-guided antitank) missiles to both the Cobra and the UH-1 (Huey). These proved effective against NVA tanks and other targets during the Easter offensive of 1972.

From the beginning, the Army had wished to build an attack helicopter equipped with a combination of rockets, antitank missiles, and cannon; and so was launched the Cheyenne program. The Cheyenne was designed for speed, but costs escalated and a prototype crashed, and so the program was terminated.

The Army still wanted an attack helicopter, though — a helicopter capable of day and night and adverse-weather operations against enemy armor and other hardened targets, and so the Apache program was launched.

The Apache was to be a true attack helicopter, able to fight in close direct fire battles or to go deep into the enemy rear. Its design emphasized the ability to fly at low level, sort out its targets, and launch weapons from long range, outside the enemy's antiaircraft range. At the same time, Apaches made no compromise in the areas of sensors, weapons, agility, and survivability. The airframe structure, for instance, is designed to take a 20-g crash without killing the crew, and the fuel tanks are self-sealing and crash-resistant.

Apaches were fielded in the mid-1980s, and they quickly proved themselves to be the main battle tanks of the Army's air fleet at both division and corps.

— The Bradley is a well-armed armored fighting vehicle, designed to permit infantry to fight mounted or, in another role, to drop its rear ramp and let the infantry fight dismounted in small teams, while supporting them with fire as necessary. It can also provide scouting for cavalry units, and infantry support for armored units on the battlefield. It's not designed to take the kind of heavy punishment a tank can, nor is it designed to deliver the kind of heavy blows a tank can deliver (though its punch is in no way light—with TOW missiles and a 25-mm cannon). Its versatility, however, clearly complements the tank-infantry team to produce a potent battlefield combination.

Like Apache, Bradley was created out of the failure of another program — this one called MICV (Mechanized Infantry Carrier Vehicle), which was designed to accompany M1 Abrams tanks into battle. It was not a wonderful piece of equipment. The one-man turret was inadequate, and the vehicle was as high as an early World War II tank, making it a vulnerable target. In early 1975, after the TRADOC studies of the 1973 Mideast War, General DePuy recommended killing the MICV. In his view, it wouldn't survive on the modern battlefield.

Out of the ashes of the MICV, the Bradley program was born. Like MICV, Bradley had doubters, and it would continue to have doubters right up to the attack on Desert Storm: "It's underpowered. The transmission doesn't work. The turret is too complex. The vehicle is not survivable." And on and on.

In the end, it worked superbly.

— The Abrams was likewise built on the ashes of failed programs (the U.S.-German MBT-70, and then the U.S. MBT-80). The Abrams likewise took its share of criticism, which in the end was not justified. Not only is designing a tank no small matter, but the United States had not built a completely new tank since the late 1940s. In tank design there are always trade-offs between survivability, mobility, and firepower. You have to lose something; you can't have it all. Large, heavily armored tanks with large cannons weigh a lot. That means they tend to be slow, they break bridges, and they can't get through underpasses. A tank like that isn't useful. Very quick light tanks without enough firepower to engage enemy armor and enough armor protection to survive are equally useless. So judgments have to be made in order to hit the right balance. How do you design a twenty-ton turret with fire-control equipment so precise it will allow gunners to track moving targets day and night and hit what they aim at, yet so rugged it can be used for days at a time without having to be taken to a shop for repairs? You also have to consider costs and maintenance. How many miles will your tank go between major failures of components?

The Abrams was a controversial machine, with a new and untried turbine powerplant, new armor, new electronics, and a new interior turret design. It was a tribute to American engineering that it took only eight years from the written requirements in 1972 to bring the first tank off the production line. Along the way came the questions and criticisms. Some worried about weight. Some worried about dust and sand getting into the turbine engine. Some worried about survivability. Some wondered if the new interior turret design would really work.

In the end, it turned out to be the world's best main battle tank. If you went out onto a used tank lot, where all the world's best tanks were lined up for sale, the Abrams would be the one you'd pick. Its 1,500-horsepower turbine engine will drive it across a battlefield at speeds in excess of forty miles an hour; it has great dash speed, accelerating to twenty mph in less than ten seconds; and it will do it quietly. (Some early opponents in NATO exercises called M1s "the Whispering Death.") The M1A1 that VII Corps took into Iraq carried a 120-mm smoothbore cannon as well as a.50-caliber and two 7.62-mm machine guns.

Crew protection is superb. Primary armor protection for the M1 comes from its Chobham armor (named after the British research facility in Chobham, England). The M1 is also equipped with an automatic fire-detection /suppression system, and the M1A1 additionally has an atmospheric overpressure system to allow the crew to survive and fight on a battlefield contaminated with toxic chemicals, biological agents, or nuclear fallout.

In Desert Storm, M1A1s killed many Iraqi tanks. "When I went into Kuwait, I had thirty-nine tanks," a captured Iraqi battalion commander reported. "After six weeks of air bombardment, I had thirty-two left. After twenty minutes in action against M1s, I had none."

By the end of the 1970s, the Army in Europe had grown weary of staring down the superior Soviet equipment from their lightly armed M551 Sheridan light tanks and their 1950s-technology M60-series tanks. All that changed by the early 1980s, when the Army started to field the Big Five. They were a shot in the arm for the confidence of the Army in Europe.

DOCTRINE

Not only was it necessary to have new tools and new training, but it was crucial to learn a whole new way to fight. The ideas with which an army fights are only slightly less important than the ideas for which it fights. Doctrine is a statement of how the Army intends to fight. It gives the Army a common language and a common reference point that allows shorthand professional communication. It's not a dogma; it's a guideline, a statement of principles that should prove helpful in solving battlefield problems. But the solutions themselves will be dictated by the specifics of the situation. For an Army with a degree of complexity caused by the lethality and speed of modern battle, such a common work plan is invaluable.

