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,
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 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
