collective body of the Joint Chiefs, but only to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) and the Secretary of Defense. This simplified staff procedures and did away with the need to gain all service agreement on operational matters. In other words, before offering military advice to the President or Secretary of Defense, the Chairman JCS no longer required the total agreement of the service chiefs. Though the service chiefs were still senior advisers on national strategy, they were no longer involved in the day-to-day operational role. Meanwhile, because they were now free of individual service involvement, the authority of the Unified Commanders in areas around the world was significantly strengthened.
Joint education was to be required of all officers; all service schools were now to have a joint war-fighting curriculum approved and accredited by the Joint Staff; prior to promotion to flag rank, officers were required to serve in joint assignments; and those who qualified as CINCs would have to serve in a joint assignment as a flag officer.
Goldwater-Nichols was not an unqualified success. Though it gave the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman JCS, and the Joint Staff full authority to make the strategic analysis that would force decisions and trade-offs between service priorities, budget authority was left within service departments (so they could take care of their Title 10 responsibilities), and that invited bureaucratic maneuvering and interservice rivalry. Each service wanted to gain a larger share of the defense budget. That is still the case ten years and three JCS Chairmen later.
Goldwater-Nichols was an enormous adjustment for each service department, including the Army. Fortunately, and to its lasting benefit, in the summer of 1987 the Army chose as its new chief an officer uniquely suited for this transitional period, General Carl E. Vuono.
THE VUONO YEARS
General Carl Vuono came to be Army Chief as a man long immersed in the Army renaissance. He had not only lived it, he had increasingly helped to form some of its most important policies. He continued to do both as Army Chief.
In the late 1970s, Vuono had served General Starry as his chief for combat developments, and in that position, he had seen to it that the Army fielded the Big Five in a way that integrated training, organizational design, and equipment fielding so as to gain combat power in the shortest possible time. As commander of the 8th Infantry Division, he had stamped on that unit his own training beliefs and modernization plans, which would become a model for the rest of the Army. At Fort Leavenworth, from 1983 to 1985, as deputy TRADOC commander, he had completed the work on the new Army of excellence and had seen the establishment of SAMS and CAS3. From 1985 to 1986, as Army operations deputy for General Wickham, he had assisted General Bill Richardson in establishing the Joint Readiness Center at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, and later at Fort Polk, Louisiana. As TRADOC commander, he had published the first senior leadership doctrine manuals and committed to the establishment of the BCTP for division and corps commanders. He was uniquely qualified to be Army Chief.
Soon after he took over that position, Vuono laid out a vision for the Army. At its core is what he called a 'trained and ready Army' (exactly what the Goldwater-Nichols Act envisioned the service departments should have). He charged the Army with keeping its eye on balancing investments and energies among six imperatives: training, force modernization, war-winning doctrine, quality soldiers, 'leader development' (his term), and force structure — with the right mix of heavy, light, and special operating forces to fulfill missions of the CINCs.
Each of these six imperatives was important, but it was in training and leader development that Vuono was to leave his greatest legacy.
Vuono was long convinced that if leaders successfully grew other leaders, then that was their finest gift to succeeding Army generations — thus 'leader development.' Such development was a commander's responsibility, not a staff responsibility of the Department of the Army Chief for Personnel. It had to be related to the way the Army fought. Thus, he wanted leader development institutionalized at the Army's senior tactical war-fighting school at Fort Leavenworth. As we have already seen, that came to be embedded in a three-level approach: formal Army schooling, each level featuring standards that officers had to pass before they could move along to the next stage in their career; practical experience serving in units at various levels of responsibility, including the rigorous experiences of the NTC, JRTC, and BCTP; and self-development through private study, reading, and learning from others.
Vuono's chief training focus was in a rigorous combat simulation system — hands-on performance-oriented training. Believing that all training short of war was simulation, he had the Army combine computer-assisted simulations and live field maneuvers to give leaders and combat staffs the rigors of simulated combat. For the first time in the Army's history, every commander — from the individual tank commander on his crew-qualification Table VIII to the corps commander on his BCTP WARFIGHTER exercise — had to undergo a rigorous and stressful combat exercise. Every exercise was externally evaluated and followed by a series of AARs. Everyone had to perform to standard.
Vuono also had training practices codified into training doctrine. Long a believer that mission focus for wartime missions should drive training, he set out to write it into a manual, which was called FM 25-100.
FM 25-100 coined the term Mission-Essential Task List (METL). METL is a simple concept. A commander examines the wartime mission the theater commander has assigned him and from it determines the tasks necessary for its execution. Thus: Mission-Essential Tasks. Then he has his unit train for these tasks, which are then broken down further by echelon of command, down to individual tasks for soldiers. When FM 25-100 was in preparation, Vuono conducted a series of senior leader training conferences throughout the Army, personally involving other commanders in the composition of the manual. When that one was finished, he set about to produce a second manual, called FM 25-101, which was to provide further details for lower tactical echelons. Together, these standardized the Army's approach to training in schools and on the field.
As the end of the Cold War approached, Vuono set down three essential tasks for the Army during the transition years to a new strategic era:
• To win the wars the Army was called on to fight;
• To maintain readiness in the force not associated with those operations (remembering the deplorable state of readiness of our forces in Europe as they were systematically drawn down to fight in Vietnam);
• And to remain balanced in the six imperatives as the Army reshaped itself from its Cold War strength of over 1 million active and Reserve component strength to new levels.
GENERATIONS
Continuity of focus has been indispensable to the Army's recovery from Vietnam — a focus on training and readiness and the warrior spirit, while maintaining the ability to adapt as the strategic environment and resource availability changed. Such continuity was the consequence of the experience of four generations of leaders, each generation passing the torch to the next.
In the words of General Carl Vuono, the Army 'cannot afford a generation that does not have that focus.' Every Army generation must 'bring along a cadre of people who feel as strongly' about mission focus and staying trained and ready. For Vuono and all the generations of Army leaders, there could be no compromise.
The first generation was that of World War II combat leaders, with Korean War combat experience. These men were the commanders of divisions and higher echelons in Vietnam: Westmoreland, Abrams, Weyand, DePuy, Kerwin, Davison, Kroesen.
The second generation's entire service was in the Cold War. They either had combat experience in Korea; or they'd commanded at battalion or brigade level in Vietnam; and they'd been brigade, division, or corps commanders in the 1970s: Rogers, Meyer, Wickham, Starry, Otis, Cavazos, Richardson, Brown, Keith, Shoemaker, Gorman.
The third generation did command battalions in Vietnam, and had colonel-level command in the 1970s: Vuono, Thurman, Merritt, Lindsay, and Grange.
The fourth generation had Vietnam combat experience at company-grade and junior-field-grade levels; and in the Army of the 1970s, they had battalion-level command, from which vantage point they could see firsthand the