In July 1976, the U.S. Army published its remarkable document FM 100-5. This manual was the Army's capstone doctrine statement. You could call it the Army's Philosophy of War.

The '76 FM 100-5 came largely out of studies of the '73 Mideast War by General DePuy and his colleagues at TRADOC; its focus was on how the U.S. Army must fight to win on the modern battlefield; and it was written largely by a small group of senior officers under General DePuy's direction, including then-Major Generals Donn Starry and Paul Gorman. The book differed from earlier general manuals in that it was designed as a primer to inform the Army about how to understand the modern battlefield and how to fight and win when outnumbered on that battlefield. The book was meant not only to inform and instruct, but to restore confidence.

As an instructional manual the new FM 100-5 was widely applied — the Army quickly internalized the changed battlefield it now confronted — but as a how-to-fight manual, it was widely misread. Because its chief focus was on what it called "Active Defense," many leaders discounted it. They thought the approach was too "defensive" — too passive — but it was no such thing. A careful reading in the context of its times shows that it was in fact a very clear expression of what the U.S. Army could actually do at that time in order to get itself ready to fight and win. Later advances on this early doctrine would go a long, long way in the direction of attack. Meanwhile, however, a start had to be made with what was then available and possible.

When Donn Starry commanded V Corps in Germany, even as he implemented FM 100-5 and rebuilt warrior confidence in the unit, one thing still bothered him: Warsaw Pact army doctrine called for attack in waves. They'd hit you, and then hit you again and again, with fresh echelons of troops. Starry was not convinced he could be successful with an outnumbered force if the Warsaw Pact continued to introduce fresh echelons of troops into the fight. This issue had been on his mind ever since he himself had stood on the Golan Heights with Israeli Major General Musa Peled just after the 1973 Mideast War. There he'd listened to Peled's accounts of the IDF's fight against the Soviet echelonment tactics used by the Syrians. The IDF had won outnumbered on the Golan by attacking deep with air and 175-mm artillery, and then by maneuvering Peled's own division deep during the last days of the war.

Starry had long been convinced that, like the IDF, the U.S. Army had to think deep, and now that he was V Corps commander facing a possible echelon attack in a real mission, he was even more convinced. But Starry was also a pragmatist. He was fully aware that the Army could absorb only so many new ideas at any one time, and it was just about to be hit by the new doctrine of active defense. So he put off his thoughts until later.

In the summer of 1977, Starry succeeded DePuy as TRADOC commander. He was still deeply concerned about Warsaw Pact echelonment tactics and the enormous disparity in numbers. If something wasn't done about them, and if war broke out, sooner or later the sheer weight of numbers would prevail. In the end, he knew, the Army's Active Defense doctrine came down to attrition warfare, and in attrition warfare, numbers do count.

Starry's idea was to reintroduce a battle in depth: to extend the battlefield deep on the enemy's side of the forward line of contact, to attack follow-on echelons, and to break up the enemy's momentum and disrupt his ability to bring his mass to bear. To do all this required intelligence and deep targeting, and it required the orchestration of this fight with the principal deep-attack assets available to the USAF.

TRADOC presented Starry with the opportunity to implement this idea.

Starting with Starry's germ, over the next four years TRADOC developed what became known as AirLand Battle. Actual doctrine creation was a team effort involving two principal doctrine authors at the Army's Command and General Staff College, Colonels Huba Wass de Czege and Don Holder, both of whom worked directly for Lieutenant General Bill Richardson. Wass de Czege and Holder wrote a doctrinal book that built on the strengths of the 1976 edition, while adding both depth and maneuver, and ideas about gaining the initiative and going over to the attack. The idea was to win, and not just to stop the enemy advance.

At first, Starry called this idea the "extended battlefield." Later, it was "deep battle," and finally AirLand Battle.

In 1982, Colonel Fred Franks was given command of his old regiment, the 11th ACR, Blackhorse, which was now stationed in Germany in the Fulda Gap. There he was to have his first opportunity to command a large tactical unit. That meant that he was also a military community commander — essentially the mayor of a city of about 10,000 soldiers, civilians, and family members.

As commander of the 11th ACR, he wanted to introduce the new AirLand Battle doctrine — which the Army was about to publish in August — to teach it not only to the regiment, but also to the V Corps covering force, which consisted of about 10,000 soldiers from various units in the corps that had been put under his operational control to fight the initial battles and break up the momentum of a Warsaw Pact attack toward Frankfurt through the Fulda Gap.

Franks's corps commander during his two years with the Blackhorse was Lieutenant General Paul (Bo) Williams, a skilled and understanding commander who saw the vital importance of linking the Blackhorse's mission success (as covering force) to his overall corps success. Williams's G-3 was also a cavalryman, Colonel Tom Tait, who was a big help in the continuing work to strengthen the covering-force fight. He and Bo Williams were receptive to Franks's continuing arguments, taken in large part from the AirLand Battle doctrine that Franks himself had helped work on at TRADOC — that they had to begin to win immediately, especially in light of the growing capabilities provided by the new equipment that was becoming available. Franks believed, in fact, that early success in the covering force might even provide a basis for early limited counterattacks in NATO territory, which would break up the massed momentum of the other side before it really got started.

In 1983, Franks had a chance to put these ideas into practice at a REFORGER exercise.

REFORGER (REturn of FORces to GERmany) was a method of rapidly reinforcing U.S. units stationed in the central region of NATO. In times of crisis, troops would fly in from the United States, link up with equipment already stored in Europe, and — if they had to — go to war. In order to demonstrate U.S. political resolve, as well as to actually exercise the concept, there was a REFORGER exercise each year.

