CHAPTER 22

DePuy’s great rebuilding

After the 1991 Gulf War, when Americans wanted to know how the U.S. Army had improved so radically in the sixteen years since the fall of Saigon, they were told about a quiet but sweeping rebuilding—of new weapons, better soldiers, and revamped thinking about how to fight. These accounts of that transformation were accurate—to a point. What was less noticed at the time was that the great rebuilding had also contained some shortcomings that would hobble the Army many years later in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In 1973, Creighton Abrams, who had led the relief of the besieged 101st Airborne Division during the Battle of the Bulge, again would ride to the rescue of his service when he replaced Westmoreland as Army chief of staff. It was not inevitable that Abrams would be picked to lead the Army. President Nixon did not like Abrams and in fact had discussed with Henry Kissinger whether to relieve him as commander in Vietnam, according to Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, and others. At one point in 1971, Nixon, upset with Abrams, had ordered Alexander Haig, then an Army brigadier general, to depart immediately for Vietnam to replace him. The ambitious, self-confident Haig knew that the idea of a one-star general stepping in was ridiculous, but, being Haig, he still was tempted: “I had no doubt that I could do the job.” However, the secretary of defense, Melvin Laird, admired Abrams, and Laird had won a promise from Nixon that he could make his own personnel decisions, so Abrams stayed in place. Still, the discussions about who would succeed Westmoreland dragged on, and Abrams was nominated just twelve days before Westmoreland was to step down.

As Abrams awaited confirmation, he had a conversation with Maj. Gen. Donn Starry, who warned him, “Your Army is on its ass.” It was—and he was determined to change that. The Grant-like Abrams—compact, solid, thoughtful, cigar-smoking, hard-drinking, slouching, and grouchy—would initiate the rebuilding of the Army. The process began with the creation of an “expeditious discharge program” to try to clean the Army’s ranks of drug addicts, gang members, and other troublemakers. Under this process, which sidestepped a court-martial, the U.S. Army in Europe ejected thirteen hundred soldiers in just four months. Barry McCaffrey, by then a battalion commander in Germany, would spend weekends with his company commanders assembling lists of “bad apple” soldiers. On Monday mornings, he would assemble the full battalion with a truck standing nearby. The names of those to be ejected would be read off, and those called out were put on the truck. When the loaded vehicle pulled out and headed to the discharge office, he said, “the full battalion would cheer to get rid of these bums.”

In the following years, the Army also modernized its gear, made its training radically more realistic, and developed thoughtful new manuals for how to take on the Red Army in Central Europe, giving it a chance of prevailing even though it would fight the Russians outnumbered. Yet in the process of rebuilding, Abrams and his subordinates appear to have planted some of the seeds of problems that would plague the Army in Iraq and Afghanistan thirty years later. “In 1973, I was present for a lecture by General Creighton Abrams,” recalled a Marine officer who had served in Vietnam. “He declared that the Army was turning its back on counterinsurgency forever.” That year the Army War College dropped its required five-week course in unconventional warfare. This officer concluded, “That was the decision that caused the Army to stumble so badly in Iraq for the first three years.”

Abrams’s influence over the Army’s renewal, though positive, was limited. He soon was stricken with cancer, though he remained in office. Into the vacuum stepped William DePuy, who in the mid-1970s would become, in the assessment of one Army historian, “arguably, the most important general in the U.S. Army” and, in the view of another, “likely the most important figure in the recovery of the United States Army” from its collapse after the defeat in Vietnam. “What DePuy did was take a broken Army and fix it so it could fight in Europe under the conditions that prevailed,” said Henry Gole, his biographer. For a spell, a fast-rising young officer, one Lt. Col. Colin Powell, worked for DePuy at the Pentagon. (In another sign of the extensive intergenerational connections in the Army, Powell reported in that post directly to Maj. Gen. Herbert McChrystal Jr., father of the general who would command in Afghanistan four decades later.)

On July 1, 1973, DePuy took command of the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC). It was a newly created headquarters, designed by him to bring together, for the first time, the Army’s efforts on training, research, and doctrine—the last of these being essentially how the service thinks about how to fight. The Army was out of Vietnam, and DePuy was focused on its future, which he saw as conventional, tank-heavy battles in Europe. When the fourth Arab-Israeli conflict (also known as the Yom Kippur War, the Ramadan War, or the October War) broke out that fall, he made the lessons and implications of the Israeli counterattack the centerpiece of his efforts to modernize and refocus the Army. The Arab forces, Soviet-trained and equipped, were a reasonable facsimile of what the U.S. Army would face on the plains of Central Europe if the superpowers ever went to war. DePuy also radically improved the Army’s training efforts, beginning by doing away with mind-numbing time-based training, in which a certain number of hours were to be spent on each basic task in a soldier’s field, and replaced it with a competence-based system. “The soldier moved to the next sequential task only after he had demonstrated competence at the basic level,” wrote Gole.

