PEOPLE, TRAINING AND LEADER DEVELOPMENT AND THE ARMY PROFESSION
Yet with all the doctrine evolution, the leading with ideas, the experiments that proved their worth on recent battlefields, the wise investments in information technologies that have dramatically assisted commanders and soldiers on those battlefields, one issue stands paramount and that is people. Army Chief General Pete Schoomaker has said, 'Train and equip soldiers and grow leaders.'
What the Army really pays attention to is people. You develop your soldiers and leaders from a value base with the ability and confidence to adapt, to think their way through situations where there is no precedent, where they have to apply their expert knowledge gained from years of study and practice, to situations they have never seen before, to be able to operate effectively in ambiguity. It is the essence of military professionalism. Nothing makes a difference in battle like training and leadership. Colonel Arnie Bray, commander of the 82d Airborne 2d Brigade in combat in Iraq in 2003, said, 'Especially useful were the heavy light drills in the pre-command courses and the two rotations in which my battalions were involved at the NTC… These skills were developed by repeated live fires… training that always included some twist that made the conditions more unpredictable' (Bray, notes, December 2003).
Each of the Army's capstone doctrinal manuals since 1976 has said a version of this: 'Once the force is engaged, superior combat power derives from the courage and competence of soldiers, the excellence of their training, the capability of their equipment, the soundness of their combined arms doctrine, and, above all, the quality of their leadership.'
To get that, you need a continuing investment in professional education and training. That investment is a combination of actual classrooms for study, interaction, and reflection; realistic computer simulations for war games with opposing forces as in BCTP; and open-air classrooms in relevant terrain and urban environments with field work with full equipment and live fire where all the normal frictions of lots of moving parts apply against an opposing force who has an equal opportunity to win. All this must be done under the watchful eye of mentors and trainers who can coach and teach, helping participants to be better able to interpret their experiences. It requires an investment so that professionals can educate and train professionals. Each of the military services has made such a continuing investment and, even in the budget-scarce times of downsizing, has protected those investments and adapted them to the current security environment because they knew the battle payoff.
Following Desert Storm TRADOC showed in various briefings noncommissioned officers and officers from the time they had entered the force and the opportunities they had to develop through the Army's intensive training and leader development system. We did that because every unit and commander paid tribute to the importance of training as key to winning in battle. The Army reached the same conclusion after Afghanistan and Iraq.
That absolute focus and passion for training soldiers and units and developing leaders continued through the 1990s to the current war. Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki commissioned a series of studies on training and leader development in early 2000, done by a TRADOC team under the leadership of Lieutenant General Mike Steele (later Lieutenant General Jim Riley) and Major General Dave Huntoon at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. They concluded that you must develop leaders who are 'adaptive and self aware.' The studies resulted in needed adjustments, as well as revised training doctrine, FM 7.0, faithful to continuing battle-focused training but more relevant to the current operational environment. As the noncommissioned officer study said, you also develop leaders with a warrior ethos, a credo recently restated and reinforced by General Pete Schoomaker for the entire Army.
By the time of Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraqi Freedom in Iraq in 2003, the U.S. Army had a generation of battle commanders, noncommissioned officers, and soldiers who trained with a single-minded passion for meeting combat-ready standards. Combat Training Centers, begun in the mid to late 1980s and only available a short time before 1991, are a way of life for this generation. One battalion commander had more than seventeen rotations through these major training areas before commanding his battalion in combat in 2003. Those training centers at Fort Irwin, California, Fort Polk, Louisiana, and Hohenfels, Germany, along with the Battle Command Training Program (BCTP) made a huge difference even more so than in 1991 for all ranks. Also making a difference is a generation of noncommissioned officers schooled in the Army's Noncommissioned Officer Education System (NCOES). Moreover, all ranks of Army officer and NCO leadership benefited from assignments during the 1990s in actual operational areas like the Balkans or other unit deployments where they could gain valuable command wisdom from conducting actual operations. The result would be a savvy group of deployment and operationally experienced battle commanders in both Afghanistan and Iraq, who also knew each other from other operations, thus further enhancing teamwork and trust.
As before, all unit post operations reports, as well as individual discussions have credited tough training to battle standards as making the difference in combat performance. Some of that training and leader development took place in those training areas in Kuwait. Devotion to combat readiness is interwoven in the total fabric of Army culture. That the U.S. Army kept such a focus during the 1990s, unlike the similar period from 1945 to 1950, is evidence of a significant permanent transformation in the culture of the Army.
Finally, during the late part of the 1990s and early twenty-first century, the U.S. Army began renewed thinking about the nature of the Army as a profession to draw attention to both institutional Army values and to the role of the military as a learned and honored profession in America.
In 1997, U.S. Army senior leadership spent the better part of their winter commanders' conference agreeing on a new set of Army 'values.' It was not that the U.S. Army had no values before. It was just that they had not been part of the official language, part of the ways to evaluate behavior and performance, part of the ways the Army could speak to itself in a common language about what it held inviolate as it served our nation. Those commanders, led by then Army Chief of Staff General Denny Reimer, devised a set of values: loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, integrity, and personal courage. One could argue (and correctly) that such values were present at Valley Forge, at Gettysburg, in WWI at the Marne, in WWII at Buna and Normandy, in Korea at Inchon, in Vietnam in the Ia Drang Valley and Cambodia, in Panama, in Desert Storm, and in the streets of Mogadishu. Yet, the fact of such focused work by the senior leadership said two things: First, here are the values that are not negotiable as the Army serves the nation, and second, they are now an official part of the profession.
These developments in the professional fabric of the Army are examples of the U.S. Army changing its culture even as it was embarked on tough operations for the nation, recording these thoughts in its manual FM 1, 14 June 2001. As former Army Chief General Eric Shinseki would say on 8 November 2001,
General Pete Schoomaker, as he seeks to accelerate the Army's transformation to fight and win this war and meet warfighting needs of the future, has said those seven values are not negotiable. From General Creighton Abrams who reaffirmed, 'the Army is people' to focus rebuilding the Army from the early 1970s to the present, there is an unbroken and unshakable commitment to focus on people, to training soldiers and growing leaders. That commitment has only grown stronger with this generation of soldiers and leaders in the 1990s as it has in this early twenty-first century of service to America.
CONCLUSIONS
What then of war in 1991 and war now? Of the continuing readiness of the U.S. Army to be of service to our nation in peace and war following the attack on our citizens on 11 September 2001?
Our earlier statement still holds true today:
