June 6, 2005


On June 14, we will celebrate the Army’s 230th birthday. It is an appropriate time to reflect on the Army’s call to duty and its 230 years of service to the nation.

We do this at the instant that our Army is fully engaged in fighting and winning the Global War on Terrorism while transforming itself in the most dramatic fashion since World War II.

Sixty years ago this summer, World War II was ending. It was a war in which armor and air power came to the fore. It was also a war being fought along defined fronts using mass often conscripted forces and centralized control. It was a war of the industrial age.

Now, we are more than three years into the war against terrorism and two years since the overthrow of the regime of Saddam Hussein. It is a war in which satellites, computers, sensors and intelligence dissemination are increasingly valuable. It is a war being fought globally usually without fronts in a 360-degree battle space, and for the United States particularly, using new organizations relying on well-trained volunteers and a more decentralized control. It is war in the information age.

This dramatic change did not follow a single linear path of advance. It was a change that occurred in a world of domestic politics and evolving strategic environment.

To look at the United States Army now and what it will become, it is important to look back this pivotal earlier era.

As we look back over 60 years at the Allied forces in Europe and the Pacific, what now seems to have been inevitable was anything but in September 1939 when Hitler and Stalin invaded Poland, setting in train the most destructive war in human history. Indeed, the idea of a victory over Germany’s Nazis and Italy’s fascists appeared even more illusory with the fall of France in 1940.

At the same time, the Japanese were devouring more and more of China.

In those days and months leading up to the American entry into World War II, Gen. Catlett Marshall sought to measure that Army against European standards in a series of exercises known as the Louisiana Maneuvers. Emerging from these exercises was the realization of the need for tough, realistic training [the necessity of time] with modern equipment [the necessity of resources].

As the Allied leaders met at Yalta in early February1945 with the Nazi regime collapsing and the Japanese being driven back to the home islands, mass mattered on the battlefield.
The dropping of the atomic bomb would be the culmination of industrial age warfare.

Although the Allies had worked together in unheard of ways to defeat the common enemy in Germany, Italy and Japan, they were already splitting apart over the political future of millions of people in Europe. It was obvious as early as the Allies summer meeting in Potsdam, a suburb of Berlin.

The longer run reality was the Cold War, a war that lasted 45 years.

From this post war reality and threat came the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

The United States Army was to play a pivotal role by providing security and stability in the birth of democracy and the emergence of a free economy in the western sectors of Germany, indeed Western Europe and Turkey. The physical presence of hundreds of thousands of American soldiers was a visible reminder to Europeans and the Soviet Union that the United States took its leadership role seriously.

The reality was different.

The United States returned to its habits following all its wars. The months following V-E and V-J Days were marked by rapid demobilization of American land, air and sea forces and the mothballing of equipment. Army and Navy spending was slashed in the years after victory was achieved even as the United States reorganized its security and intelligence operations with the creation of the Defense Department and Central Intelligence Agency.

When North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950, the American Army in Japan lacked the necessary realistic training [shortage of ammunition, modern equipment and area of fire and maneuver] to respond effectively to modern Soviet-built tanks and the overwhelming numbers of infantry.

“Task Force Smith” fought bravely. But without the anti-tank weapons critical to success against armor, the outnumbered Americans soldiers could not stop the North Koreans.

The lesson preached by Marshall a decade earlier of the necessity of having time to train and the resources to make that training realistic and effective was proven again.
The United States Army was still largely a Cold War force, relying heavily on conscription for manpower, when it fought in Vietnam, but a force that was open to innovation – special forces, air assault, airborne gunships, riverine operations and assisting regional popular forces in defending their homes.

What changed following the Vietnam War was the development of a voluntary and professional Army. A renewed emphasis was placed on making the Army “a learning institution” that made the United States Army’s noncommissioned officer corps the catalyst for instilling Army standards throughout the force.

A second major change was placing a number of military skills into the Army’s two reserve components. Called the “Abrams Doctrine,” after then chief of staff Gen. Creighton Abrams, the idea was the United States would never go to war again without its reserve forces. The power of integrating these forces was first seen in Desert Shield/Desert Storm, the peacekeeping mission to the Sinai, the peace enforcement missions to the Balkans and amply demonstrated in Operations Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Integration – jointness – was the third change affecting not only the Army but all the services.