DePuy and his subordinates, most notably Starry and another rising general, Paul Gorman, studied the Navy’s Fighter Weapons School, which had been established after the Navy calculated that 40 percent of its pilots flying over North Vietnam were lost during their first three hostile engagements and that 90 percent of those who made it through that first set of fights survived their entire tours of duty. The Navy had established the school, better known as Top Gun, in 1969, to better prepare new pilots by having them fly against experienced ones using Soviet-based tactics. Graduates of this Navy school, which was made famous by a 1986 Tom Cruise film, fared far better flying over North Vietnam, while Air Force pilots, many of them operating the same sort of aircraft but lacking this new training, continued to suffer the same loss ratios.

The Army set out to create its own version of this realistic training with the new National Training Center (NTC) at Fort Irwin, in the high Mojave Desert of California. The thousand-square-mile center, which would finally open in 1980, after DePuy retired, confronted visiting units with a smart, wily, live enemy, “the Opposition Force.” Rather than have “who won” decided in arguments afterward, the forces were equipped with laser guns and receptors, which fairly accurately detected who had shot first and best, making the exercises more realistic. In addition, “observer-controllers” monitored the battlefield and gave commanders tough reviews after each round of maneuvers. By coincidence, the new training center opened just as the Army, after much hard work, began to attract smarter, more disciplined volunteers. Not only did the center improve the skills of soldiers, but the tough training gave platoons, companies, and battalions new confidence in themselves and their leaders. After the 1991 Gulf War, it would be commonplace for soldiers to report that the fighting they had seen had not been as hard as going through maneuvers at the National Training Center.

DePuy also correctly read the trend in military operations toward more sophisticated weaponry, and the implications of that for raising and training a force. This was not a foregone conclusion. At the time, there was a small but influential movement in Congress and among some defense intellectuals and journalists for equipping the military with large numbers of smaller, less expensive weapons. DePuy, seeming to anticipate the coming of computerized warfare, moved in the opposite direction. There would need to be a higher ratio of leaders to troops, he concluded, with smaller units and more intense training. “We cannot have the best man on a $200 typewriter while a less-qualified soldier operates a million-dollar tank,” he wrote in 1978. He threw his institutional weight behind the development of five new weapons systems: the Abrams tank, the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, the Patriot antiaircraft system, the Apache attack helicopter, and the Black Hawk transport helicopter. They were accompanied by a revolution in the weapons used by the other services, with, among other advances, precision-guided munitions, stealthy fighters and bombers, and unmanned aircraft for both reconnaissance and strike missions. James Kitfield, author of the best book on the post-Vietnam military, also credits DePuy with helping to create the Army’s semi-secret Delta Force, its elite Special Operations counterterror unit.

This is how David Barno, a general who served in the Army in the late twentieth century and commanded in the war in Afghanistan in 2004–5, summarized the post-Vietnam reconstruction of the Army:

It not only ensured that the best weapons systems for conventional war against the Soviets got top priority, but it also matched them with organizational changes to optimize their performance in battle (a new infantry and armor battalion organization), a rigorous self-critical training methodology (including massive free-play armored force-on-force laser battles), advanced ranges and training simulators for mechanized warfare, and perhaps most importantly, the recruitment and leadership of extraordinarily high quality personnel who were bright, motivated, and superbly trained to make best use of the emerging new concepts and high-tech equipment being fielded. These innovations that grew out of the massive infusion of resources in the 1980s remain the cornerstone of the Army as an institution today. Their long-term influence on Army cultural and institutional preferences cannot be overstated.

Out at Fort Leavenworth, Maj. Gen. John Cushman also was thinking about rebuilding the Army. Cushman had grown up in the interwar Army: He was born in China in 1921 and lived there when his father was a captain in the 15th Infantry Regiment, serving as adjutant under the regimental executive officer, George Marshall, and also serving alongside another young officer, Matthew Ridgway.

