soldier, in his feel for the battlefield, I personally identify with him in my own approach to commanding units and leading soldiers in battle.
So General Cavazos and I hit it off right away.
Almost immediately, he spotted a few things in my own problem-solving and decision-making techniques that were causing some friction between me and the division staff. The way I like to work with my staff is to ask a lot of questions, open things up, and choose a course of action that presents the most options for a given mission. Sometimes that takes time. This didn't always sit well with my staff, and Dick Cavazos noticed. He led some back- and-forth discussion in an AAR.
'What we discovered was this. What your commander is trying to do is generate options continually as the battle moves on. He doesn't want to run out of options. What you've got to do is to keep giving them to him so the commander always has a viable option to use against an enemy move. So don't be bothered by your commander asking you a lot of questions, by driving you to come up with additional alternatives. What he's trying to do is think his way through the situation, just like you're trying to do. He's problem-solving, just like you are. Commanders just don't passively sit around and wait for the staff to solve the problems.
'Next,' he went on, 'most savvy tactical commanders wait until the last minute to decide something. Why is that? Well, that gets back to what you are trying to do. That gets back to this: you want to stay out ahead of the enemy. That means you don't want to decide too far in advance what you're going to do. If you do that, by the time you execute, the situation may have changed, and you may have another option available to you. On the other hand, you don't want to wait so long to decide that your unit can't execute.
'Well, this drives the staff nuts. Why? They've got a lot of details to attend to, so they want the commander to decide very early. So they're always pushing the commander to decide so they can get their work done. So if they don't understand why the commander is doing what he's doing, then they're going to look at their commander as indecisive. In fact, he isn't indecisive at all. What he's looking for is the right intuitive moment to decide to act. Then he executes very forcefully without looking back.'
Before Dick Cavazos led us through this discussion to these conclusions, I had not been able to articulate it, either to myself or to my staff, with anything like this clarity. Now, as a senior tactical commander, he had really let me see myself in a mirror.
So after I took in what we had all discussed, I told myself, Yes, that's true, that's exactly what I do, that's the way I've been at squadron, regiment, and now as a division commander. I was starting to see tension between me and the staff, most of whom I had long known or personally chosen. Now I understood. Actually, it's normal senior tactical commander behavior.
General Cavazos, then, was the first person to open up for me why commanders tend to wait till the last possible minute to decide what they're going to do. That had been my tendency, anyway, almost intuitively, and it had been successful. And now he was explaining me to myself, as it were. He saw me as I had not been able to see myself, and he reinforced for me what had been up to then inexplicable intuitive commander behavior.
Before this exercise, I had not really known Dick Cavazos. But here, our meetings and subsequent work together in other exercises turned into a deep friendship.
That seminar at Fort Leavenworth was a very valuable week.
After that, we went on to train for WARFIGHTER, and then, in July of '89, about a month before I moved on to command VII Corps, we ran the actual WARFIGHTER exercise. The exercise was very instructive as well. What it did was prove to me yet again that planning is not fighting.
In the Battle Command Training Program, you normally set up your command posts out in the field, with all the vehicles and communication gear. And you also have your subordinate colonel-level commands — that is, the commanders of your four maneuver brigades, your DISCOM (division support command), and your DIVARTY (division artillery). You are essentially in your wartime setup, except that all your troops are not out there with all their equipment.
At brigade, division, and corps, the U.S. Army normally operates with three command posts, as was discussed briefly in the opening chapter: a small tactical command post forward, a main command post, which is much larger, and a rear command post, which deals mainly with logistics. Normally, your assistant division commander for maneuver goes forward to the tactical command post, where he controls the fight that's right up against you — what is called the close fight. Your assistant division commander for support, another brigadier general, is at the rear command post. There he coordinates all the support — the logistics — for the fight, watches over the security of the division rear area against enemy special forces teams, and controls real estate, so two units do not try to occupy the same ground. The division commander normally operates from the main command post or main nerve center. From there, he can synchronize the close fight, the support functions, and also the deep fight, the second-echelon fight as far deep as the division can go.
When this WARFIGHTER started, I followed doctrine and started out at the main command post, but soon I found that the decision-making agility in our division was too slow with me there. By staying at the command post, I didn't have enough of an intuitive feel of the fight. Now, I'm not comfortable doing that anyway. I don't like to stay so far removed from the actual fight and let someone else do it. But I hadn't commanded a division before in a fight, so I said, 'Okay, I'll start out doing what you're supposed to do.'
So what happened? The opposing force began to break through us. As BCTP adjusted the exercise, I made an adjustment to the way I commanded.
We restarted it.
'This time,' I said, 'I'm going to be out where I know I belong, out at the tactical command post, and moving around.' From then on, we were very successful. And I never forgot that. It was a great lesson: What I had done during the first day of the exercise was to abandon my intuitive sense of what I ought to do as a commander. Instead, I'd followed what the doctrine expected me to do and stayed in the main command post.
I remembered that lesson during Desert Storm — and did not stay at the main command post.
As a matter of fact, we were not particularly dispersed during the BCTP, so I could move around in a wheeled vehicle. Because of the confines of the local training area, everything was fairly close together. If it had been an active operation, I would probably have had to get in a helicopter, the way I did in Desert Storm.
The main thing was that I wanted to get my subordinate commanders' sense of what was happening, and then give them my own sense and tell them what I wanted them to do in the next twelve to twenty-four hours. When I was there with them, I could look them in the eye and see if they understood what I wanted. That way, there could be no ambiguity in orders. There is an old saying: If an order can be misunderstood, it will be.
There were other benefits: First, I could try ideas out on my commanders. If I was thinking of doing something different, I could give them a heads-up and get their reaction to it.
Second, at the division tactical command post, you get the best, the freshest, information. By the time information moved from the units in contact, through their headquarters and the tactical command post, and then back to the main command post, it was hours out of date. So when I was at the tactical CP, and not visiting commanders, I was able to get a better view of the tactical situation and to make better, quicker decisions.
Third, senior commanders really get to make only a few key decisions during the fight. What you want to do, then, is to inform yourself so that you can determine the best time to make those decisions. By being forward, talking to my subordinate commanders, and being with the troops, seeing and sensing the fight, I better informed myself.
By being up front, you gain immediacy. But you also gain something else: Soldiers are getting hurt, wounded, killed in action. Commanders shouldn't be staying in their command post. They should be out and around the soldiers, where they can be feeling the pain and the pride, and where they can understand the whole human dimension of the battle. That way of operating has practical, tactical consequences. It will better inform commanders' intuition about what to do; it will suggest alternative courses of action that will accomplish their mission at least cost to their troops.
And so that's what I found myself doing on both the practice battlefield and the real battlefield. And so it turned out that in this BCTP we were very successful in the end and defeated the OPFOR.
Early on in this fight, in this scenario, we had to make the following decisions. We had to determine which way the major enemy force was coming; how we were going to win the counterfire fight (that is, defeat the enemy's artillery); and where and when we were going to commit the division reserve to stop the enemy attack and regain the initiative. To do all this, you have to read the battle quickly. Tactics during battle is a series of adjustments to stay ahead of the enemy.