The '83 REFORGER involved V Corps units in Germany and units coming from the States. Though the exercise was to be held on the actual Fulda Gap terrain, it was set back some distance from the border. In it, the 3rd Armored Division was to be the Blue, or friendly, force against the opposing Orange force. The 11th Cavalry was not listed to be part of the exercise.

Fred Franks takes up the story:

And Fred Franks was proving the efficacy of AirLand Battle in the toughest kind of trial short of war.

Succeeding Starry at TRADOC was General Glen Otis. Otis had been the Army's operations deputy at the Department of the Army and was thoroughly familiar with the evolving doctrine. Drawing on studies coming out of the Army's War College, Otis was taken with the idea of addressing three levels of war: strategic, operational, and tactical. Strategy was beyond the scope of Army doctrine, but a lot could be done with the operational level. At that level, tactical battles were not discrete, unconnected events. Rather, they needed to be so woven together that they achieved a campaign objective, and thereby gained the overall strategic aim of a military operation.

The missing strategic link in Vietnam was the operational level of war. Year after year, tactical battles were won by U.S. and allied forces, but in the absence of an operational plan, these never added up to gaining the overall strategic objective.

Otis included the three levels in the new FM 100-5, and Otis's successor at TRADOC, Bill Richardson, directed expansion of the operational doctrine.

Meanwhile, while at Fort Leavenworth as deputy commandant of the Army's Command and General Staff College, Lieutenant General Bob RisCassi assigned Franks direction of the project to revise the Army's 1982 FM 100-5 that, while retaining AirLand Battle, included this expanded discussion, which it described as the "design and conduct of major operations and campaigns." Such design would be called "operational art" — the thinking that translated strategic aims into effective military campaigns. The book was approved and published in May 1986, and because operational art and design was a new thought for the U.S. Army, the doctrine was accompanied by a briefing put together by Colonel Rick Sinnreich, director of the School for Advanced Military Studies (SAMS), that would explain it to the U.S. Army and our allies. In Desert Storm, this 1986 book would serve as the U.S. Army's basic doctrine and directly influence the design of major operations.

Training and doctrine flow — or at least they should flow — out of the same source. Doctrine gives you mission and focus. Training gives you the skills to carry out your mission.

In the spring of 1988, before he assumed command of the 1st AD, Fred Franks had the opportunity to visit Eastern Europe to observe a Warsaw Pact military exercise as part of the observer exchanges of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). This visit gave him a unique opportunity to see for himself the training and doctrine of his potential enemy in operation.

This was the first time he had been behind the Iron Curtain to have a look for himself. Though he had patrolled it as a platoon leader, troop commander, and regimental commander during two previous tours in Europe, for the first time he was driving through the checkpoints, then down to Prague, and on up to the training exercise north of the capital. He spent a week in the field visiting a Soviet armored division and watching them go through training exercises. He took a lot of pictures, talked to Soviet officers, talked to observers from other countries, and saw at first hand the capabilities and limitations of a Soviet armored division.

The visit to Czechoslovakia confirmed all he'd always imagined about them: The Soviets' doctrine emphasized tight control. Everything had to go according to a timetable; nobody did anything on his own.

Franks visited a Czech mechanized infantry unit in a dug-in defensive position, and saw a Soviet unit in a similar position and a Soviet tank unit, equipped with T-72s. They were permitted to take pictures of it and of the troops and their positions, and also observed one of their second-echelon units moving up; they stopped on the side of the road and got out to talk to them. From all this, he got a decent insight into their mentality, leadership, equipment capabilities, approach to training, and approach to wartime situations. They were technically competent. Their field craft was quite good — digging holes, camouflage, movement of vehicles. But everything was very rehearsed. On their major maneuver range, you could see well-worn trails in the snow where unit after unit had done the same thing over the same ground. If anything unexpected happened, or if any radical change was required by some unexpected actions, that would be very disruptive to them.

Their training was very rote, very set-piece. They did this, then they did that. There were no real opposing forces — or thinking enemy, in what the U.S. Army calls free-play exercises. Our training exercises were dynamic; things are allowed to happen unexpectedly. We demanded of commanders that they deviate from the plan, because the enemy has a mind of his own. But here in Czechoslovakia, it looked as if they were going through a series of tightly scripted one-act plays. They'd move from Point A to Point B and then stop and get into positions.

Here are a couple of anecdotes. The experience could have been insightful had we fought them.

A Soviet major general had been escorting Franks and his colleagues around a tank firing range. It was very cold, and it started to snow. As it happened, he finished his tour and presentation about twenty minutes early.

Did they move Franks and his colleagues out to the buses waiting for them and get them to the next scheduled event? No. They didn't have that kind of flexibility. So there they stood in a blinding snowstorm, waiting for the appointed time when they could load the buses and move to their next station.

At the next station, they observed what the Soviets called a live fire exercise. Franks sat in warm bleachers that were covered, fully enclosed, with glass in front. Underneath were latrines with running water. It was like a sports stadium box for maybe two hundred people, obviously used time after time for VIPs and officers. And the range in front was full of ruts and tank trails, so you could see that they'd performed this exercise time after time. They'd bring their officers in, sit them down in the bleachers, and then carefully explain how a tank battalion supported by Hind helicopters would attack a position. We would call this a demonstration. They called it training.

All of this confirmed the wisdom of the United States' own doctrine: Before the Soviets gained mass and velocity to produce the momentum of their attack, the West needed to hit them early and hard and often while they were still getting themselves together and trying to organize their great numbers on limited terrain. The West had to add to the normal confusion, to hit their command posts while they were dealing with the early disruptions. Since nobody would exercise initiative — they were not allowed to — without their command posts they'd be lost.