In the early 1970s, Cushman commanded the 101st Division when it came home from Vietnam. From that post he moved to take command at Leavenworth in 1973. There, he looked for ways to complement DePuy’s tactical rebuilding with an ethical and intellectual rejuvenation. Despite the findings of the 1970 Army War College study that the Army’s professional ethic had been badly eroded, ethics were still considered primarily the domain of the Army’s Chaplain Corps, not an influential group. In leading the Army’s Command and General Staff College at Leavenworth, Cushman was struck by how much students craved discussions of “basic questions such as honesty, candor, and the freedom to fail.” His ensuing sessions with them only intensified their interest, so in March 1974 he held his first symposium on officer responsibility with students and about one hundred guests, including fifteen generals. He began by posing a series of questions about how to raise standards and create an environment of integrity, and the role of generals in making that environment routine. One of the speakers was Lt. Gen. Peers, who had investigated the leadership failures surrounding the My Lai massacre.

Generals who were accustomed to deference from officers far junior to them were taken aback at the free-flying atmosphere at the Leavenworth symposium. “It was tough, direct, and pointed and heated—and some of those generals got hurt—bad,” recalled Col. Dandridge Malone.

One officer stood to talk about “dishonest demands coming down, dishonest reports going up.”

“I never tolerated that in my division,” responded one of the generals.

“I was in your division,” the younger officer said.

“Lock your heels,” the general said, using an abrupt phrase for ordering a subordinate to come to attention to prepare for an upbraiding.

Brig. Gen. Morris Brady, in a memorandum summarizing the proceedings of the symposium, wrote that the feeling among the younger officers was that “the more senior an officer is, the more likely it is that he has compromised his integrity in order to achieve success. . . . From the students’ perspective, we have created an environment that encourages professional immorality.”

In the following days, Gen. Abrams began hearing complaints and sent a query: “What the hell happened out there at Leavenworth?” He eventually was persuaded that passion about ethics was a positive sign.

Others were even less enthusiastic about Cushman’s initiative than Abrams, most notably William DePuy, to whom Cushman reported. Both men were described by others as stubborn and brilliant, but DePuy, by then one of the most powerful generals in the Army, also was described by some as determined to run things his way. He “did not want a dialogue he could not control,” Maj. Paul Herbert concluded in an Army monograph. What’s more, the two generals had differences dating back a decade, over the approach DePuy had devised to fight in Vietnam. As Cushman would put it,

In 1964–67 I had taken exception to Bill DePuy’s approach to fighting in Vietnam, having heard enough for me to believe that both as General Westmoreland’s J-3 and then as division commander he had misunderstood the nature of the war, downrating pacification and emphasizing massive search and destroy operations by U.S. forces, while allowing those to shunt aside ARVN [Army of the Republic of Vietnam] troops and to take insufficient note of province and local forces and their advisors who were in the closest touch with the people.

In 1974, the fundamental difference between the two men, as Cushman saw it, was that DePuy was teaching the Army how to fight, while Cushman was complementing that work by teaching Army officers how to think about fighting. Both are necessary, but DePuy seemed to believe that he did not have the resources for both and that the first would have to take priority. He made it clear that he was not interested in sponsoring introspective studies of Army professional issues. He told his subordinate commanders that he had seen “the Army War College being thrown into lots of projects which really didn’t inspire me much. These projects included surveys of what made lieutenant colonels unhappy, and others which I felt stirred up more bloody problems than they solved.” When he visited Leavenworth, he undercut Cushman’s educational efforts, telling the students at one point, “All I want from this class is ten battalion commanders.”

DePuy was aware of his critics, who muttered that his reforms produced commanders who did not understand war. As the general himself later recalled, “They said that DePuy is going to cause a lacuna which is going to create a whole generation of idiots who all know how to clean a rifle but who don’t know ‘why’ we have an Army. I didn’t lose a lot of sleep over that because we do have a system that begins to answer the question of how to train an officer.” This “lacuna” is, of course, close to what happened two decades later as the generation of astrategic officers trained under DePuy became the generals fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan—most notably Tommy R. Franks and Ricardo Sanchez—but no one could have known that back in the 1970s when DePuy mounted this defense of his efforts.

DePuy fired off a series of letters to Cushman, warning that he did not like Cushman’s contemplative direction at Leavenworth. As Abrams succumbed to his cancer, he was less able to shield Cushman from DePuy, who did not have a lot of time for working out his differences with subordinates. “Nice warm human relationships are satisfying and fun, but they are not the purpose of an Army,” he instructed other senior officers at Fort Benning the same year that he was confronting Cushman.

