Into the Storm: On the Ground in Iraq

by Tom Clancy

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ENGINE OF CHANGE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  As Franks sees it, organizations change for three reasons:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  IDEAS FOR CHANGE

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

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

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

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

  * threats and unknown dangers,

  * the national military strategy,

  * history and the lessons learned from it,

  * the changing nature of warfare, and

  * technology.

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

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

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

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

  What were some of the other warning lights?

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

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