time) as soon as the opposing force moved toward us, so as to surprise them and break up their momentum of attack.
After I went to the assistant division commander, Brigadier General Tom Griffin, and explained what I had in mind, he agreed to support this. But he told me he knew there would be controversy. Some on the other side were going to claim we were 'not playing by the rules, since we were supposed to be on the defense.' In my judgment, that was the whole point. When the opposing force attacks, they'll expect to find us defending and backing up. So we should attack early in a preemptive strike and surprise them. In the confusion that followed, we could exploit with additional air and ground attacks, and maybe stop their attack before it got started.
We anticipated that the opposing force attack would come at first light.
To create deception, we decided to lead the opposing force to believe our M1 squadron was in our northern sector, when in fact we had them hidden in the center, waiting for the moment to attack. Thus, we sent a few M1s to the northern sector and made sure they were clearly visible to the other side on the evening before the attack. Then we played M1 noise over loudspeakers all along that sector, while we pulled the actual tanks out, loaded them on heavy equipment transports, and then moved them the seventy to eighty kilometers to the south to rejoin the rest of their unit.
The other piece of my plan was to make a sack for the other side to fall into. Our center squadron was to be the bottom of the sack, so to speak. In other words, I ordered them to defend and then to give way some, so we could draw the enemy after them. Once they were inside, we would attack with the fast-moving M1s. Meanwhile, during the night before the attack, I ordered my aviation squadron (with their newly developed night-flying skills) to give me a clear picture of the posture of the opposing force. I wanted to hit them just after they moved against us.
We were ready. We had rehearsed this, so we all knew what we were doing. I had a great team of commanders and soldiers who could pull this off. And in Tom Griffin I had a senior commander who trusted us and was not afraid to go out on a limb and risk a decision for us.
At 0715 the first morning, I advised Tom that conditions were right. Our aviation had reported that the opposing forces had concentrated a large force in the area we wanted to attack. These looked to be second-echelon units to be used later in the day, after the initial attack was successful. Meanwhile, our middle squadron (the 3rd Squadron of the 11th, commanded by then-Lieutenant Colonel Stan Cherrie, who was to be my G-3 on Desert Storm) had reported that the opposing force had attacked. They could hold, but not for long. Our M1 squadron (1st Squadron of the 11th, commanded by then-Lieutenant Colonel John Abrams, now a lieutenant general and V Corps commander in Germany) had reported they were ready (I had them on an immediate attack readiness posture).
My operations officer, Major Skip Bacevich (later my G-3 in the 1st Armored Division and later still commander of the 11th Cavalry in a rapid deployment to Kuwait in June 1991), was with me in our two M113 command vehicles on a hill overlooking the attack area. The weather was clear. Perfect! But if we waited much longer, the opposing force would break through my middle squadron and I'd have to use my M1 squadron to stop that. I wanted to attack and seize the initiative, just as our doctrine recommends. So did Tom Griffin. He gave us the approval. I ordered John and the aviation squadron to attack.
The attack was a success. We completely surprised the opposing force and caused such confusion that the exercise had to be stopped while forces got untangled and reset to begin again.
That whole experience was a lesson for us all. I'll never forget it. We had the right people, the right doctrine, the right equipment, a bold plan, and a commander who knew what we were doing and who trusted and supported us. It was magic. I was learning how to be a senior tactical commander.
And Fred Franks was proving the efficacy of AirLand Battle in the toughest kind of trial short of war.
Succeeding Starry at TRADOC was General Glen Otis. Otis had been the Army's operations deputy at the Department of the Army and was thoroughly familiar with the evolving doctrine. Drawing on studies coming out of the Army's War College, Otis was taken with the idea of addressing three levels of war: strategic, operational, and tactical. Strategy was beyond the scope of Army doctrine, but a lot could be done with the operational level. At that level, tactical battles were not discrete, unconnected events. Rather, they needed to be so woven together that they achieved a campaign objective, and thereby gained the overall strategic aim of a military operation.
The missing strategic link in Vietnam was the operational level of war. Year after year, tactical battles were won by U.S. and allied forces, but in the absence of an operational plan, these never added up to gaining the overall strategic objective.
Otis included the three levels in the new FM 100-5, and Otis's successor at TRADOC, Bill Richardson, directed expansion of the operational doctrine.
Meanwhile, while at Fort Leavenworth as deputy commandant of the Army's Command and General Staff College, Lieutenant General Bob RisCassi assigned Franks direction of the project to revise the Army's 1982 FM 100 -5 that, while retaining AirLand Battle, included this expanded discussion, which it described as the 'design and conduct of major operations and campaigns.' Such design would be called 'operational art' — the thinking that translated strategic aims into effective military campaigns. The book was approved and published in May 1986, and because operational art and design was a new thought for the U.S. Army, the doctrine was accompanied by a briefing put together by Colonel Rick Sinnreich, director of the School for Advanced Military Studies (SAMS), that would explain it to the U.S. Army and our allies. In Desert Storm, this 1986 book would serve as the U.S. Army's basic doctrine and directly influence the design of major operations.
Training and doctrine flow — or at least they should flow — out of the same source. Doctrine gives you mission and focus. Training gives you the skills to carry out your mission.
In the spring of 1988, before he assumed command of the 1st AD, Fred Franks had the opportunity to visit Eastern Europe to observe a Warsaw Pact military exercise as part of the observer exchanges of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). This visit gave him a unique opportunity to see for himself the training and doctrine of his potential enemy in operation.
This was the first time he had been behind the Iron Curtain to have a look for himself. Though he had patrolled it as a platoon leader, troop commander, and regimental commander during two previous tours in Europe, for the first time he was driving through the checkpoints, then down to Prague, and on up to the training exercise north of the capital. He spent a week in the field visiting a Soviet armored division and watching them go through training exercises. He took a lot of pictures, talked to Soviet officers, talked to observers from other countries, and saw at first hand the capabilities and limitations of a Soviet armored division.
The visit to Czechoslovakia confirmed all he'd always imagined about them: The Soviets' doctrine emphasized tight control. Everything had to go according to a timetable; nobody did anything on his own.
Franks visited a Czech mechanized infantry unit in a dug-in defensive position, and saw a Soviet unit in a similar position and a Soviet tank unit, equipped with T-72s. They were permitted to take pictures of it and of the troops and their positions, and also observed one of their second-echelon units moving up; they stopped on the side of the road and got out to talk to them. From all this, he got a decent insight into their mentality, leadership, equipment capabilities, approach to training, and approach to wartime situations. They were technically competent. Their field craft was quite good — digging holes, camouflage, movement of vehicles. But everything was very rehearsed. On their major maneuver range, you could see well-worn trails in the snow where unit after unit had done the same thing over the same ground. If anything unexpected happened, or if any radical change was required by some unexpected actions, that would be very disruptive to them.
Their training was very rote, very set-piece. They did this, then they did that. There were no real opposing forces — or thinking enemy, in what the U.S. Army calls free-play exercises. Our training exercises were dynamic; things are allowed to happen unexpectedly. We demanded of commanders that they deviate from the plan, because the enemy has a mind of his own. But here in Czechoslovakia, it looked as if they were going through a series of tightly scripted one-act plays. They'd move from Point A to Point B and then stop and get into positions.
Here are a couple of anecdotes. The experience could have been insightful had we fought them.
A Soviet major general had been escorting Franks and his colleagues around a tank firing range. It was very cold, and it started to snow. As it happened, he finished his tour and presentation about twenty minutes early.
Did they move Franks and his colleagues out to the buses waiting for them and get them to the next