A year later, in April 1975, Cushman convened a second symposium on ethics and leadership. It was held at Leavenworth at an anguishing moment, just as the North Vietnamese tanks rolled into Saigon and the last American helicopters lifted off the roofs of U.S. government installations there. Cushman ended the symposium with a prayer for all those who had suffered in Vietnam. He asked that those present “be examples of the soldierly virtues.” Then he looked up and said to the hundreds of assembled officers, “Now just go quietly out of here.” It was a fitting emotional end to America’s long, misbegotten war in Southeast Asia.

•    •    •

DePuy clashed even more with Cushman over the other part of his command: doctrine. Updating the Army’s capstone manual, then known as “FM 100-5: Operations,” was traditionally the job of the commander at Fort Leavenworth and the handful of trusted subordinates to whom he delegated the actual work of drafting.

Their fundamental philosophical differences made a clash between the two generals inevitable. It began during the drafting of the operations manual. “Major General Cushman believed that an organization worked best when liberated, to the degree possible, from the artificial constraints placed on the tremendous creative potential of the group,” wrote Maj. Herbert in his history of the FM 100-5 manual during this time. “General DePuy believed that real initiative was rare in human beings and that an organization functioned best when its members were frequently told in simple terms what to do.” DePuy’s loyalists, such as Gen. Donn Starry, who would succeed him at TRADOC, thought Cushman was deeply in the wrong. “General Jack Cushman at Leavenworth led the surge of resentment about the 1976 edition of FM 100-5—Active Defense,” Starry said in his oral history. “I have characterized that many times as probably the greatest act of institutional and individual disloyalty I have ever had the chance to observe.”

As was probably also inevitable, DePuy rejected the draft Cushman had delivered and took over the job himself. DePuy was preparing for a big war. “Don’t get too lofty or philosophical,” he admonished the officers he picked to work with him on the manual. “Wars are won by draftees and reserve officers. Write so they can understand.”

In 1976, DePuy published the edition of the manual that quickly became known as the “Active Defense” version. It provoked a huge and healthy debate inside the Army. While his version was eventually repudiated, and replaced in 1982 by the “AirLand Battle” edition of FM 100-5, he succeeded in elevating the role of doctrine itself and so revitalized thinking in the Army about its core missions. In the second half of the 1970s, Military Review, one of the Army’s leading professional journals, would carry more than eighty articles on aspects of the new manual. DePuy made the drafting of doctrine—once considered drone work for second-rate midcareer staffers—a core function, the business of generals. This new emphasis made the Army, as an institution, mull basic strategic questions: Who are we? What are we trying to do? How are we to do it—that is, how should we fight? Ironically, while repudiating Cushman personally, DePuy had, to a degree, moved the Army into precisely the realm of thinking he had shunned but that Cushman had advocated.

By spotlighting doctrine, DePuy also helped wrest control of the strategic discussion back from civilians, who had become dominant in that sphere during the 1950s as nuclear weaponry grew to overshadow all other questions of warfare. As historian and strategic expert Hew Strachan later put it, in that difficult post-Vietnam recovery phase, “doctrine became one device by which it [the Army] sought to reassert its professional self-worth.”

But the manual also contained deep flaws that resulted partly from DePuy’s feud with Cushman. DePuy had emphasized the “synchronization” of military operations, which he saw as the temporal equivalent of concentrating forces physically. This would prove to be a mixed legacy. Overseen by a master of the battlefield, it was a useful tool, concluded his biographer, retired Army Col. Henry Gole. But in the hands of lesser officers, this approach tended to intensify the Army’s inclination to follow cumbersome procedures that actually undercut combat effectiveness. In the 1991 Gulf War, wrote retired Army Col. Richard Swain, efforts to follow the idea of synchronization, of getting all the parts working together to greater effect, would become “the molasses in the system . . . a drag on opportunism.”

More important, DePuy’s manual was very much a product of the late Cold War. It emphasized training, which prepares soldiers for the known, far more than education, which prepares them to deal with the unknown. “DePuy wanted USACGSC [the Army’s Command and General Staff College] to train its students to be experts at handling a division in combat,” wrote Maj. Herbert. “Cushman wanted to educate students as well as to train them, to make them think, to enrich them personally and professionally, and to prepare them intellectually for all their years as field grade officers.” DePuy readily conceded that he favored training over education. “We were tactical guys by self-definition and preference,” he said later.