Franks came away from there with two impressions:

One, they weren't supermen. In fact, our ideas about how to fight them, as written into doctrine, were exactly correct.

And two, with each side visiting the other, something had to give. They would observe our new modern equipment and superb soldiers and NCOs, and they couldn't help but realize that our soldiers were capable of things they could not even imagine.

But that wasn't really the important thing… showing off or learning how to fight each other. The important thing was that better understanding had to take place. They would see us. We would see them. We'd get to know each other better. And we'd open up little by little. And with that happening, the confrontation simply had to go away eventually. Franks didn't know when or how, but as a result of that visit, he was convinced the Cold War couldn't go on forever. That was the real aim of the visit.

Soviet and Iraqi doctrine and practice, he reflected later, had many similarities. Although they had equipment from South Africa, Brazil, France, and elsewhere (even from the United States), the Iraqis were equipped mainly with Warsaw Pact equipment. And although, in a curious way, their military was organized more on Western lines (into corps, divisions, and brigades) than on Soviet Warsaw Pact lines (into armies, divisions, and regiments), and although some of their tactics looked more Western than Soviet, in their actual behavior and in the way they laid out their defense and anticipated fighting a defensive battle, their behavior was profoundly Warsaw Pact. The Iraqis exercised very tight control. Everything they did was very, very rote. Every little thing had to go according to plan.

That meant that if you happened to do exactly what they predicted you would do, and at a place where they predicted you were going to do it, then they could hurt you. They had a lot of firepower. They had excellent artillery weapons. On the other hand, if you did something unexpected — such as time of attack, or speed of attack, or the location of the attack — and caused them to alter the rote pattern that they had anticipated, they had difficulty adjusting.

In other words, what Franks saw in 1988 in Czechoslovakia, he saw again with the Iraqis in Desert Storm. He saw the strength of our doctrine and the weakness of theirs.

(The Iraqi army was different from Warsaw Pact countries in one major respect, however: in the brutal way they treated their own soldiers and the savage treatment of their own citizens. That was pure Iraqi.)

During the 1980s, while the Army continued to deter Soviet aggression as part of NATO, it fought small wars in Grenada and Panama. And late in 1989, the Cold War ended. The Soviet empire had started the sag toward its final collapse.

Army leaders looking around at the beginning of the decade could not have easily imagined the incredible events at decade's end. To win the war, the Army had prepared to fight for the better part of two generations. To do it without firing a shot… you can't beat that for success.

LEADER TRAINING

There was one final ingredient to the rebirth of the Army.

From the days of Baron von Steuben during the American Revolutionary War, the NCO has been the "backbone of the Army." It is the sergeant who is responsible for the individual training of the soldier, who leads the soldiers in small units under the command of officers, who is closest to the soldiers, enforces good order and discipline, and provides the example of what soldiers should be to the junior enlisteds.

Let's make a kind of syllogism: Because Vietnam gutted the NCO corps, many small units went to hell. Ergo, it was necessary to fix the NCO corps. Thus, very early on in the rebirth process, Army leaders decided to change the way noncommissioned officers were trained and educated.

In 1969, Army Chief General William Westmoreland, having seen firsthand what Vietnam was doing to the NCO corps, directed General Ralph Haines, then his vice chief, to look into the whole situation and devise a solution. The "Haines Board" recommended that, throughout their careers, NCOs attend a series of progressive and sequential leader development schools designed to develop their leadership skills at each step in their advancement. Such a system was already in place for officers. Now NCOs would have a similar system — called NCOES, or noncommissioned officer education system.

How does the Army grow good NCO leaders? Before becoming sergeants, people showing leadership potential during their first three years in the Army attend a Primary Leader Development Course, or PLDC. Following promotion to sergeant and after serving for a few years, but before promotion to the next grade, NCOs attend the Basic Noncommissioned Officer Course (BNCOC), which is designed for small-unit leaders, such as squad leaders or tank commanders, and devoted to skills necessary to those positions. Following more years of practical experience, NCOs return to the Advanced Noncommissioned Officer Course (ANCOC) to help them make the transition from single-team leader to multi-team leader. By this time, an NCO will have perhaps ten to twelve years of service. Following successful performance of those duties and after demonstrating increased potential, NCOs attend a course designed to assist them in becoming first sergeants, or the senior NCO in a company organization ranging from seventy to two hundred soldiers. Finally, NCOs with senior leadership potential attend the nine-month Sergeants Major Academy at Fort Bliss, Texas, to prepare them for the most senior NCO positions — from command sergeant major of battalions to sergeant major of the Army. In the mid-1980s, the Army linked successful graduation from these schools to promotion.

This leader development system for NCOs saw its fulfillment on the battlefields of Desert Storm. By 1991, most of the senior NCOs of combat battalions had entered the Army in the mid-1970s and had had the opportunity to attend most of the NCOES courses. Meanwhile, all of the more junior NCOs had had the opportunity to attend these schools as they grew in rank and responsibilities. Their collective performance, and that of their soldiers in Desert Storm, was a direct effect of the long-sustained commitment to excellence of the U.S. Army's NCOES begun almost twenty years earlier. No other army in the world has such a system.

There were also major changes in the ways officers were educated.

From studies in the late 1970s, observations of commander and staff performances in NATO and at the new NTC, and renewed emphasis in doctrine on the operational level of war, Army leaders concluded that improvements had to be made in the way officers were developed.

