scheduled event? No. They didn't have that kind of flexibility. So there they stood in a blinding snowstorm, waiting for the appointed time when they could load the buses and move to their next station.
At the next station, they observed what the Soviets called a live fire exercise. Franks sat in warm bleachers that were covered, fully enclosed, with glass in front. Underneath were latrines with running water. It was like a sports stadium box for maybe two hundred people, obviously used time after time for VIPs and officers. And the range in front was full of ruts and tank trails, so you could see that they'd performed this exercise time after time. They'd bring their officers in, sit them down in the bleachers, and then carefully explain how a tank battalion supported by Hind helicopters would attack a position. We would call this a demonstration. They called it training.
All of this confirmed the wisdom of the United States' own doctrine: Before the Soviets gained mass and velocity to produce the momentum of their attack, the West needed to hit them early and hard and often while they were still getting themselves together and trying to organize their great numbers on limited terrain. The West had to add to the normal confusion, to hit their command posts while they were dealing with the early disruptions. Since nobody would exercise initiative — they were not allowed to — without their command posts they'd be lost.
Franks came away from there with two impressions:
One, they weren't supermen. In fact, our ideas about how to fight them, as written into doctrine, were exactly correct.
And two, with each side visiting the other, something had to give. They would observe our new modern equipment and superb soldiers and NCOs, and they couldn't help but realize that our soldiers were capable of things they could not even imagine.
But that wasn't really the important thing… showing off or learning how to fight each other. The important thing was that better understanding had to take place. They would see us. We would see them. We'd get to know each other better. And we'd open up little by little. And with that happening, the confrontation simply had to go away eventually. Franks didn't know when or how, but as a result of that visit, he was convinced the Cold War couldn't go on forever. That was the real aim of the visit.
Soviet and Iraqi doctrine and practice, he reflected later, had many similarities. Although they had equipment from South Africa, Brazil, France, and elsewhere (even from the United States), the Iraqis were equipped mainly with Warsaw Pact equipment. And although, in a curious way, their military was organized more on Western lines (into corps, divisions, and brigades) than on Soviet Warsaw Pact lines (into armies, divisions, and regiments), and although some of their tactics looked more Western than Soviet, in their actual behavior and in the way they laid out their defense and anticipated fighting a defensive battle, their behavior was profoundly Warsaw Pact. The Iraqis exercised very tight control. Everything they did was very, very rote. Every little thing had to go according to plan.
That meant that if you happened to do exactly what they predicted you would do, and at a place where they predicted you were going to do it, then they could hurt you. They had a lot of firepower. They had excellent artillery weapons. On the other hand, if you did something unexpected — such as time of attack, or speed of attack, or the location of the attack — and caused them to alter the rote pattern that they had anticipated, they had difficulty adjusting.
In other words, what Franks saw in 1988 in Czechoslovakia, he saw again with the Iraqis in Desert Storm. He saw the strength of our doctrine and the weakness of theirs.
(The Iraqi army was different from Warsaw Pact countries in one major respect, however: in the brutal way they treated their own soldiers and the savage treatment of their own citizens. That was pure Iraqi.)
During the 1980s, while the Army continued to deter Soviet aggression as part of NATO, it fought small wars in Grenada and Panama. And late in 1989, the Cold War ended. The Soviet empire had started the sag toward its final collapse.
Army leaders looking around at the beginning of the decade could not have easily imagined the incredible events at decade's end. To win the war, the Army had prepared to fight for the better part of two generations. To do it without firing a shot… you can't beat that for success.
LEADER TRAINING
There was one final ingredient to the rebirth of the Army.
From the days of Baron von Steuben during the American Revolutionary War, the NCO has been the 'backbone of the Army.' It is the sergeant who is responsible for the individual training of the soldier, who leads the soldiers in small units under the command of officers, who is closest to the soldiers, enforces good order and discipline, and provides the example of what soldiers should be to the junior enlisteds.
Let's make a kind of syllogism: Because Vietnam gutted the NCO corps, many small units went to hell. Ergo, it was necessary to fix the NCO corps. Thus, very early on in the rebirth process, Army leaders decided to change the way noncommissioned officers were trained and educated.
In 1969, Army Chief General William Westmoreland, having seen firsthand what Vietnam was doing to the NCO corps, directed General Ralph Haines, then his vice chief, to look into the whole situation and devise a solution. The 'Haines Board' recommended that, throughout their careers, NCOs attend a series of progressive and sequential leader development schools designed to develop their leadership skills at each step in their advancement. Such a system was already in place for officers. Now NCOs would have a similar system — called NCOES, or noncommissioned officer education system.
How does the Army grow good NCO leaders? Before becoming sergeants, people showing leadership potential during their first three years in the Army attend a Primary Leader Development Course, or PLDC. Following promotion to sergeant and after serving for a few years, but before promotion to the next grade, NCOs attend the Basic Noncommissioned Officer Course (BNCOC), which is designed for small-unit leaders, such as squad leaders or tank commanders, and devoted to skills necessary to those positions. Following more years of practical experience, NCOs return to the Advanced Noncommissioned Officer Course (ANCOC) to help them make the transition from single-team leader to multi-team leader. By this time, an NCO will have perhaps ten to twelve years of service. Following successful performance of those duties and after demonstrating increased potential, NCOs attend a course designed to assist them in becoming first sergeants, or the senior NCO in a company organization ranging from seventy to two hundred soldiers. Finally, NCOs with senior leadership potential attend the nine-month Sergeants Major Academy at Fort Bliss, Texas, to prepare them for the most senior NCO positions — from command sergeant major of battalions to sergeant major of the Army. In the mid-1980s, the Army linked successful graduation from these schools to promotion.
This leader development system for NCOs saw its fulfillment on the battlefields of Desert Storm. By 1991, most of the senior NCOs of combat battalions had entered the Army in the mid-1970s and had had the opportunity to attend most of the NCOES courses. Meanwhile, all of the more junior NCOs had had the opportunity to attend these schools as they grew in rank and responsibilities. Their collective performance, and that of their soldiers in Desert Storm, was a direct effect of the long-sustained commitment to excellence of the U.S. Army's NCOES begun almost twenty years earlier. No other army in the world has such a system.
There were also major changes in the ways officers were educated.
From studies in the late 1970s, observations of commander and staff performances in NATO and at the new NTC, and renewed emphasis in doctrine on the operational level of war, Army leaders concluded that improvements had to be made in the way officers were developed.
In the middle 1970s the Army had adopted a central selection board process to pick its lieutenant colonel- and colonel-level commanders. Then, in the early 1980s, a pre-command course was created for those officers, which brought them up to date with the rapidly modernizing Army in the field, and gave them instruction and war- gaming practice (by way of simulations) on their new level of command. The course itself was two to three weeks of instruction and hands-on training in new equipment at the officers' basic branch school (armor, infantry, artillery, etc.), followed by two weeks of instruction in combined arms and issues of command at Fort Leavenworth.
For captains, the Army took a bolder step, by establishing a combined-arms services and staff school (the