In truth, both DePuy and Cushman were correct about the necessary focus—DePuy in the short run and Cushman in the long one. DePuy’s approach fit a time when the predictable enemy was the Soviet Union, when even the ground on which a confrontation with the forces of the Warsaw Pact would take place was well known. During the Cold War, some U.S. Army officers stationed in West Germany would take their families for Sunday picnics at the spots near Fulda where they expected to emplace their tanks to face the Red Army. There was little need for generals who were strategic thinkers, because the strategic threat at the time was obvious: It was the Soviet Union. The ways to deal with the Red Army remained fairly constant: Find ways to slow it down while fighting outnumbered, so that artillery, rockets, and aircraft could begin to even the balance by what was called, rather bizarrely, “servicing targets.” “In a very real sense, it was a simple world model from the political-military point of view,” Army Col. Donald Bletz noted in 1974. “The threat was clear, and not only the need for military force but also the nature of that force was clear and broadly accepted.” DePuy’s emphasis on tactical competence was necessary but not sufficient. His approach “courted the dangers of oversimplification, rigidity and impermanence,” noted Herbert.

Be that as it may, he was in control—and intolerant of other approaches. “Dear Jack,” DePuy wrote to Cushman in October 1975. “As you know, I am deeply concerned about the ability of our colonels and lieutenant colonels to lead their commands in the first battle of the next war.” This was certainly his core concern, and he was determined to yank Cushman away from strategic thinking and ethical philosophizing. So he instructed Cushman to “design a refresher course in tactical leadership” for such officers headed to combat commands. It was as if DePuy had determined that future commanders, as well as Cushman, would take remedial instruction.

Cushman’s approach to the manual was influenced by the Vietnam War, which was hardly mentioned in DePuy’s 1976 edition of 100-5. His emphasis on strategic considerations was better for preparing officers for ambiguity, for handling crises involving a less understood foe, perhaps in parts of the world new to Americans and their Army. As Herbert notes, it would have been better if the two men had been able to resolve their differences and give Army officers both what they needed at the time and what they would need in the future. But DePuy and Cushman could not find such a compromise. The result was that, in the 1970s and 1980s, the Army for the most part neglected Cushman’s approach and followed DePuy’s. It produced a generation of officers who tended to be tactically adept, proficient as battalion commanders, but not prepared for senior generalship—especially when the Cold War ended and they faced a series of ambiguous crises. In its twenty-first-century wars, the Army would come to realize it needed leaders comfortable with vague situations, alien cultures, inadequate information, and ill-defined goals. It would have many such soldiers in its ranks, but few in key command positions at its top.

In the 1940s, Cushman would have likely been removed by DePuy. But this was the 1970s, and even DePuy had become shy of relief. At one point, DePuy told Starry that he had decided to fire Cushman and was traveling to Fort Leavenworth to do so, but, for reasons that are not known, he did not. Instead he gave Cushman a blistering performance review that criticized the Leavenworth commander for failing to follow DePuy’s direction. “General Cushman is a very strong minded individual,” it stated. “It is very difficult to make him truly responsive to guidance, to make him a true member of the team.” But Fred Weyand, by now the Army chief of staff, liked and admired Cushman. Over DePuy’s objection—expressed directly to Weyand—the chief of staff promoted Cushman and sent him to a top Army position in Korea. DePuy would have his revenge: Shortly after Cushman departed for Asia, DePuy canceled the third Leavenworth symposium on ethics, scheduled for April 1976. It is striking today to read the official histories of the early days of the Training and Doctrine Command and see that DePuy looms large on nearly every page, while Cushman almost never appears.

The result of this feud between generals was that the Army’s rejuvenation would be tactical, physical, and ethical but not particularly strategic or intellectual. The Army was concentrating on its soldiers, which generally is the correct approach, but appears to have done so at the cost of paying sufficient attention to generalship. The centerpiece of the training revolution of the late 1970s, the National Training Center, at Fort Irwin, California, along with two other centers that were established later, radically improved the tactical skills of soldiers and their leaders. But it also tended to focus the Army overmuch on battalion command. A successful tour leading a battalion had long been the beginning of the Army’s path to becoming a general, but the training centers emphasized this even more. This new focus may have skewed Army views somewhat, leading officers to actually confuse battalion command with generalship. “From 1982 on, the National Training Center was the intellectual home of the Army, not the War College or West Point,” observed Col. Paul Yingling. In its training revolution, the Army effectively built a new body but placed atop it an old head—a head that had not performed well in Vietnam. Battalion and brigade commanders knew how to conduct a blitzkrieg, but when they became generals, they did not know what to do once that speedy attack was concluded. Nor did they receive adequate political guidance from their civilian superiors, which would have underscored the need for better planning for war termination. And so four times—in 1989 in Panama, in 1991 and 2003 in Iraq, and in 2001 in Afghanistan—Army generals would lead swift attacks against enemy forces yet do so without a notion of what to do the day after their initial triumph, and in fact believing that it was not their job to consider the question. The military historian Brian Linn put it well: “The fixation on winning day-long battles in a two-week NTC rotation may well have distracted an entire generation of combat officers from learning, or even thinking about, how to turn short-term tactical victories into long-term strategic results.”

