Into the Storm: On the Ground in Iraq sic-1 Read online

  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 Comman
d 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.