Into the Storm: On the Ground in Iraq

American equipment.

But it wasn't just numbers that disturbed the Army leaders, it was the quality of equipment. The T-62 Soviet-built tank (used by the Syrians and the Egyptians) had a 115-mm smoothbore tank cannon fully capable of defeating U.S. tanks, with a 50 percent probability of hit and kill at 1,500 meters. Worse, many reserve U.S. tanks had only 90-mm cannons. Moreover, antitank guided missiles were killing tanks at ranges in excess of 3,000 meters. And artillery had doubled in lethality and increased in range by about 60 percent since World War II.

Quick to seize on these points, General Bill DePuy sent a team to Israel to gather lessons, and the Israelis generously shared the things they'd learned with the U.S. Army (they even sent a number of captured T-62 tanks to the U.S. Army for examination). This contact opened a continuing dialogue with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), which greatly benefited the U.S. Army's preparations for fighting on the new battlefield.

From General DePuy and TRADOC's many briefings and studies, two concepts came out of the lessons of the Yom Kippur War. These concepts became rallying cries:

• 'Fight outnumbered and win.'

• 'Win the first battle of the next war.'

These drove the Army's thinking, training, and equipping throughout the Cold War, and they were the basis for much of what happened in Desert Storm.

THE TRAINING BEGINS

The training revolution started during the years from 1971 to 1975, and though it was the work of many people, it was principally sparked by Bill DePuy and Paul Gorman.

Gorman was an innovator, a soldier with a highly fertile mind and a passion for training. Gorman had been General DePuy's G-3 when DePuy had commanded the Big Red One in Vietnam, and it was DePuy who arranged to have then-Brigadier General Gorman assigned to the Infantry School as assistant commandant.

There Gorman headed the Board for Dynamic Training, and later what became known as the Combined Arms Training Board (CATB), established by Westmoreland in 1971. At CATB, a systems approach to training and what would be called Tactical Engagement Simulation (TES) were developed.

Working with scientists at Florida State University, the CATB developed a system whereby every major function on the battlefield could be broken into discrete tasks.

First, you made a front-end analysis to determine what tasks had to be performed by individuals and by teams in the company, then you determined the standards of performance that had to be executed to ensure the mission was successful. The list of individual tasks were then arranged according to the skill levels of soldiers, and these were put into books called Soldiers' Manuals. Soldiers could then study these manuals, and NCOs could teach from them. Next came what was called a 'skill qualification test,' which required each soldier to demonstrate proficiency once a year in his or her specialty.

Unit tasks, meanwhile, were put into booklets called ARTEPs (Training and Evaluation Plans — an evaluative list of tasks). ARTEPs permitted commanders to judge better and more systematically their units' ability to accomplish particular battlefield unit tasks.

TES was simply train as you fight. It was a system of shoot-back simulations that replicated the battlefield with great fidelity, and its concept was both eye-opening and (after the fact) blindingly obvious: If you survived your first combat engagements, you would go on to perform at much higher levels. This was shown to be true of both individuals and units. The Navy created their Top Gun School in the late 1960s, after they realized they needed to train their pilots through their 'first fights' before they had their real first fights in the skies over North Vietnam, and the Army decided to build a similar school for land warfare.

What Gorman wanted to do with TES was to develop simulations that would allow an opposing force to maneuver and 'shoot back' in training. Such a system would objectively score target hits and kills in training fire with opposing forces. The problem was that Gorman didn't have the technology for it. Right now, units fired blanks at each other, and an 'umpire,' or neutral observer assigned to the exercise, judged who won or lost and by how much.

That all ended when Gorman came upon the technology eventually called MILES — Multiple Integrated Laser Targeting System. It was an eyesafe laser beam that used the normal sights on a weapon, and it allowed units and individuals to 'fire' at each other and to 'hit' without danger to either side. All individuals and equipment had receivers, and when a laser hit your receiver, you either heard a loud ring or a light went on signaling a 'kill.'

Meanwhile at Fort Benning in CATB, Gorman and his group proposed a revision of tasks to make them more relevant and so that they could better meet standards. This came to be called 'performance-oriented training,' which meant that training was no longer conducted according to some arbitrary time criterion. Rather, you kept at it until standards were met. This was as simple as it was profound: You stayed at it until you got it right. In April 1975, the Army officially changed its training regulations, and from then on, performance-oriented training was the law. It also laid the basis for the evaluation system of the ARTEP. Army training would never be the same again.

With this kind of training, soldiers and units would become veterans before they actually went into combat. To complete that vision, the Army more than ever needed a world-class national training facility that included rigorous practice battlefields with large-unit live fire.

Other training innovations came out of practical experience in the field, and some of them had long-term consequences.

Early in 1976, Lieutenant General Donn Starry assumed command of U.S. Army V Corps in Germany. (Starry, of course, had been one of the 11th ACR commanders at the time Fred Franks served with the Blackhorse in Vietnam.) He was immediately faced with two especially daunting challenges: In V Corps, he found a unit that doubted its ability to fight and win against the combined armies of the Warsaw Pact (a serious overmatch, at least in numbers). And the U.S. V Corps was essentially all that stood in the way of a rapid Warsaw Pact thrust over the short 120 kilometers to Frankfurt, the industrial and financial capital of West Germany.

Deeply troubled by all this, Starry went to work to fix it. His aim was to restore confidence to his corps by showing them how they could fight and win there, even outnumbered.

Starry came to V Corps from TRADOC, where he had been one of the principal authors of the soon-to-be- published 1976 FM 100-5. He put this new doctrine to use immediately. Using videotapes, he pointed out that the avenue of approach that ran from the West German city of Fulda to Frankfurt had to be hugely tempting to Warsaw Pact planners, and that it was vital to deter such an attack. Starry's presentations called attention to what was forever after referred to as the 'Fulda Gap.'

But Starry did more than talk. He instituted an innovative, mission-focused training program that related the specific tasks of training to the specific tasks needed to accomplish a wartime mission. And he started what he and the Army came to call 'terrain walks': Once every three months he required all commanders and leaders to go out on the actual ground where they anticipated they would fight. There they would explain in detail to their next-higher commander just how they intended to conduct the fight. (Starry and all his subordinate commanders personally attended these sessions.) Afterward, they were required to construct 'battle books.' In these, commanders detailed unit and weapon positions, how they intended to manage the flow of battle, and how their actions fit the overall corps plan.

Starry's training methods, and his terrain walks, proved so effective that they were used in all of Europe up to the end of the Cold War. And they went a long way toward restoring confidence to V Corps and other U.S. units in Germany.

By the 1980s, the Army was infused with the objectives leaders had begun articulating in the previous decade: Fight and win the first battle of the next war. Fight outnumbered and win. Fight a 'come-as-you-are war' — a war with a short preparation and warning time. Train the way you fight.

Unit training facilities were being constructed or modified to re-create with great fidelity the modern highly lethal battlefield. Principal among these was the new National Training Center at Fort Irwin, in California's Mojave