The Generals

by Thomas E. Ricks

  The Army set out to create its own version of this realistic training with the new National Training Center (NTC) at Fort Irwin, in the high Mojave Desert of California. The thousand-square-mile center, which would finally open in 1980, after DePuy retired, confronted visiting units with a smart, wily, live enemy, “the Opposition Force.” Rather than have “who won” decided in arguments afterward, the forces were equipped with laser guns and receptors, which fairly accurately detected who had shot first and best, making the exercises more realistic. In addition, “observer-controllers” monitored the battlefield and gave commanders tough reviews after each round of maneuvers. By coincidence, the new training center opened just as the Army, after much hard work, began to attract smarter, more disciplined volunteers. Not only did the center improve the skills of soldiers, but the tough training gave platoons, companies, and battalions new confidence in themselves and their leaders. After the 1991 Gulf War, it would be commonplace for soldiers to report that the fighting they had seen had not been as hard as going through maneuvers at the National Training Center.

  DePuy also correctly read the trend in military operations toward more sophisticated weaponry, and the implications of that for raising and training a force. This was not a foregone conclusion. At the time, there was a small but influential movement in Congress and among some defense intellectuals and journalists for equipping the military with large numbers of smaller, less expensive weapons. DePuy, seeming to anticipate the coming of computerized warfare, moved in the opposite direction. There would need to be a higher ratio of leaders to troops, he concluded, with smaller units and more intense training. “We cannot have the best man on a $200 typewriter while a less-qualified soldier operates a million-dollar tank,” he wrote in 1978. He threw his institutional weight behind the development of five new weapons systems: the Abrams tank, the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, the Patriot antiaircraft system, the Apache attack helicopter, and the Black Hawk transport helicopter. They were accompanied by a revolution in the weapons used by the other services, with, among other advances, precision-guided munitions, stealthy fighters and bombers, and unmanned aircraft for both reconnaissance and strike missions. James Kitfield, author of the best book on the post-Vietnam military, also credits DePuy with helping to create the Army’s semi-secret Delta Force, its elite Special Operations counterterror unit.

  This is how David Barno, a general who served in the Army in the late twentieth century and commanded in the war in Afghanistan in 2004–5, summarized the post-Vietnam reconstruction of the Army:

  It not only ensured that the best weapons systems for conventional war against the Soviets got top priority, but it also matched them with organizational changes to optimize their performance in battle (a new infantry and armor battalion organization), a rigorous self-critical training methodology (including massive free-play armored force-on-force laser battles), advanced ranges and training simulators for mechanized warfare, and perhaps most importantly, the recruitment and leadership of extraordinarily high quality personnel who were bright, motivated, and superbly trained to make best use of the emerging new concepts and high-tech equipment being fielded. These innovations that grew out of the massive infusion of resources in the 1980s remain the cornerstone of the Army as an institution today. Their long-term influence on Army cultural and institutional preferences cannot be overstated.

  Out at Fort Leavenworth, Maj. Gen. John Cushman also was thinking about rebuilding the Army. Cushman had grown up in the interwar Army: He was born in China in 1921 and lived there when his father was a captain in the 15th Infantry Regiment, serving as adjutant under the regimental executive officer, George Marshall, and also serving alongside another young officer, Matthew Ridgway.

  In the early 1970s, Cushman commanded the 101st Division when it came home from Vietnam. From that post he moved to take command at Leavenworth in 1973. There, he looked for ways to complement DePuy’s tactical rebuilding with an ethical and intellectual rejuvenation. Despite the findings of the 1970 Army War College study that the Army’s professional ethic had been badly eroded, ethics were still considered primarily the domain of the Army’s Chaplain Corps, not an influential group. In leading the Army’s Command and General Staff College at Leavenworth, Cushman was struck by how much students craved discussions of “basic questions such as honesty, candor, and the freedom to fail.” His ensuing sessions with them only intensified their interest, so in March 1974 he held his first symposium on officer responsibility with students and about one hundred guests, including fifteen generals. He began by posing a series of questions about how to raise standards and create an environment of integrity, and the role of generals in making that environment routine. One of the speakers was Lt. Gen. Peers, who had investigated the leadership failures surrounding the My Lai massacre.