In the middle 1970s the Army had adopted a central selection board process to pick its lieutenant colonel- and colonel-level commanders. Then, in the early 1980s, a pre-command course was created for those officers, which brought them up to date with the rapidly modernizing Army in the field, and gave them instruction and war-gaming practice (by way of simulations) on their new level of command. The course itself was two to three weeks of instruction and hands-on training in new equipment at the officers' basic branch school (armor, infantry, artillery, etc.), followed by two weeks of instruction in combined arms and issues of command at Fort Leavenworth.

For captains, the Army took a bolder step, by establishing a combined-arms services and staff school (the Army called it CAS3). Though it was begun as a pilot in 1983, the school wasn't fully operational until it moved into a new, specially designed classroom building built in the fall of 1986. CAS3 was to be attended by all Army captains sometime during their sixth to tenth year of service. Seminar groups of twelve to fifteen students from all disciplines in the Army were led through an intense nine-week course by an ex-battalion commander. There they learned how to solve tactical problems and how to manage a variety of tactical communications, including writing orders. CAS3 immediately produced results in significantly improved staff skills for the student graduates (and for the faculty as well — many of whom went on to senior-level command).

As CAS3 was getting off the ground, it became apparent that a second-year course was needed at Fort Leavenworth for selected students to study the complexities of the operational level of war with much more intellectual rigor than had been possible in the Army's educational system before. This need turned into the School for Advanced Military Studies (SAMS). Begun in a small converted gymnasium, the school opened with twelve students in 1983-84, and expanded to its current level of fifty-two students by 1985-86. SAMS was, and is, a highly selective operation, with an intensive entrance examination, including interviews. It initially drew only Army student volunteers from the graduates of the one-year Command and General Staff College course, but eventually USAF and USMC students also came out of that course. The curriculum is as rigorous as any graduate-level program in the United States (SAMS is certified to grant master's degrees in military arts and sciences by the Middle States Accreditation Board), and its graduates have gone on to distinguish themselves as operational-level planners in every major U.S. contingency operation from the late 1980s until today. Some of these gained publicity in Desert Storm as the "Jedi Knights," who crafted the basic CENTCOM plan used to liberate Kuwait.

This explosion of energy at Fort Leavenworth transformed the Army's Command and General Staff College. Long a training ground for future commanders and staff officers, CAS3, SAMS, and pre-command courses made it truly a university for the tactical and operational level of land warfare.

The entire atmosphere was transformed: Officers from captain to lieutenant general now came to study at Leavenworth, while officers from almost 100 different countries attended the regular course. Authority to grant the MMAS injected a graduate-school rigor into the second-year program. Creation of a combat studies institute attracted civilian faculty with broad academic credentials in the history of military art. Army leadership now looked to Fort Leavenworth for studies of future scenarios, which were then taken to senior-level leader seminars. The Battle Command Training Program also brought division and corps commanders and their staffs to Fort Leavenworth, and a Center for Lessons Learned was created to capture valuable training and war insights. In time, Fort Leavenworth became the symbol of the intellectual heart and soul of the tactical field army. Guest speakers and other visitors enriched the quality of the intellectual environment. Leaders from Congress, media, academia, and militaries around the world came for discussions and exchanges. Just as Fort Leavenworth had once been a frontier to the future of the American West on the banks of the Missouri, so now had it become a frontier to the Army's future.

RUNNING HARD

By the middle 1980s, the Army had more than turned the corner. It was running hard. The Grenada invasion, for instance, though demonstrating some difficulties in joint operations, was a success for the Army, and it showed how far it had come from the doldrums of the 1970s. The Army had reason to feel good about itself, and could point to an operational success as proof.

Meanwhile, the Army came to realize it might have to face situations where armor/mechanized forces (what it calls "heavy" forces) might not be as effective as "lighter," pure infantry forces. And so Army Secretary Jack Marsh and Army Chief John Wickham directed the creation of two light infantry divisions, to add to its sixteen current divisions. In order to do this without increasing the manpower authorizations of the active force, it turned again to the "round-out" concept, where National Guard brigades were folded into active-duty divisions, to "round" them out to full strength.

These divisions were to be truly "light" — in the spirit of the "light" troops who had stormed the redoubts at Yorktown in our Revolution. They would depend not so much on firepower as on stealth, infiltration, speed of movement through difficult terrain, tough physical conditioning, field craft, and relentless drills on the fundamentals of small-unit soldiering. It was in the latter where they excelled.

The Army also upgraded its special operating forces (SOF), expanding the Rangers to a regiment of three battalions. These would be the elite among elites — fit volunteers, trained to a razor's edge and beyond, to operate in small units behind the lines. As an elite force, they were given ample training budgets, stable personnel policies (less rotation in and out than normal units), their pick of volunteers, and leaders and commanders who were already experienced company commanders.

The Army's ambitious fielding of two light infantry divisions was a success. Schools for "light fighters" were established. Bold commanders such as Major General Ed Burba in the 7th Division at Fort Ord, California, would seize on the light fighter concept and transform their new divisions to operational reality in short order. Because light infantry soldiers drilled and trained hard on fundamentals of fitness and basic infantry close-combat skill, it wasn't long before they became a world-class fighting force. Their proficiency and zeal for combat fundamentals soon infected the Army — an unexpected bonus that has lasted. Convinced that light fighters needed an NTC-like facility to train to realistic battlefield conditions, General Richardson successfully pushed hard for a Joint Readiness Training Center. The JRTC was opened in 1986 in temporary facilities at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas. Later it was moved permanently to Fort Polk, Louisiana.

At Fort Hood, Texas, General Bob Shoemaker, then Lieutenant General Dick Cavazos after him, as III Corps Commander, formed training units to teach the Army how to employ the new Apache to attack deep and en masse. Resisting those who would parcel the Apaches out in small units throughout the tactical Army (reminiscent of the "penny packaging" of tanks in the 1920s), they became strong advocates of aviation brigades to add a new maneuver and deep firepower dimension to the tactical Army.

