• Recruiting/re-enlistment bonus money
• Family or community traditions
• A sense of adventure or patriotism
• A sense of belonging
For some, the Army is a path up from the gangs and violence of the inner city or the despair of poverty. For many it is an opportunity to make their own way in the world. All of these are reasons for young men or women to consider the Army as a place to start their adult lives or make a career. That has been the attraction or the Army for many men and women of all races, religions, and backgrounds. It is an organization that looks like the country that it protects, serves, and frequently represents to the rest of the world. It therefore is no surprise that when Americans are asked who they respect and trust most, several well-known ex-Army officers are at the top of the list.
The Enlisted Troops
To maintain its projected active-duty strength of around 500,000 personnel, the Army still needs over 100,000 new enlisted recruits per year.
Suppose that you’ve just graduated from high school (you have to be at least seventeen years old to enlist), and you drop in to see your local Army recruiter. (If you have a drug problem, or a police record for anything more serious than minor infractions, forget it.) The recruiter will ask what kind of training and career specialty you want to pursue in the Army, and describe all of the options available. There are a lot of them, and this may take some time if you have not thought out exactly what you want. If you check out okay, you will be asked to sign some papers, similar to a contract, in which you agree to enlist for a certain term of years (this varies with the chosen specialty—check out the current rules). Then you will be given a medical exam and processed for induction. There is a small ceremony in which you take an oath to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”
After induction, new recruits report for Basic Training, which lasts twelve weeks. Basic Training centers include Fort Knox in Kentucky, Fort Jackson in South Carolina, Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, Fort Lee in Virginia, Fort Benning in Georgia, and a number of other posts. From Hollywood movies, most people get the impression that Basic Training (better known as “Boot Camp”) is a cross between a prison chain gang and a Nazi concentration camp. But in practice, the Army has learned that harassment and brutality simply don’t work, especially with intelligent and motivated recruits. All the same, Basic Training is designed to be physically demanding and psychologically stressful, yet it is also designed to build small-unit cohesion, fitness, and self-esteem, along with some of the skills of soldiering.
The Army’s approach to training is centered around three principles: Task, Conditions, and Standards. Soldiers learn their jobs as a series of tasks, with conditions to be met, to a certain standard of performance. Thus, a typical training Task might be stated as:
The Conditions of the task might be:
The Standard might be:
The Army devotes tremendous effort to designing, developing, testing, and evaluating its training methods and materials. Soldiers want realistic hands-on training, and when this is not possible for reasons of cost or safety, it is often possible to provide simulators, mock-ups, and similar training devices. Standards are intentionally set high because for all the excitement and adventure of military service, it is a dangerous profession, where people can get hurt using equipment improperly. Army instructors are taught that if the student fails to learn, it is because the instructor failed to teach properly.
After graduating from Basic Training (if you fail the first time, you can cycle through it one more time), soldiers are assigned to Advanced Individual Training (AIT) in a particular branch or specialty. The branches of the Army fall into three main groups:• Combat—Infantry, Armor, Artillery.
• Combat Support—Aviation, Air Defense, Artillery, Engineers, Military Police, Military Intelligence, Signal, etc.
• Combat Service Support—Quartermaster, Transportation, Finance, Data Processing, etc.
At the completion of AIT, which typically takes from six to twenty-four weeks, the soldier receives his Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) Code. If you want to be an Armored Cavalry Scout, the MOS is 19D (pronounced Nineteen-Delta), and you would attend the Armor School at Fort Knox, Kentucky. If you want to be an Apache Helicopter Mechanic, the MOS is 67R (Sixty-Seven-Romeo in the vernacular of the trade), and you would attend the Aviation Maintenance school at Fort Rucker, Alabama. When soldiers graduate from AIT, they are given their first assignment and sent off to their first unit.
Enlisted soldiers advance through a series of nine grades of rank, starting with E-1 (private) through E-9 (sergeant major). Senior enlisted personnel are highly respected in the Army; it is not unusual for a wise officer to ask the senior NCO’s advice on tactical situations, or how to deal with a problem soldier. Such personnel are frequently college-educated, and you often find sergeants major (yes, that’s the proper plural form) with graduate degrees.
From the time of his first assignment, the life of an enlisted person can be summed up in just a few words: do your job, go to school, and prepare yourself for the next rank up the chain. Because of the Army’s force drawdown, the life is becoming more competitive. In a time of declining force levels, only those showing skill and promise are going to be retained.
On the other hand, there are jobs for Army enlisted troops that arc simply not available in any other branch of the military. For example, if you want to fly as a pilot in the U.S. Air Force, you have to be an officer. Not so in the Army. There is a tradition of “flying sergeants” going back decades; and when the Army decided to maintain an aviation arm after the Army-Air Force split in 1947, they decided to continue the tradition as a series of ranks for warrant officers (WOs). Warrant officers are former sergeants, with their own separate career path for jobs of high responsibility—such as the care and operation of a ten-million-dollar helicopter! The Army trusts enlisted soldiers with jobs just as important, responsibilities just as great, and objectives just as vital as those given to officers. In fact, the only thing an officer can do that an enlisted soldier can’t is command.