  Generals who were accustomed to deference from officers far junior to them were taken aback at the free-flying atmosphere at the Leavenworth symposium. “It was tough, direct, and pointed and heated—and some of those generals got hurt—bad,” recalled Col. Dandridge Malone.

  One officer stood to talk about “dishonest demands coming down, dishonest reports going up.”

  “I never tolerated that in my division,” responded one of the generals.

  “I was in your division,” the younger officer said.

  “Lock your heels,” the general said, using an abrupt phrase for ordering a subordinate to come to attention to prepare for an upbraiding.

  Brig. Gen. Morris Brady, in a memorandum summarizing the proceedings of the symposium, wrote that the feeling among the younger officers was that “the more senior an officer is, the more likely it is that he has compromised his integrity in order to achieve success. . . . From the students’ perspective, we have created an environment that encourages professional immorality.”

  In the following days, Gen. Abrams began hearing complaints and sent a query: “What the hell happened out there at Leavenworth?” He eventually was persuaded that passion about ethics was a positive sign.

  Others were even less enthusiastic about Cushman’s initiative than Abrams, most notably William DePuy, to whom Cushman reported. Both men were described by others as stubborn and brilliant, but DePuy, by then one of the most powerful generals in the Army, also was described by some as determined to run things his way. He “did not want a dialogue he could not control,” Maj. Paul Herbert concluded in an Army monograph. What’s more, the two generals had differences dating back a decade, over the approach DePuy had devised to fight in Vietnam. As Cushman would put it,

  In 1964–67 I had taken exception to Bill DePuy’s approach to fighting in Vietnam, having heard enough for me to believe that both as General Westmoreland’s J-3 and then as division commander he had misunderstood the nature of the war, downrating pacification and emphasizing massive search and destroy operations by U.S. forces, while allowing those to shunt aside ARVN [Army of the Republic of Vietnam] troops and to take insufficient note of province and local forces and their advisors who were in the closest touch with the people.

  In 1974, the fundamental difference between the two men, as Cushman saw it, was that DePuy was teaching the Army how to fight, while Cushman was complementing that work by teaching Army officers how to think about fighting. Both are necessary, but DePuy seemed to believe that he did not have the resources for both and that the first would have to take priority. He made it clear that he was not interested in sponsoring introspective studies of Army professional issues. He told his subordinate commanders that he had seen “the Army War College being thrown into lots of projects which really didn’t inspire me much. These projects included surveys of what made lieutenant colonels unhappy, and others which I felt stirred up more bloody problems than they solved.” When he visited Leavenworth, he undercut Cushman’s educational efforts, telling the students at one point, “All I want from this class is ten battalion commanders.”

  DeP
uy was aware of his critics, who muttered that his reforms produced commanders who did not understand war. As the general himself later recalled, “They said that DePuy is going to cause a lacuna which is going to create a whole generation of idiots who all know how to clean a rifle but who don’t know ‘why’ we have an Army. I didn’t lose a lot of sleep over that because we do have a system that begins to answer the question of how to train an officer.” This “lacuna” is, of course, close to what happened two decades later as the generation of astrategic officers trained under DePuy became the generals fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan—most notably Tommy R. Franks and Ricardo Sanchez—but no one could have known that back in the 1970s when DePuy mounted this defense of his efforts.

  DePuy fired off a series of letters to Cushman, warning that he did not like Cushman’s contemplative direction at Leavenworth. As Abrams succumbed to his cancer, he was less able to shield Cushman from DePuy, who did not have a lot of time for working out his differences with subordinates. “Nice warm human relationships are satisfying and fun, but they are not the purpose of an Army,” he instructed other senior officers at Fort Benning the same year that he was confronting Cushman.

