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.
In short, battle and operational environments were going to be hard to predict. This meant that the Army had to be able not only to fight and win in several different types of battlefields, but also to accomplish several types of operations other than war. And this in turn meant that the Army's doctrine had to address the issue of the smaller force's versatility. It also meant doing away with the term 'AirLand Battle' — not because the concept was no longer useful, but because it suggested the linear battlefield of central Europe. Though such a battlefield might turn out to exist in the future, Army commanders had to be capable of adapting to a very different kind of battlefield.
So this is what they did:
LAND BATTLE
Changes to the land war doctrine fell within four areas: Force Projection, Operations Other Than War, Joint and Combined Operations, and Conduct of the Land Battle.
Because the likelihood that the Army would fight or operate close to garrison locations (as it did in Germany during the Cold War) was about zero, it had to become skilled at quickly putting together tactical teams to fit fast- arising mission requirements that were hard to predict in advance. Then they had to get to where they were going and, depending on the nature of their mission — from fighting their way in to operations other than war — they had to figure out how to place the force on the ground consistent with the way they wanted to conduct the operation (an error in initial disposition, as Moltke said, might not be corrected for an entire campaign). Meanwhile, they had to get early intelligence as rapidly as possible in order to deploy the units. And finally, once there, they had to supply themselves, perhaps half a world away from the U.S.A., or else hundreds or thousands of miles from their garrisons, and sometimes in areas where they wouldn't get local help.
The Army taught itself how to do all that. An entire chapter on force projection was put into the 1993 100-5. Force projection scenarios became the object of study in Army schools. Training programs were begun. Army Chief Sullivan and his principal logistician, Lieutenant General Lee Salomon, began prepositioning Army equipment in key locations around the world, to allow sizable land power to be sent into a region quickly. The recent deployment of a
