Founded by the Continental Congress in 1775, the U.S. Army is older than the country it serves. It is and always has been an army of the people, and over the course of our nation's history, it has probably reflected American society more than any other uniformed service. As a consequence, it is the service that has most frequently felt the nation's mood swings concerning foreign military ventures. Such ventures have rarely sat well with the American public, or with their representatives in Congress, and because of that, and the nature of American geography, Congress has historically had little patience for a large standing peacetime Army, preferring early on to rest secure behind our ocean boundaries, and later to rely on the technology of the Navy and Air Force.
In the early 1970s, neither the United States nor the Army was in good shape. You can blame the condition of both on the outcome of the war in Vietnam, and you won't be wrong, but there were deeper causes. Fortunately, the Army's leaders were willing to face up to them.
What was happening? What did they see?
By 1972, most U.S. ground forces were out of Vietnam, and the war had been turned over to the ARVN, though with support from U.S. logistics and airpower.
No matter what you may have heard, however, when our Army left Vietnam, they had not lost.
Before they left, U.S. Army tactical forces had performed superbly. They were victorious in every tactical engagement, some at considerable cost in soldiers, and technical and tactical innovations, such as air assault and attack helicopters, had proved successful. The NVA had to wait until some time after the departure of U.S. ground forces before they dared to start major operations in the south, and even longer before they risked undertaking a major invasion of the south with mechanized forces and tanks. Yet, even then, U.S. airpower was still assisting ARVN forces.
And then the air support stopped.
When that happened, U.S. military professionals, especially those in the Army, felt that the long, terrible sacrifice by young Americans had been betrayed. Just as bad was the loss of national honor: we abandoned an ally we had pledged to assist. The professionals would never forget that.
There was little support for the war on the home front, and it was reflected in attitudes toward the military. It was a bad idea to wear the uniform off post or base. Protests at the Pentagon became news cliches, and when National Guard troops were called out to keep protesters in check, feelings against the military intensified even further.
Meanwhile, the whole society was passing through a major upheaval: polarization of whites and blacks, testing of authority, insensitivity to minorities, drug problems, the sexual revolution. The Army was not immune; as drug use and racial tensions divided America, so, too, did they divide the U.S. Army.
An army has a spirit, an identity, an image. Part of it comes from its own institutional personality and traditions; part from the people from whom it springs. In the 1970s, the U.S. Army's public image was in ruin, its spirit in danger of being broken, its identity in danger of being lost.
A prime example could be found not in Vietnam or the United States, but in Europe, where the Army faced its greatest challenge, in the Warsaw Pact. How ready was the Army, as part of NATO, to stop a Warsaw Pact armored sweep aimed at Western Europe?
Not very.
The years of fighting in Vietnam had drawn Europe-based forces down to unacceptable strengths. Worse, the insatiable appetite for personnel had stripped our forces of officer leadership, and almost destroyed the Army's professional noncommissioned officer corps, long the backbone of the Army. A series of hasty training programs to fill depleted ranks had left the Army with NCOs who all too often were poorly trained in basic leadership techniques. Because the NCO is the first-line leader in the Army, the one person primarily responsible for the basic individual soldier skills on which every successful operation depends, training and discipline suffered. In some cases, it went to hell.
In Europe, many in the Army were on drugs, mostly hashish, but some were on heroin. There was racial violence in the barracks, which sometimes spilled over into the streets. Gangs ran some barracks. Leaders — officers or noncommissioned officers — were physically attacked. The chain of command in units struggled day to day simply to maintain good order and discipline.
It was not an Army that expected to win, or was ready to win.
Equally serious, while the Warsaw Pact had strengthened their forces during the previous ten years, U.S. Army capabilities had steadily declined. While fighting in Vietnam, the Army had missed a whole equipment modernization cycle. Many Army units would have been expected to fight with equipment from the early 1960s, with no prospect for change anytime soon.
Just as important, though less immediately visible, the Army warfighting doctrine — the ideas with which it fights — had not undergone a serious examination since World War II.
And finally, Army leaders realized — with shock — that the U.S. Army was not prepared to fight and win in a mechanized battlefield that had the speed and lethality of the 1973 Mideast War. A whole generation of leaders had seen Army unpreparedness in World War II and Korea, and knew its cost in the lives of soldiers. The thought of unpreparedness haunted the U.S. military perhaps more than it did any other major power. It would be hard to underestimate the sense of urgency with which such feelings drove the Army reforms of the 1970s and 1980s.
Meanwhile, in 1973, the draft law expired, which meant that from then on, the armed services would have to exist as an all-volunteer force. The initial results were almost entirely predictable. It was difficult to find true volunteers, and of those who joined up, all too many were not high-quality recruits. Too many were at the lower ranges of intelligence, and some of them came in only after they were given the choice of prison or military service. All that made an already deteriorating discipline situation worse.
Some professionals left the Army then. They'd had enough of an Army gutted by Vietnam, indiscipline, low morale, and betrayal. Others left involuntarily, as the Army rapidly drew down from its peak strength during Vietnam. But many stayed. They stayed because they wanted to be soldiers, because they wanted to be part of the solution, because they saw an Army never defeated on the battlefield struggling for its very existence as a viable force, and they wanted to help in these times of trouble. They stayed because the Army was wounded and needed help; you do not abandon a wounded buddy on the battlefield. They stayed because it was their duty. They were in for the long haul. It wasn't always easy or fair, but they knew that sometime, someplace in the future, the nation would need her Army to go fight and win, and it had better be ready.
Senior Army leadership knew all this when they took a look around their institution in the early 1970s. That they did not like what they saw goes without saying. And so they set out to change it.
There was much work to be done.
MISSION AND FOCUS
To begin with, in order to rebuild the Army, it was not enough to publish directives and policies. The entire Army had to internalize the need to remake itself, and do it so pervasively that all its members felt the same urgency. In order to renew its focus, the Army needed to renew its sense of its mission — or rather, it needed to understand what exactly its mission was.
An Army's mission is to win wars on the ground. But what did that actually mean for the U.S. Army in the early 1970s? And what would the Army have to do then to accomplish it?
The answers were provided for them by Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, Army Chief of Staff Creighton Abrams, and Secretary of the Army Bo Calloway.
James Schlesinger was sworn in as Secretary of Defense in July 1973, after spending several years at the Rand Corporation, one of the premier strategic and military think tanks. In those years, the United States had tended to rely more on nuclear weapons than on conventional forces for the defense of Central Europe. Schlesinger's experience at Rand had left him with the conviction that the United States needed to turn that balance around. There was an urgent need, in his words, 'for a stalwart conventional defense in Europe,' a need that was not likely to be met immediately, given the 'dreadful' condition of the U.S. Army at the time. He had in fact seen a growing indication that the Europeans had given up on American forces in Europe. Because of the drawdown of our forces there to support Vietnam, the Europeans had concluded that our army in Europe lacked credibility.