  A year later, in April 1975, Cushman convened a second symposium on ethics and leadership. It was held at Leavenworth at an anguishing moment, just as the North Vietnamese tanks rolled into Saigon and the last American helicopters lifted off the roofs of U.S. government installations there. Cushman ended the symposium with a prayer for all those who had suffered in Vietnam. He asked that those present “be examples of the soldierly virtues.” Then he looked up and said to the hundreds of assembled officers, “Now just go quietly out of here.” It was a fitting emotional end to America’s long, misbegotten war in Southeast Asia.

  • • •

  DePuy clashed even more with Cushman over the other part of his command: doctrine. Updating the Army’s capstone manual, then known as “FM 100-5: Operations,” was traditionally the job of the commander at Fort Leavenworth and the handful of trusted subordinates to whom he delegated the actual work of drafting.

  Their fundamental philosophical differences made a clash between the two generals inevitable. It began during the drafting of the operations manual. “Major General Cushman believed that an organization worked best when liberated, to the degree possible, from the artificial constraints placed on the tremendous creative potential of the group,” wrote Maj. Herbert in his history of the FM 100-5 manual during this time. “General DePuy believed that real initiative was rare in human beings and that an organization functioned best when its members were frequently told in simple terms what to do.” DePuy’s loyalists, such as Gen. Donn Starry, who would succeed him at TRADOC, thought Cushman was deeply in the wrong. “General Jack Cushman at Leavenworth led the surge of resentment about the 1976 edition of FM 100-5—Active Defense,” Starry said in his oral history. “I have characterized that many times as probably the greatest act of institutional and individual disloyalty I have ever had the chance to observe.”

  As was probably also inevitable, DePuy rejected the draft Cushman had delivered and took over the job himself. DePuy was preparing for a big war. “Don’t get too lofty or philosophical,” he admonished the officers he picked to work with him on the manual. “Wars are won by draftees and reserve officers. Write so they can understand.”

  In 1976, DePuy published the edition of the manual that quickly became known as the “Active Defense” version. It provoked a huge and healthy debate inside the Army. While his version was eventually repudiated, and replaced in 1982 by the “AirLand Battle” edition of FM 100-5, he succeeded in elevating the role of doctrine itself and so revitalized thinking in the Army about its core missions. In the second half of the 1970s, Military Review, one of the Army’s leading professional journals, would carry more than eighty articles on aspects of the new manual. DePuy made the drafting of doctrine—once considered drone work for second-rate midcareer staffers—a core function, the business of generals. This new emphasis made the Army, as an institution, mull basic strategic questions: Who are we? What are we trying to do? How are we to do it—that is, how should we fight? Ironically, while repudiating Cushman personally, DePuy had, to a degree, moved the Army into precisely the realm of thinking he had shunned but that Cushman had advocated.

  By spotlighting doctrine, DePuy also helped wrest control of the strategic discussion back from civilians, who had become dominant in that sphere during the 1950s as nuclear weaponry grew to overshadow all other questions of warfare. As historian and strategic expert Hew Strachan later put it, in that difficult post-Vietnam recovery phase, “doctrine became one device by which it [the Army] sought to reassert its professional self-worth.”

  But the manual also contained deep flaws that resulted partly from DePuy’s feud with Cushman. DePuy had emphasized the “synchronization” of military operations, which he saw as the temporal equivalent of concentrating forces physically. This would prove to be a mixed legacy. Overseen by a master of the battlefield, it was a useful tool, concluded his biographer, retired Army Col. Henry Gole. But in the hands of lesser officers, this approach tended to intensify the Army’s inclination to follow cumbersome procedures that actually undercut combat effectiveness. In the 1991 Gulf War, wrote retired Army Col. Richard Swain, efforts to follow the idea of synchronization, of getting all the parts working together to greater effect, would become “the molasses in the system . . . a drag on opportunism.”

  More important, DePuy’s manual was very much a product of the late Cold War. It emphasized training, which prepares soldiers for the known, far more than education, which prepares them to deal with the unknown. “DePuy wanted USACGSC [the Army’s Command and General Staff College] to train its students to be experts at handling a division in combat,” wrote Maj. Herbert. “Cushman wanted to educate students as well as to train them, to make them think, to enrich them personally and professionally, and to prepare them intellectually for all their years as field grade officers.” DePuy readily conceded that he favored training over education. “We were tactical guys by self-definition and preference,” he said later.

  In truth, both DePuy and Cushman were correct about the necessary focus—DePuy in the short run and Cushman in the long one. DePuy’s approach fit a time when the predictable enemy was the Soviet Union, when even the ground on which a confrontation with the forces of the Warsaw Pact would take place was well known. During the Cold War, some U.S. Army officers stationed in West Germany would take their families for Sunday picnics at the spots near Fulda where they expected to emplace their tanks to face the Red Army. There was little need for generals who were strategic thinkers, because the strategic threat at the time was obvious: It was the Soviet Union. The ways to deal with the Red Army remained fairly constant: Find ways to slow it down while fighting outnumbered, so that artillery, rockets, and aircraft could begin to even the balance by what was called, rather bizarrely, “servicing targets.” “In a very real sense, it was a simple world model from the political-military point of view,” Army Col. Donald Bletz noted in 1974. “The threat was clear, and not only the need for military force but also the nature of that force was clear and broadly accepted.” DePuy’s emphasis on tactical competence was necessary but not sufficient. His approach “courted the dangers of oversimplification, rigidity and impermanence,” noted Herbert.

  Be that as it may, he was in control—and intolerant of other approaches. “Dear Jack,” DePuy wrote to Cushman in October 1975. “As you know, I am deeply concerned about the ability of our colonels and lieutenant colonels to lead their commands in the first battle of the next war.” This was certainly his core concern, and he was determined to yank Cushman away from strategic thinking and ethical philosophizing. So he instructed Cushman to “design a refresher course in tactical leadership” for such officers headed to combat commands. It was as if DePuy had determined that future commanders, as well as Cushman, would take
remedial instruction.

  Cushman’s approach to the manual was influenced by the Vietnam War, which was hardly mentioned in DePuy’s 1976 edition of 100-5. His emphasis on strategic considerations was better for preparing officers for ambiguity, for handling crises involving a less understood foe, perhaps in parts of the world new to Americans and their Army. As Herbert notes, it would have been better if the two men had been able to resolve their differences and give Army officers both what they needed at the time and what they would need in the future. But DePuy and Cushman could not find such a compromise. The result was that, in the 1970s and 1980s, the Army for the most part neglected Cushman’s approach and followed DePuy’s. It produced a generation of officers who tended to be tactically adept, proficient as battalion commanders, but not prepared for senior generalship—especially when the Cold War ended and they faced a series of ambiguous crises. In its twenty-first-century wars, the Army would come to realize it needed leaders comfortable with vague situations, alien cultures, inadequate information, and ill-defined goals. It would have many such soldiers in its ranks, but few in key command positions at its top.

  In the 1940s, Cushman would have likely been removed by DePuy. But this was the 1970s, and even DePuy had become shy of relief. At one point, DePuy told Starry that he had decided to fire Cushman and was traveling to Fort Leavenworth to do so, but, for reasons that are not known, he did not. Instead he gave Cushman a blistering performance review that criticized the Leavenworth commander for failing to follow DePuy’s direction. “General Cushman is a very strong minded individual,” it stated. “It is very difficult to make him truly responsive to guidance, to make him a true member of the team.” But Fred Weyand, by now the Army chief of staff, liked and admired Cushman. Over DePuy’s objection—expressed directly to Weyand—the chief of staff promoted Cushman and sent him to a top Army position in Korea. DePuy would have his revenge: Shortly after Cushman departed for Asia, DePuy canceled the third Leavenworth symposium on ethics, scheduled for April 1976. It is striking today to read the official histories of the early days of the Training and Doctrine Command and see that DePuy looms large on nearly every page, while Cushman almost never appears.