The Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) began Battle Labs in 1992 to do just that. Those Battle Labs followed a long lineage of positive experience in all the military services with the experimental method in getting to the future. Specific Force XXI experiments were an outgrowth of the work done in Battle Labs and the overarching Army experimental program Army Chief General Sullivan called the Louisiana Maneuvers. The Battle Labs continue their work, adjusted now for the times, conditions, and technology opportunities needed by the Army in the twenty-first century. The Army has also now invested formally in a 'futures center' at TRADOC to accelerate such methods to look ahead to sustain that battlefield edge. The Army is a pragmatic profession, wanting to see proof that concepts work before trying them in battle, so it continues its experiments while simultaneously tapping into operational lessons learned from recent battles and operations. Army Chief General Schoomaker has directed the 3d Infantry Division, so spectacularly successful in its attack on Baghdad, to tap into that experience and explore the formation of a new generation of modular combat units.
Continuity. One azimuth for experiments in the 1990s was called Force XXI. In the final chapter of this book we had said, 'Army Chief General Sullivan directed that an experimental unit named Force XXI (after twenty-first century) be established at Fort Hood, Texas, with the goal of a full-brigade war-fighting experiment at the NTC (National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California) in 1997. The Army had come a long way toward the future since 1991.'
Progress since 1997 would be even more stunning. That unit was formed, and it was the 4th Infantry Division. TRADOC, under the command of General Bill Hartzog, set up that brigade experiment at the NTC in 1997, followed by a division experiment in a BCTP (Battle Command Training Program). For the division experiment, the commander was General Scott Wallace, who commanded V Corps in the 2003 attack to Baghdad, using many of the technologies and battle command techniques he had used in the 4th Division. Major General Buff Blount was able to drill his 3d Infantry Division in Kuwait training areas on live-fire exercises and major maneuvers using these new Force XXI battle command technologies (Blount, notes, February 2004). Just as there was great continuity in the generations in the 1980s to continue that transformation, the Army saw to it there was continuity in this generation to field Force XXI and make it work in battle.
The best endorsement comes from LTC John W. Charlton, who commands 1st Battalion, 15th Infantry in the 3d Infantry Division. Charlton and his battalion fought eight major engagements during twenty-one days of intense combat operations in Iraqi Freedom.
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All these ideas and all these experiments, however, must fit within a common set of joint warfighting ideas. Before 1991, and even until the mid 1990s, each military service had relative autonomy in developing their own set of warfighting ideas that were then amalgamated into joint operations doctrine. Services also conducted almost exclusively their own training programs without an overarching program to train their service headquarters to function as a joint command. All that began to change with Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and Joint Chiefs Chairman General Colin Powell. Their leadership and directions were followed and adjusted as necessary by subsequent Secretaries of Defense and Joint Chiefs Chairmen. They all saw the value and necessity of having a Joint Command lead change first with a set of joint warfighting ideas. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld made the final decision that calls for all these experiments to go on within the framework of joint experiments by the newly formed Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) at Norfolk, Virginia. The emergence of this Joint Command, not only to write joint doctrine for interoperability among all the services, but also to oversee experiments for future capabilities as well as train headquarters and senior commanders in joint battle command, is a major transformation since Desert Storm in 1991. JFCOM will have a continuing transforming effect on the military services' already impressive abilities to fight and win as joint teams.
In addition to JFCOM, other external continuity and support has been important to the Army. In the early 1990s I was briefing then Deputy Secretary of Defense Bill Perry at Fort Monroe on Desert Storm and some of the 'glimmerings' or new concepts of warfare we had seen and where we needed to begin experimenting. As a result of Secretary Perry's interest and vision, as with a previous visit from Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, we got continued and needed support from the Department of Defense. John Hamre, later Deputy Secretary of Defense, at the time was a staffer for the Senate, saw the virtue of the Army's approach to the future and the need for resources. We also had other forward thinkers come to visit TRADOC, Joint Chiefs Chairman General Colin Powell and then Congressman and later House Speaker Newt Gingrich. They contributed to our ideas and helped us think our way through these glimmerings and their implications for the future. As a result we got needed resources and added dimensions to our ideas. We began those experiments. In a spirit of continuity just as in the previous rebirth of the Army, they were continued by the next generation at TRADOC and the Army, and now they are carried forward within JFCOM. As a result their lineage reached from Panama and Desert Storm to Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. That continuity of Army vision from generation to generation, the very same continuity that had been so successful from the middle 1970s to the early 1990s, was key.
The Army had seen early the possibilities of a revolution in Battle Command, using that term beginning in 1992 to focus on the art of command and also emerging technologies able to assist command on the move and increase tempo. This generation has made those possibilities a reality. That reality translated into the speed and precision seen as so vital to Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003 by LTG McKiernan and others in current and future contemporary operating environments (McKiernan, David, Lieutenant General, U.S. Army, notes, February 2004).
Each generation of leaders not only provided for growth in capabilities, but also kept their focus on staying trained and ready. Former Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki reiterated that focus when, soon after he assumed his duties he ordered all combat divisions to be manned at 100 percent of requirements to increase their readiness. He also fended off calls for reductions in the size of the U.S. Army by some who thought wars might be able to be won from a distance. The Army also published a vision in 1999 to increase its deployability in the present while also investing in a future force. Such continuity of vision and purpose is the same tough-minded strategic leadership that got the Army from the 1970s to victory in Desert Storm and got it from post-Desert Storm to victory as part of the joint team in Afghanistan and Iraq.
That continuity with room for adjustments as required, combined with those experiments, intense training, wise, talented, and adaptive leaders and soldiers, and rapid fielding led to battlefield realization in Iraq of a vision first expressed in a TRADOC concept pamphlet published in 1994,
(Force XXI Operations, TRADOC Pamphlet 525-5, Headquarters, U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, Fort Monroe, Virginia, 1 August 1994, pp. 3–4)
In earlier pages of this book we said, 'Quality soldiers and leaders whose full potential is realized through the application of information-age technologies and by rigorous and relevant training and leader development.' It does not always happen the way it was envisioned, but sometimes it does in the Army profession. When that happens it is the result of a lot of teamwork, shared vision, decisive change, and courageous continuity.