At Fort Hood, in 1985, a young Lieutenant General Crosbie "Butch" Saint assumed command of III Corps. Saint had previously commanded the 11th Armored Cavalry in Fulda, Germany, had been deputy commandant of the CGSC during the formulation of AirLand Battle, had recently commanded the 1st Armored Division in Germany, and was soon to become well known in the Army as an advocate of mobile armored warfare. III Corps's new mission in Northern Army Group in NATO was to attack to restore the territorial integrity of Germany after an initial Warsaw Pact attack. In order to accomplish this mission, Saint set out to utilize the corps's significant additional combat power and to create what he called a "mobile armored corps." III Corps drilled and practiced attacks, made long unit moves and attacked from the march, worked on the logistics of refueling on the move, and even published a tactical handbook to supplement the existing doctrine and further lay out the tactics. By now, they had Apaches in the brigade organization and employed them deep and massed.

Saint's ideas influenced a generation. In 1990, as the commander of U.S. forces in Germany at the end of the Cold War, he put the whole of U.S. Army Europe on the same tactical training regimen he'd started with III Corps.

GOLDWATER-NICHOLS

Never has national security legislation brought such sweeping — and wise — changes to the U.S. military as the Goldwater-Nichols National Security Act of 1986. It transformed the relationship of the service departments to the Joint Staff; it promoted operational "jointness" by legislating service for officers on joint assignments; and it streamlined the command authority from the President and Secretary of Defense to the Unified Commanders worldwide.

Goldwater-Nichols essentially removed the service departments from operational matters. Under the law, they still had their budget authorities, but now, under Title 10, their sole responsibility was to man, equip, and train forces, which would then be provided to the unified CINCs (commanders in chief) worldwide for employment in missions assigned by the President and the Secretary of Defense. The Joint Staff now no longer answered to the collective body of the Joint Chiefs, but only to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) and the Secretary of Defense. This simplified staff procedures and did away with the need to gain all service agreement on operational matters. In other words, before offering military advice to the President or Secretary of Defense, the Chairman JCS no longer required the total agreement of the service chiefs. Though the service chiefs were still senior advisers on national strategy, they were no longer involved in the day-to-day operational role. Meanwhile, because they were now free of individual service involvement, the authority of the Unified Commanders in areas around the world was significantly strengthened.

Joint education was to be required of all officers; all service schools were now to have a joint war-fighting curriculum approved and accredited by the Joint Staff; prior to promotion to flag rank, officers were required to serve in joint assignments; and those who qualified as CINCs would have to serve in a joint assignment as a flag officer.

Goldwater-Nichols was not an unqualified success. Though it gave the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman JCS, and the Joint Staff full authority to make the strategic analysis that would force decisions and trade-offs between service priorities, budget authority was left within service departments (so they could take care of their Title 10 responsibilities), and that invited bureaucratic maneuvering and interservice rivalry. Each service wanted to gain a larger share of the defense budget. That is still the case ten years and three JCS Chairmen later.

Goldwater-Nichols was an enormous adjustment for each service department, including the Army. Fortunately, and to its lasting benefit, in the summer of 1987 the Army chose as its new chief an officer uniquely suited for this transitional period, General Carl E. Vuono.

THE VUONO YEARS

General Carl Vuono came to be Army Chief as a man long immersed in the Army renaissance. He had not only lived it, he had increasingly helped to form some of its most important policies. He continued to do both as Army Chief.

In the late 1970s, Vuono had served General Starry as his chief for combat developments, and in that position, he had seen to it that the Army fielded the Big Five in a way that integrated training, organizational design, and equipment fielding so as to gain combat power in the shortest possible time. As commander of the 8th Infantry Division, he had stamped on that unit his own training beliefs and modernization plans, which would become a model for the rest of the Army. At Fort Leavenworth, from 1983 to 1985, as deputy TRADOC commander, he had completed the work on the new Army of excellence and had seen the establishment of SAMS and CAS3. From 1985 to 1986, as Army operations deputy for General Wickham, he had assisted General Bill Richardson in establishing the Joint Readiness Center at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, and later at Fort Polk, Louisiana. As TRADOC commander, he had published the first senior leadership doctrine manuals and committed to the establishment of the BCTP for division and corps commanders. He was uniquely qualified to be Army Chief.

Soon after he took over that position, Vuono laid out a vision for the Army. At its core is what he called a "trained and ready Army" (exactly what the Goldwater-Nichols Act envisioned the service departments should have). He charged the Army with keeping its eye on balancing investments and energies among six imperatives: training, force modernization, war-winning doctrine, quality soldiers, "leader development" (his term), and force structure — with the right mix of heavy, light, and special operating forces to fulfill missions of the CINCs.

Each of these six imperatives was important, but it was in training and leader development that Vuono was to leave his greatest legacy.

Vuono was long convinced that if leaders successfully grew other leaders, then that was their finest gift to succeeding Army generations — thus "leader development." Such development was a commander's responsibility, not a staff responsibility of the Department of the Army Chief for Personnel. It had to be related to the way the Army fought. Thus, he wanted leader development institutionalized at the Army's senior tactical war-fighting school at Fort Leavenworth. As we have already seen, that came to be embedded in a three-level approach: formal Army schooling, each level featuring standards that officers had to pass before they could move along to the next stage in their career; practical experience serving in units at various levels of responsibility, including the rigorous experiences of the NTC, JRTC, and BCTP; and self-development through private study, reading, and learning from others.