The Officer Corps
They range from cabinet-level officials in the government to second lieutenants commanding platoons, and yet they all have one thing in common: the trust of a nation to use their best judgment to fulfill their duty. That is a big responsibility, as the last few years have shown. The Army expects a lot from its officers.
Just before the 1991 Persian Gulf War, it was top Army officers in Washington D.C., particularly General Colin Powell, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and General Carl Vuono, the Chief of Staff of the Army, who briefed the Bush administration on how a war against Iraq to liberate Kuwait could be fought and won with acceptable risks and casualties.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, some of the Army’s most junior officers were preparing to lead their soldiers into combat. It was, in fact, three young Army officers, Dan Miller, H. R. McMaster, and Joe Sartiano, each leading a troop from the 2nd Squadron of the 2nd ACR, who made first contact with the security elements of Iraq’s Republican Guard, fighting the decisive ground action of the Gulf War. Three captains, not one of them more than twenty-eight years of age, made on-the-spot judgments that determined where the rest of General Franks’ VII Corps would fight. What does General Franks think about the quality of their initiative today? The three young officers “did exactly what I would have done,” he says.
What a difference from a quarter century ago, when Army junior officers were regarded as the least professional officers in the U.S. military—and some were “fragged” (shot in the back by their own troops)!
That difference is due to the intellectual and professional growth of the commissioned officer corps of the Army. Note that word commissioned. A soldier is enlisted in the Army for a certain term of years, and may be offered the opportunity to re-enlist (much like a contract). But an officer is c
ommissioned. The commission of an Army officer asks many things of the person accepting it. These might best be summed up by the motto of West Point: “Duty, honor, country.” Depending on performance and the needs of the service, an officer may hold that commission until the age of retirement. But let’s look at the start of the journey.
An Army officer’s career usually begins after high school, when a young person decides to join up. Then comes college, an experience which is of great interest to the Army. And the interest is not passive either. For it can help a teenager afford a college education in a number of ways. These include:• Appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York.
• Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) scholarship programs at major colleges and universities.
From these programs, as well as from Officer Candidate Schools (for young enlisted soldiers who already have college degrees), come second lieutenants (also known as “butter bars” from the golden color of their insignia of rank), the raw material of the Army officer corps.
From the start of his or her career, the officer has one goal—move up or move out. Officers can only be passed over for promotion two times before they are forced out of the Army. And currently, lieutenants trying for promotion to captain only get one try. Like their enlisted counterparts, they face the problem of a declining force size in the Army.
Since being qualified to do a lot is the best way to stay in, the post-Vietnam generation of Army officers is the best-educated officer corps that America has ever put into the field. It is expected that in the course of a twenty-year-plus career, an officer will obtain a graduate degree and constantly seek out professional educational opportunities. Some of the more interesting of these are:• The Army War College at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C.
• The Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
• The School of Advanced Military Studies, the graduates of which are known as “Jedi Knights.”
• Specialized training schools, duty as exchange officers, and advanced degrees from civilian universities.
The result of all this training is that as a group, the officers in the U.S. Army today are the most professional in the country’s history. Many are also, of course, veterans of combat in the Persian Gulf, Panama, Somalia, and other places. Combat experience tests the war-fighting skills and effectiveness of a military force. Other things help, but the victorious combat experience of those young captains and majors will help maintain the Army’s war-fighting skills for another generation. And that will be good for everyone they command.
Command is the ultimate goal of a professional officer. Luckily, the Army’s organization allows a large percentage of the officer corps to gain early command experience as platoon and company/troop leaders. It also gives the Army an opportunity to evaluate them: Based upon their performance as commanders of small units, it selects those best qualified for command of larger units. This does not necessarily guarantee that the best officers always rise to the top, but it does tend to push the ones with talent and potential into positions of responsibility, where their management skills, initiative, and leadership under stress can be fairly evaluated.
The Road to the National Training Center
The goal of any Army combat unit is to be ready to deploy and, if necessary, be ready for combat. How does a commander like Colonel Young of the 3rd ACR take the newly schooled soldiers sent to him by the Recruiting Command, mix them with the equipment and soldiers he already has, and make them combat-ready? The Army has a habit of rotating and promoting people in such a way that maintaining readiness is a constant challenge. Colonel Young’s responsibility as the regimental commander is to maintain the fine instrument left to him by the previous commander, Colonel (now Brigadier General) Robert R. Ivany. Luckily, the Army has a whole series of training opportunities and exercises designed to help their unit commander do just that. This training cycle is set up so that at the end of it—the “final exam”—the whole regiment gets to find out just how well it has done. This final exam is called the National Training Center (NTC).
