Chinese attack was legendary.
The general liked the idea and gave the go-ahead, with directions that the center should be austere and the training tough and realistic, with lots of live fire and fieldwork. “I’m going to spend a lot of time out there checking up on Zinni,” he told Colonel Gray. “I better not see rugs on the floor, or troops living in anything but tents.” He was a man after my own heart — a warrior general and not a business manager.
The center proved to be a great success, for several reasons.
First, the assessments were only given to the commanders training there and never to their superiors. So they could test their limits and work on their weaknesses without fear of report cards. (I fought off attempts to use the center to make reportable evaluations on the units training there.) This allowed me to be brutally honest about their shortfalls; and it allowed them to fail and improve.
Second, though my instructors were not always the very best available (and this was deliberate; taking the best guys would have gone down very badly with everybody else), all of them were competent enough to do the job, and I sent them to the best leadership and tactical courses to increase their knowledge and skills. The work for my instructors was hard and demanding and the hours were long, but they loved it.
We also did a great deal of instructor training at the center. I revised the Special Operations[29] courses and further trained my instructors in these specialized skills. To spice up the training for the troops we added courses on survival and adventure training, but we never lost sight of our primary mission, to develop advanced infantry skills in the division units.
As time passed, the shooting qualification scores of troops and units that went through our training skyrocketed upward, and the positive feedback from the division was overwhelming. We even trained the division’s Competition Squads for the annual Marine Corps competition at Quantico, Virginia. The 2nd Division squads were traditionally the doormats in this competition, but the squads we trained that year took the top two honors.
I ran the Infantry Training Center for well over a year — loving every minute of it, learning a great deal, and experimenting with ideas I had wanted to try ever since Vietnam. Some worked and some didn’t; but the chance to concentrate on small-unit tactics, weapons, environmental operations, and combat leadership training was invaluable.
Later on, the Marines addressed the problem of tactical evaluation of units beyond the company level. Their eventual solution came from an Army program.
After Vietnam, all the services faced serious problems, but, of all the services, the Army had the longest way to go; they needed the most radical reforms. To their credit, they did what they had to do and did it superbly.
One of their biggest and most enduring reforms was to create the Battle Command Training Program (BCTP), which allows them to tactically evaluate unit and command performance all the way up to the corps level. The idea is to train people by letting them see how and where they make wrong decisions or wrong moves, and to see how they can more reliably make the right choices. The program is not used as a measure for promotion, or as a hammer to beat people with. But it is tough. A three-star Army general at the corps level goes through a battle test and an evaluation; and it’s cold and pointed, and the evaluators don’t want to hear any gripes, bitches, or excuses. That’s it.
The first time I observed a BCTP exercise, a three-star general screwed up somehow, and admitted it without excuses. “Yeah, I screwed up,” he said. “I should have made a different choice.”
This was a sign of a remarkable transformation.
When the Marine Corps saw how well the BCTPs worked, we grabbed onto the idea and developed a similar program, now called “the Marine Air Ground Task Force Staff Training Program” (MSTP). We found a site for large-scale combined arms field exercises at Twentynine Palms in California where battalion units and larger get tested and evaluated. (The Army does the same thing not far from there at the NTC — National Training Center.) And we developed a Marine Corps Combat Readiness Evaluation System (MCRES) that provided unit and individual standards and a test for our units preparing to deploy.
As 1974 rolled around, Tony Zinni had been a captain for eight years and a company-grade officer for over nine. Early that year, he was selected for major, but the actual promotion was a long time coming, since he was very junior on the list. Since majors generally got staff jobs, he knew that his wonderful and exciting times “in the field” and “with the troops” were coming to an end. Since Marine advisers were still operating in Vietnam, he had dreams of still getting back to the advisory unit… yet he knew that possibility was becoming ever more remote.
Barring that, he hoped to teach tactics again at Quantico. But that did not happen. Toward the end of the year, he was ordered to Marine Corps Headquarters in Washington, D.C., to the Manpower Department, where he became the retention and release officer and later the plans officer of the Officer Assignment Branch. He couldn’t imagine a worse fate.
Zinni doesn’t like Washington — doesn’t like the high concentration of brass and paper pushing. His first job in the Manpower Department (think “Personnel Department”) was to be a plans officer, running the program that assigned occupational specialties to officers at the Basic School and that determined augmentation.[30]
In his words, “It was really boring… really boring.”
Any available free time was spent moonlighting at Quantico (which is only a few miles southeast of Washington), helping with field exercises and teaching tactics. And the young officers continued their informal seminars in tactics and operations.
In those days, the feeling was growing among his peers that the Corps needed to revamp and reassess its operational thinking; officers at the schools at Quantico began meeting after hours to talk about these issues and discuss the future of the Corps. Much of their thinking was far outside of the conventional box, which some of the senior leadership and even some of Zinni’s peers perceived as a danger. But not Zinni. He was excited by this quiet revolution in the ranks.
With Vietnam winding down, the services were turning their focus back to the Cold War requirements of defending Europe. Because this was also a time of tough budgets, military value was being measured primarily by the capability of the services to meet that commitment and only that commitment. Since the battle with the Warsaw Pact was going to be fought by the heaviest mechanized forces, many questioned the existence of the Corps — at least in its current form as an expeditionary light infantry. Many defense experts were recommending everything from disbanding the Marines to radically altering it.
There was a battle over the soul of the Marine Corps.
Tony Zinni continues:
The first thing Marines have to realize is that our service is not vital to the existence of the nation. The second thing we have to realize, however, is that we offer to the nation a service that has unique qualities — qualities and values that the nation admires, respects, and can ill afford to lose. These include:
One: Our first identity as Marines is to be a Marine. We are not primarily fighter pilots, scuba divers, tank gunners, computer operators, cooks, or whatever. The proper designation for each Marine from privates to generals is “Marine.”
Two: Every Marine has to be qualified as a rifleman. Every Marine is a fighter. We have no rear area types. All of us are warriors.
Three: We feel stronger about our traditions than any other service. We salute the past. This is
