by Tom Clancy
During the process of choosing nominees to fill both three- and four-star nominations, it is common practice for the serving four-star Army generals to make recommendations to the Army Chief. The chief of staff then takes the recommendations under advisement, combines it with his own counsel, and makes his recommendations to the Army Secretary, the senior civilian in the Department of the Army (in order to strictly observe the letter and spirit of civilian control of the military, the final approving authority at each step is the senior civilian in the Executive Branch). Next, the nominations are reviewed by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and approved or rejected by the Secretary of Defense. If the Secretary okays them, they are sent to the President for his approval. Finally, just as he would for any senior executive position, the President offers the nomination to the Senate for confirmation.
For Franks, the principals involved in his selection were Army Chief Gordon Sullivan, Army Secretary Mike Stone (who died in 1995; Stone was a successful businessman, a public servant of long standing who loved the Army), General Colin Powell, and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney.
Much later, Franks learned from Carl Vuono that it was he who had recommended him to Sullivan. Since Sullivan was about to become chief and needed his own team, however, the choice had to be his.
"I didn't pick you because the Army did not have any alternatives," Vuono added. "I recommended you because — based on your recent experience in Desert Storm, your two previous tours of duty in TRADOC, and your command of Seventh Army Training Command in Germany — you were the best choice for the times TRADOC and the Army were about to enter."
DEPARTURE
Leaving VII Corps was not easy. Leaving any command is not easy, but this one was especially hard, since everyone in the corps had been to war together. They had been family on the battlefield, and bonds formed there are forever. Franks went around the corps to say his good-byes, trying as best he could to keep everything as low-key as possible. But at the assembly on the parade-athletic field at Kelly Barracks on 31 July, there was a lot of emotion. "Soldiering with you has been the highlight of my life," Franks told them. "What we have done, we have done as a team. We will miss you all." It had been less than two years since August 1989, when he had taken the VII Corps colors as commander. Together, he and the corps had seen the fall of the Wall and the tearing apart of the Iron Curtain, the end of the Cold War, deployment and victory in the Gulf, and now this. It was a lot to absorb.
After the ceremony, Franks and Denise left Stuttgart.
When Lieutenant General Mike Spigelmire assumed command of VII Corps two weeks later, he had an unpleasant task before him, and in March 1992, in a ceremony in Stuttgart a little more than a year after the biggest armor attack in the history of the U.S. Army, VII Corps was inactivated and its battle colors cased (they are now on permanent display at SAMS at Fort Leavenworth). The Army leadership (with strong dissent from Fred Franks) had decided to keep V Corps as its residual corps in Germany. Frankfurt, not Stuttgart, was to be the headquarters. (Three years later, the V Corps HQ was moved from Frankfurt to Heidelberg. Kelly Barracks, former home of VII Corps, remains open as part of European Command.)
On Tuesday morning, 7 August, at 1000 hours, General Sullivan promoted Franks to four-star general in a small conference room in the Pentagon. The Senate had confirmed him late Friday afternoon. Denise and a few former JAYHAWKS from VII Corps who worked in the Pentagon were there; and Denise helped General Sullivan pin on the fourth star.
TRADOC
TRADOC was a sizable responsibility.
When TRADOC had been activated as a major U.S. Army command in June 1973, it had been a unique organizational concept, with no precedent in the U.S. Army or in any armies around the world.[57] As we have seen in previous chapters, TRADOC had two major responsibilities: to be the architect of the future army, and to prepare the army for war.
First, TRADOC determines the requirements for fighting in the future. To accomplish that aim, it makes sure that
• the Army continues to adapt and change to meet future national security demands as part of a joint military team;
• in the future the Army is as relevant and decisive a force as it is in the present;
• growth is coherent; in other words, that doctrine, training, organizational design, leader development, and materiel requirements for the Department of the Army are defined and integrated so that they all come together in time and investment — with particular attention paid to the requirements of individual soldiers to gain combat power.
Second, TRADOC is responsible for training standards across the Army, and it operates the Army's vast training and leader development school system — what Franks likes to call the nation's "Land Warfare University." With over 350,000 students annually; real estate the size of Puerto Rico; a faculty of over 11,000; ROTC and JROTC in close to 1,500 high schools, colleges, and universities throughout America; and with Education Board approval to award master's degrees, this is a university by any measure.