Vuono's chief training focus was in a rigorous combat simulation system — hands-on performance-oriented training. Believing that all training short of war was simulation, he had the Army combine computer-assisted simulations and live field maneuvers to give leaders and combat staffs the rigors of simulated combat. For the first time in the Army's history, every commander — from the individual tank commander on his crew-qualification Table VIII to the corps commander on his BCTP WARFIGHTER exercise — had to undergo a rigorous and stressful combat exercise. Every exercise was externally evaluated and followed by a series of AARs. Everyone had to perform to standard.

Vuono also had training practices codified into training doctrine. Long a believer that mission focus for wartime missions should drive training, he set out to write it into a manual, which was called FM 25-100.

FM 25-100 coined the term Mission-Essential Task List (METL). METL is a simple concept. A commander examines the wartime mission the theater commander has assigned him and from it determines the tasks necessary for its execution. Thus: Mission-Essential Tasks. Then he has his unit train for these tasks, which are then broken down further by echelon of command, down to individual tasks for soldiers. When FM 25-100 was in preparation, Vuono conducted a series of senior leader training conferences throughout the Army, personally involving other commanders in the composition of the manual. When that one was finished, he set about to produce a second manual, called FM 25-101, which was to provide further details for lower tactical echelons. Together, these standardized the Army's approach to training in schools and on the field.

As the end of the Cold War approached, Vuono set down three essential tasks for the Army during the transition years to a new strategic era:

• To win the wars the Army was called on to fight;

• To maintain readiness in the force not associated with those operations (remembering the deplorable state of readiness of our forces in Europe as they were systematically drawn down to fight in Vietnam);

• And to remain balanced in the six imperatives as the Army reshaped itself from its Cold War strength of over 1 million active and Reserve component strength to new levels.

GENERATIONS

Continuity of focus has been indispensable to the Army's recovery from Vietnam — a focus on training and readiness and the warrior spirit, while maintaining the ability to adapt as the strategic environment and resource availability changed. Such continuity was the consequence of the experience of four generations of leaders, each generation passing the torch to the next.

In the words of General Carl Vuono, the Army "cannot afford a generation that does not have that focus." Every Army generation must "bring along a cadre of people who feel as strongly" about mission focus and staying trained and ready. For Vuono and all the generations of Army leaders, there could be no compromise.

The first generation was that of World War II combat leaders, with Korean War combat experience. These men were the commanders of divisions and higher echelons in Vietnam: Westmoreland, Abrams, Weyand, DePuy, Kerwin, Davison, Kroesen.

The second generation's entire service was in the Cold War. They either had combat experience in Korea; or they'd commanded at battalion or brigade level in Vietnam; and they'd been brigade, division, or corps commanders in the 1970s: Rogers, Meyer, Wickham, Starry, Otis, Cavazos, Richardson, Brown, Keith, Shoemaker, Gorman.

The third generation did command battalions in Vietnam, and had colonel-level command in the 1970s: Vuono, Thurman, Merritt, Lindsay, and Grange.

The fourth generation had Vietnam combat experience at company-grade and junior-field-grade levels; and in the Army of the 1970s, they had battalion-level command, from which vantage point they could see firsthand the Army's low points. These men would witness the end of the Cold War, as well as the Army's successes in Just Cause and Desert Storm: Powell, Sullivan, Reimer, Saint, Stiner, RisCassi, Burba, Franks, Joulwan, Luck, Griffith, Peay, Tilelli.

Continuity in focus and leadership from those who "grew up right" was vital to Army work from the early 1970s to Desert Storm. Neither the U.S. Army nor the nation could afford a "generation gap."

These four generations of soldiers and civilians were motivated by a sense of duty and commitment to the nation. There were no quick fixes. Success was not assured. It was not the result of a single piece of legislation. There were ups and downs, successes and reversals, tensions and disagreements. Factions argued for their positions, and sometimes went too far in one direction, and the right solution had to be found through experimentation. Yet all these were only arguments over ways to reach the ends. The ends were always the same: a combat-ready Army ready to win the first battle of the next war.

And in the end, it got done. That it did so was the result of quality people, vision, hard work, and perseverance in the face of resistance and obstacles — the very same characteristics that win on the battlefield. It was a successful partnership among the Congress, the Army, the Executive Branch, and the American people. It was a good-news story for America.

FRED FRANKS—1972–1989

As the Army was starting its road back, so was Fred Franks — from the depths of Valley Forge to the desert victory in southwest Asia. It took him to schools, to staff work, and to commands where he was given every opportunity to compete and to learn and grow. He was to take his place with his peers among the fourth generation, which had had the opportunity to "grow up right," though for Franks personally there would be an added challenge.

— At the Armed Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia, after he left Valley Forge in 1972, Franks learned joint warfare — the combining under one mission and focus of elements of more than one military service; for example, units from the Army, Navy, and Air Force.

There he would also learn for the first time how readily he was accepted back into the family of the military. There was no mention of his amputee condition; instead he was accepted for what he could do. He coached a slow-pitch softball team and played himself, played volleyball as well, and threw himself into a rigorous regimen of physical conditioning, pushing himself to see if he could still compete. There he would also hear from his Navy and Air Force classmates of their Vietnam battles in the air over North Vietnam and the courage that took. It would heighten his own feelings for those who had served in Vietnam.

— From the time he left the Armed Forces Staff College until June 1975, Franks was on the staff at the Department of the Army and then was military assistant to three Army undersecretaries. While he was on the Department of the Army staff, he worked again for General Donn Starry, and he met Colonel Dick Cavazos for the first time. Both assignments gave him a great appreciation for the enormous challenges involved in rebuilding the Army. From there came command of a cavalry squadron in the 3rd ACR in June 1975. That tour was the true turning point for Franks. That the U.S. Army would take the risk to allow him to command a cavalry squadron only heightened his commitment. When he left that post a year and a half later, he would say, "I felt whole again as a man and as a soldier. The soldiers and leaders on the field in front of me were responsible for that. We had been through a lot together and I had grown as a leader. I knew that with their help I had passed my own test as an armored cavalry commander. I would be forever grateful and would never forget our service together and that close cavalry brotherhood."

