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 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
ENGINE OF CHANGE