The National Training Center Concept
NTC was created because of the generally poor performance of U.S. Army units in Vietnam. It is designed to be a force-on-force training environment where units up to regiment and brigade size can maneuver and fight in a simulated war zone for a period of weeks. Located at Fort Irwin, California, in the Mojave Desert (near Barstow, California, south of Death Valley), NTC gives Army units the chance to do their fighting in a controlled environment. The concept for NTC came from a study of early combat experience that indicated that soldiers and units in action for the first time suffered the worst casualties. For example, the Navy found that if a pilot survived his first ten missions over North Vietnam’s formidable air defenses, he was much more likely to survive the next ninety. The studies indicated that the stresses of combat and the confusion of battle tended to make young pilots almost inept for a time, until they learned to create the “mental filters” that allow a combat veteran to distinguish what is critical to survival from what can safely be ignored. Pilots call it “situational awareness,” and it is the characteristic that separates an ace from a corpse. The Navy’s answer to this problem was the creation of the famous Top Gun fighter weapons school, and later the Strike University at NAS Fallon in Nevada. So successful was the Top Gun program that the Air Force opened a similar school-house for warriors at Nellis AFB, Nevada, under the name Red Flag.
The Army also realized the benefits of such a program; and at the same time it wanted to create a training center to teach the art of the new maneuver-style warfare that was emerging as its standard doctrine. The wide Mojave Desert in California was an obvious location, and Fort Irwin, outside Barstow, California, became available in the early 1980s. Fort Irwin was a vast, decrepit old post, almost unused since General Patton trained armored units there in the 1940s. It took years of work and lots of taxpayer money to build up the facilities; and even now construction (particularly of base housing) continues. What makes Fort Irwin such a perfect place for practicing maneuver warfare is summed up in one word: space. The NTC complex at Fort Irwin covers about 1,000 square miles/3,050 square kilometers (about the size of Rhode Island), all completely open and government-owned. Another advantage is that no one cares much about the place. It is as barren a desert as America has to offer, and operations there are unlikely to disrupt civilian activities. Nor are there natural features that outsiders care about—except for the world’s largest desert tortoise hatchery and a rare species of brine shrimp inhabiting the seasonal dry lakes of the region (and the Army is concerned about protecting these). Otherwise, it is a really big and dusty playing field. Though temperatures in the summer are extreme, rising to over 110°F/44°C regularly, still, all that room makes it the perfect sandbox to practice the art of war. Resident at the NTC is a simulated Soviet-style motor-rifle regiment staffed by Army soldiers called the Opposing Force (OPFOR). And the entire NTC facility is instrumented, to allow recording and playback of entire battles. A unit and its commanders can therefore learn exactly what they did wrong (and right) in battle against the OPFOR.
Units deploy to Fort Irwin for three-to-five-week “rotations,” which are designed to test basic combat skills of gunnery and maneuver, plus supporting skills, such as logistics, combat medicine, and maintenance. All of this is designed to be a pure twenty-four-hours-a-day learning experience that encourages participants to do new things and be innovative, as well as teaching officers and troops to maneuver in a realistic environment. All of this is obviously very expensive; yet the experience gained teaches lessons that cannot be simulated on a computer, or played out at a unit’s home base. More important, the experience pays incredible dividends in terms of lives saved and victories won when units go into combat for real. (According to many returning Desert Storm veterans, combat in the Iraqi and Kuwaiti desert was just like it was at NTC, except that the Iraqis weren’t as good sas OPFOR!
) To put all this another way, failure in any area of the operational art will result in a failure of the unit in real combat, and so it is at the NTC.
Let’s look at how Colonel Young and his troopers got ready for their 1993 NTC rotation.
Getting Ready
The 3rd ACR began to get ready for Fort Irwin in the late spring of 1993. The previous year, the regiment had sent only its 1st and 3rd Armored Cavalry Squadrons to NTC. Now Colonel Young would take the rest of the regiment to Fort Irwin, while 3rd Squadron deployed for an exercise in Kuwait (Operation Intrinsic Action 94-1). In order that the rest of the regiment would be better prepared for the coming NTC rotation, 3rd Squadron was used as an OPFOR unit for it to practice against. Since Fort Bliss butts up against the White Sands missile test range, the 3rd ACR enjoys the advantage of an enormous “back-yard” for maneuver and practice. In fact, the 3rd ACR has more room to maneuver than the whole III Corps facility at Fort Hood, Texas.
Meanwhile, since many of the Gulf War veterans had rotated out to other positions and most of the soldiers needed to requalify with their weapons, a program of live-fire gunnery “tables” was set up on a desert range north of Fort Bliss in June and July of 1993 (they are called “tables” because the scoring sheet is set up in rows and columns, with boxes for the evaluator to check off). Each table tests a different set of gunnery skills for a particular type of vehicle. It usually requires maneuvering up to firing positions, followed by a series of live-fire engagements with “pop-up” targets. Each vehicle crew must complete all twelve tables to be considered “qualified” in gunnery. The qualification process was long and dusty, with almost 200 3rd ACR crews requiring certification. When it was over, all the crews of 1st Squadron (Lieutenant Colonel Toby W. Martinez) and 2nd Squadron (Lieutenant Colonel Norman Greczyn) were fully qualified. These two units, along with the rest of the regiment (except for 3rd Squadron under Lieutenant Colonel Karl J. Gunzelman), were scheduled to move out prior to Labor Day weekend 1993 for the NTC rotation to Fort Irwin.