Late in 1976, six months before he attended the National War College, Franks took part in what was called the Tank Force Management Group. The concept behind it was simple: though the numbers of the U.S. armor force are small, their contributions on the battlefield are huge. But at that time, the armor force needed a lot of work in order to realize that potential. The TFMG's mission was to focus its attention in an armor context on areas such as doctrine, training, material improvements, and soldier quality. In other words, the group was a microcosm for the work the entire Army was trying to do after the sharp lessons of the 1973 Mideast War.

At the TFMG, Franks came to his first realization about how far the Army needed to go before it could actually fight and win on the kind of battlefield it had seen in the Mideast. If the armor — the Army's heaviest punch — needed the intensive effort he and the others were putting in at TFMG, what kind of shape was the rest of the Army in?

Later, during the 1977-78 school year, he studied strategic and national security issues with students from the other services and from civilian agencies of the government at the National War College at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C. That year included intense studies of the Middle East, such as a trip in which he personally saw the 1973 battlefields with both Israeli and Egyptian escorts.

In the summer of 1978, Franks began his first stint at TRADOC, under General Starry and then under General Otis. He was there for over three years, working to develop his, and the Army's, ideas about current and future land warfare (with the emphasis on maneuver warfare). There was — additionally — a practical side: during his first eighteen months at TRADOC, he directed an office under Major General Carl Vuono that wrote requirements for future weapons systems, watched over systems already in development to make sure they got through all their decision gates on the way to procurement, and made sure the Army was able to rapidly assimilate these new and improved weapons systems in a way that increased combat power. Again, the mix of ideas and practice that so characterized his Army career. Here also was another splendid window for viewing the Army's rebirth.

From the other side of the desk (from 1985 to 1987), now-Major General Franks was deputy commandant of the Command and General Staff College (CGSC) at Fort Leavenworth. As deputy commandant, Franks not only ran the college on a day-to-day basis but set long-term policy goals. It was like being chancellor and president all rolled into one.

He was glad to be there, for it was both the intellectual center for tactical thought and a great crossroads of the Army. He liked to teach and to throw ideas around in discussions about the profession of arms: ideas about command, war fighting, maneuver, fighting deep, team building, soldiers… ideas that have appeared in many guises throughout this book.

At West Point and afterward, he did the normal professional reading and liked to experiment with new ideas and innovations. He realized how much personal study and reading it took to be a serious, professional soldier, and was further inspired by the examples of soldiers such as Creighton Abrams, Bill DePuy, and Donn Starry. These men linked hard-nosed, professional soldiering with forward-looking ideas; and, so armed, they helped to begin to lead the Army back from Vietnam.

Later, when Franks commanded the 11th ACR, General Bo Williams paid him a compliment that has stayed with him since: "You're a soldier with ideas," Williams told him, "but you're also a very practical soldier, who always figures out how to execute the ideas before you raise them."

On Christmas Eve, 1986, while Franks was deputy commandant of CGSC, he learned that he was to be appointed the first J7 on the Joint Staff. The Goldwater-Nichols Act required generals to have joint-duty experience before they could become a CINC or serve as a general in a joint assignment. Since Franks was what was called a "joint-duty lacker," he needed such an assignment. He was not, however, thrilled to take this new job. Now at age fifty, he was, in fact, devastated to leave CGSC in the middle of the school year to be going to a staff assignment in the Pentagon.

But of course he went, because that's what soldiers do.

As J7, his official title was director of operational plans and interoperability. That meant that he and his new staff were responsible for the worldwide war plans of all the Unified Commands and for promoting improved interoperability among all the uniformed services. Or, more simply, his job was to make sure that in their joint missions, the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines worked well together… Not easy. It was three months after enactment of Goldwater-Nichols, and the climate was hostile. The services did not like what was happening to their authority, and Franks was a junior major general on a three-star staff who was trying to start up a new agency.

At that time, there was no joint doctrine, joint doctrine program, or joint requirements system. There also was no lessons-learned system — to learn from mistakes so that corrective action could be taken next time. There was a joint exercise program, but it had no basis in mission tasks. In other words, there was no system for analyzing worldwide missions, then determining joint tasks, and then setting up an exercise program to practice those tasks.

In other words, his goal was to form a kind of joint equivalent of the Army's TRADOC.

That didn't happen completely, but Franks and his staff did have some successes — coming up, for example, with a means to analyze joint Mission-Essential Tasks, which became the basis for the yearly joint exercise programs; beginning a joint doctrine program; and publishing the first joint doctrine. They also helped General Bob Herres establish the Joint Requirements Oversight Council to better define new systems requirements that fit more than one service.

In the spring of 1988, General Vuono managed to get a waiver for Franks that asserted he was now "joint qualified" and so rescued Franks from what should have been a three-year tour of duty. Franks was now to assume command of the 1st Armored Division in the middle of July, and a year later he would become a lieutenant general commander of VII Corps. It was in that position that he would encounter the greatest challenge of his life.

If we can begin to understand what he and the Army went through in the deserts of Iraq and Kuwait from 24 to 28 February 1991, however, we will first have to understand one thing.

If Fred Franks can be said to have a single focus, it's armored cavalry … always the cavalry: maneuver, not just force, but moving force, hitting from sometimes unexpected directions. He has spent a lifetime growing and developing his knowledge and skills in maneuver warfare, and that is what brought him through Desert Storm. And that is what we come to now: the art of maneuver warfare.