The early 1980s was also the time when the Army had the resources to buy the modern equipment – the Abrams main battle tank, the Bradley fighting vehicle, the Black Hawk medium-lift helicopter, the Apache attack helicopter and the Patriot air defense system. These weapon systems would play a decisive role in Operations Desert Shield/Desert Storm a decade later in liberating Kuwait.

And Marshall’s lesson on training was not forgotten with the establishment of world class training centers at Forts Irwin and Polk in the United States and Hohenfels in Germany.

As these changes in equipment, structure, organization and doctrine were unfolding, the Soviet Union collapsed and the intense focus on protecting Western Europe, in particular, from an invasion the east was gone. Western governments were pulled to declare “peace dividend” and put the “defense savings” toward social works.

A hoped for “new world order” never developed. Instead, there was the chaos and humanitarian crisis of Somalia, the political anarchy of Haiti, the ethnic cleansing sweeping the Balkans, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the wake of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, the ongoing struggle with drug cartels in South America and the rise in terrorism across the globe.

Each of these challenges demonstrated to the United States Army the need to be prepared for the full spectrum of military operations.

In Desert Shield/Desert Storm, working with a coalition of nations with differing technological capabilities, the United States Army and the other services used the power of information in deconflicting air space, coordinating fires and maneuvering safely and quickly across featureless terrain using global positioning systems to defeat a well-armed but poorly trained and led enemy.

This was the cusp of the information age warfare.

The power of information, shared by many and acted upon quickly, was a capability that the United States Army led the way in developing.

A second major lesson from the 1990s was the need for the Army to become more agile, versatile, lethal and survivable and to remain relevant. An important step was the quick fielding of the Interim Brigade Combat Team, designed to be a force that was more lethal than the Army’s light forces and more agile than its heavy forces. Now called the Stryker Brigade Combat Teams, this move was far larger than fielding a new wheeled vehicle. It required a new kind of organization with different kinds of units organic to it, i.e. the reconnaissance, surveillance and target acquisition, and different tactics, techniques and procedures.

Much of what was learned with Stryker has been folded into the Army’s Campaign Plan for the future.

The campaign plan can be divided into three parts. It is designed to stabilize the lives of soldiers and their families by allowing them to stay for longer periods of time at an installation and giving them roots in a community, create modular units that have similar characteristics in the active and reserve components and examine 100,000 positions to determine whether they should be filled by a soldier or civilian and if so should the position be in the active or reserve component.

The goal is to create a large pool of agile, cohesive and deployable units.

The campaign plan rests on the understanding that stabilizing a soldier’s life increases predictability and readiness. The stabilization synchronizes the soldier’s tour with the 36-month operational cycle of the unit. It minimizes attrition for deployed units, is focused on brigade combat teams and focuses personnel moves into the time in which the combat unit is being reset.

In addition to creating a larger pool of units, i.e. moving from 33 brigades in the active force to 43 or possibly 48 in five years and from 15 enhanced separate brigades to 33 modular ones in the Army National Guard, the stand-alone units will be more adaptable to the range of missions. They also will be more easily tailored for specific missions and more integrated with other Army units, other services and coalition forces. These modular units in addition to having a standardized design will be capable of more rapid deployment.

By the start of 2005, 40,000 positions have been reviewed and soldiers from field artillery, air defense, engineer, armor and some logistics units have been retrained and sent to military police, transportation, civil affairs, special operations, biological detection and military intelligence units.

Over 60 years, the Army has changed in many ways. It is now a more joint and United States-based, but expeditionary force that is more agile and responsive to the changing threat. It, however, has remained focused on its core competencies of being able to sustain the spectrum of military missions and operations.

Marshall’s lessons remain as true today as they were when World War II began. To meet its responsibility to win the nation’s wars and deter potential enemies, the Army needs the resources and tough realistic training that allow every soldier to live the warrior ethos.

This is what we recall on the Army’s birthday.