To accomplish these missions, TRADOC has an annual budget of over $2 billion; it has civilian and military manpower levels of close to 60,000; and it operates eighteen major installations (like the rest of the Army, it has been reduced over 30 percent in the past eight years). Each major installation and associated military school or individual training base (Fort Knox, Fort Benning, Fort Sill, Fort Jackson, Fort Leonard Wood, etc.) is commanded by a major general. In addition to the four-star commander, there are two three-star deputies, one[58] at the HQ at Fort Monroe, Virginia, and one at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, who is also commandant of the Army's Command and General Staff College and supervises all training in TRADOC.
As the new Army Chief, Gordon Sullivan saw the coming years as a time of rapid transition for the U.S. Army. The Cold War was over and won. There had been victories in both Panama and the Persian Gulf. There was a clamor for a "peace dividend." Sullivan and Franks were both aware that we had gone through similar periods many times in our history, between World War II and Korea, for example. During such times, in the words of General Colin Powell, we "screwed it up." In July 1990, when speaking to veterans of Task Force Smith, the first U.S. combat unit into Korea in 1950, Army Chief General Carl Vuono had said, "Never again can we allow our soldiers in America's Army to march into battle without the weapons and training essential to their survival and victory." This thought of unpreparedness for the next war haunted Army leaders and propelled a sense of urgency to prevent it. Sullivan's challenge to the Army was "to break the mold," to make the transition different this time.
Most of the transition was physical: the Army had to reduce manpower levels by 30 percent from Cold War levels, with significant reductions in the resources available for modernization and for investments in the future. As a major commander, Fred Franks not only would have to live within these new resource levels, but also look for ways to accomplish the TRADOC mission that were different from what had been done in the past.
But the Army would also have to make the transition from Cold War to post-Cold War in the area of ideas — or doctrine. Like General Vuono before him, Sullivan put great emphasis on keeping the Army trained and ready to fulfill its current responsibilities, while it adapted for the future, and doctrine (as Sullivan put it in a letter to Franks in July 1991) had to be the Army's "engine of change." In other words, the Army had to continue to revise its basic operational manual, the 100-5.
The Army had to continue to be able to adjust and adapt rapidly. This also seemed to be what the nation expected, given the uncertain nature of the new international security scene.
During his four years as Army Chief, Sullivan succeeded in reshaping the Army from twenty-eight active and National Guard divisions to eighteen. Meanwhile, there could be no time-outs from operational commitments. On the contrary, during that same period, the Army saw its operational commitments grow by 300 percent over what they had been during the Cold War. U.S. Army units found themselves in sout
h Florida repairing hurricane damage, in Somalia on humanitarian missions, in Haiti restoring democracy, back in Kuwait to deter Iraqi aggression, and in Bosnia to enforce a peace agreement. At the same time, the Army was withdrawing over 160,000 troops and twice that many families from Europe, and closing over 600 installations overseas. This was a monstrously difficult job. Success was not preordained. In fact, no corporation in America has ever downsized and reorganized as well or as quickly as the U.S. Army had in those few short years.
It was Fred Franks's and TRADOC's job not only to lead the intellectual change in ideas and in doctrine that would ensure that the Army could quickly adapt to the new strategic situation, but to lay the groundwork for the changes needed to meet the requirements of the first two decades of the twenty-first century.
Franks and Gordon Sullivan had several things in common. They had both "grown up right," as General Vuono liked to put it, and that gave them a leg up (an expression Franks uses with a smile) as they worked together. They both had been in tanks and cavalry and had known each other for their entire professional lives. When Franks had commanded the Blackhorse in Fulda, Sullivan had been 3rd AD chief of staff (after commanding a brigade in 3rd AD). They both liked ideas, they liked to conceptualize and brainstorm, and they talked frequently, often long into the night. Now and again, Franks and Sullivan took off together to smoke cigars and fish in the lower Chesapeake in Franks's newly purchased twenty-foot Shamrock boat, the JAYHAWK. And each Labor Day weekend, during the three years Franks was at TRADOC, Sullivan and his wife, Gay, assembled a few families at Fort Story so that they might enjoy one another's company and talk Army and national security business.
ENGINE OF CHANGE
Franks had seen for himself that, while it was absolutely necessary, it wasn't easy to stay ahead of the curve. He was reminded of that every day at his own headquarters at Fort Monroe, Virginia. Monroe was the largest stonemasonry fortress in the United States, yet it had been built after the fact — after the British had sailed into the harbor during the War of 1812 and destroyed Hampton.
When Fred Franks assumed command of TRADOC from General John Foss, he knew that he and his team had to be the agents of change, yet he also knew that the prevailing attitude in many places was, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." The Army had just come off three huge successes in the Cold War, Panama, and the Gulf. Why not leave everything else alone and just get through this downsizing period without breaking the Army?
After the victory in Desert Storm had demonstrated the value of the AirLand Battle doctrine, Franks was one of the leaders to call attention to that success. Now here he was, moving away from it into new territory.
It's always easier to make physical change in the Army than to change ideas. Though it might take a lot of work to convert a tank battalion from M60A3 tanks to M1s, you won't encounter much resistance to it.
Changing ideas is harder. "The only thing harder than getting a new idea into a military mind," Liddell-Hart wrote, "is getting the old one out." The great military historian Alfred Thayer Mahan said very close to the same thing about a hundred years ago: "An improvement of weapons is due to the energy of one or two men, while changes in tactics" — that is, in doctrine—"have to overcome the inertia of a conservative class. History shows that it is vain to hope that military men generally will be at pains to do this, but that the one who does will go into battle with great advantage." This is not surprising… or even a bad thing. It is a healthy skepticism, if it is kept in balance. You have to expect resistance to ideas that threaten known ways of doing things — and especially if those ways are successful. New ideas are unproven on the battlefield.
At times, new and revolutionary war-fighting ideas have been assimilated rapidly, for example, the U.S. Marine Corps's development of amphibious doctrine in the 1930s; the U.S. Navy's adoption of the aircraft carrier; and the U.S. Army's development of air assault, air mobility, and the use of rotary-wing aviation in firing rockets and antitank munitions.
There have also been blind spots: In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Army's long attachment to horse cavalry and its policy of tanks in support of infantry held back the development of mechanized warfare. Later, the Navy had its battleship advocates, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that aircraft made battleships obsolete. And the Air Force's strategic bomber theorists still persist in believing that wars can be won from the air alone.
People often dream of a super-weapon that will guarantee victory on the battlefield. Super-weapons make for nice dreams, and sometimes for exciting escapist fiction, but it is only rarely that a revolutionary new technology is needed to win in land battles. Rather, victory usually comes from adapting existing technology to particular advantages on the battlefield. The ways in which you combine that technology and your organizations to fight and to win is another way of saying doctrine. Earlier in the book, we saw that maneuver warfare is dominated more by ideas than by technology. Indeed, in 1940, the French and the Germans had the same technology. They both had airplanes, tanks, self-propelled artillery, and radio. But as Colonel Bob Doughty points out in his book, Seeds of Disaster, the Germans got the doctrine right, and the French got it wrong. Their soldiers fought well but their leadership had the wrong war-fighting ideas. It is an instructive period.
Again, the Army is a conservative institution, and you want that. They deal in life-and-death decisions. In no other profession is the penalty for being completely wrong so severe and lasting. The price for failure to prepare is not loss of revenue in the marketplace, it is loss of your most precious resource, your soldiers. That was demonstrated in the American Civil War, when leaders used Napoleonic methods of attack in the face of rifles that were ten times more accurate than when the tactics had been devised. The result: noble failures such as Pickett's charge at Gettysburg. Later, in World War I, leaders continued to use masses of soldiers to gain combat power and failed to win because of machine guns and devastating artillery. The challenge for TRADOC was to prevent something similar to that from happening the next year… or in 2003 or 2010.
Ideas lead change. If you want to influence the future, you have to have ideas about the future. In any campaign — in any venture — success begins with a clear vision of where you want to go and what you want to do. In Fred Franks's words: "How you think about the future determines what you think about the future and what you ultimately do about the future." Or, as Gordon Sullivan put it, "The intellectual leads the physical."
That's easier to say than to do. Leading with ideas is damned difficult. It is hard to provide new vision and focus; it is harder still to shake off old paradigms. It's a surprising paradox that the profession that takes on the greatest form of chaos possible — war — is at times so tied to order and fixed paradigms. This doubtless comes from trying to impose order on that battlefield chaos.
Thus, in the Army of 1991, there was something of a tension for some between what was needed to meet present-day training demands and what had to be done to meet the needs of the future. It was a healthy tension, but it was there.
As Franks sees it, organizations change for three reasons:
• they are out in front and want to stay there;
• they are about to be overcome by the competition and have to change in order to stay competitive;
• they have already been overcome, and they must change in order to compete and survive.
The Army was in the first category. Of course, not all periods require modifications. You have to watch out not to bring about change for change's sake… or to make them simply in order to leave your imprint on the organization, or to leave a "legacy." That attitude is dangerous. Sometimes the best a senior leader can do is to raise standards of current operating procedures.
And yet, the Army could not ignore the future. How would the next war be fought? Not to be ready was to invite failure, which could take many forms, from the loss of a war (seriously unlikely) to the loss of battles, or worse, humiliating defeats a
nd 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.