However unevenly, the Army was recovering from Vietnam. One signal of this was the controversial testimony before a congressional committee by Gen. Edward Meyer, the relatively new chief of staff of the Army, in May 1980 that, “right now, . . . we have a hollow Army.” The Army did not have enough recruits, and of those it did have coming in, only half were high school graduates. The Army also had huge budget problems, Meyer stated. His testimony made front-page headlines, but its meaning was missed. To outsiders, Meyer appeared to be admitting to failure. But to Meyer and those who understood what he was doing, it was rather that he was responding to the lack of integrity that had plagued the Army in the 1950s and even more in Vietnam, and that had come to be personified by William Westmoreland. Meyer was speaking truth to power. As James Kitfield perceptively wrote in describing the moment, “Meyer felt that lack of essential honesty and the breakdown in communication was exactly what had failed all of them—the civilian leadership, the military, the whole damn country—during Vietnam.” Civilian leaders did not appreciate his effort. As Kitfield relates it, after returning to the Pentagon from Capitol Hill, Meyer was called into the office of the secretary of the Army, Clifford Alexander, and asked to disavow the “hollow Army” comment. Meyer declined to do so but instead offered to resign, a gesture that was rejected. In this instance, the Army’s leadership was well ahead of its civilian overseers in shedding the lies and distrust that had so damaged discourse about the conduct of the Vietnam War.

The one thing that did not change much as the Army rebuilt was the sort of personality favored among those promoted to general officer rank. It remained, as it had for decades, the Omar Bradley type: hardworking, determined, somewhat conformist, steady, prudent to a fault, and wary of innovation. In 1972, before the rebuilding, the Army sent twelve new brigadier generals to be evaluated by psychologists and others for two weeks. The experts found three managerial types among the twelve. Half were solidly in the mold of Bradley: “dependable, cautious, managerial type.” Here is how one insightful Army expert outlined that sort of officer:

He can be counted on to do what is expected of him. He is a highly capable, competent, very intelligent individual who enacts a standardized leadership role quite effectively. He has energy and drive. He is slightly introverted, not to the extent of being unsociable, but to the extent of being distant and somewhat removed. . . . He’s trusting of others but not very flexible in his thinking and social behavior. . . . His weakness lies in his lack of innovativeness (in areas where innovativeness is appropriate but not organizationally required).

Another three of the new generals were of the “outgoing managerial type”—more prone to act quickly and less interested in details. Only three of the twelve were deemed to be of the “potentially creative managerial type.” It was a small sample, but it appears to be representative.

In the 1980s, after the rebuilding was well under way, David Campbell, a psychologist specializing in leadership, administered another battery of personality and intelligence tests to new Army brigadier generals. His results were remarkably similar to those in the 1972 study. The generals were relatively intelligent (with an average IQ of at least 124), hardworking, responsible, and conformist. Like George Marshall, they were rather cold in personal relations, with almost half the brigadier generals scoring a zero on wanting to be included socially, a result that Campbell found “astonishing.” But they were more rigid than Marshall had ever been in his professional thinking, scoring relatively low, Campbell found, “on the flexibility scale, which says something about their willingness, or lack thereof, to consider new, innovative solutions to problems.” The result, concluded retired Army Col. Lloyd Matthews, was “a maladaptive Army senior officer corps.” At just the time when the nation would need flexible generals, with the end of the Cold War and the emergence of a new set of problems and threats, the Army was selecting and developing the opposite type.

Nor were Army subordinates satisfied with this crop of generals. In 1983, an Army survey found that one-quarter of new brigadier generals were seen by officers who had commanded battalions under them as unqualified to be generals. In the survey, conducted by Lt. Col. Tilden Reid, an Army War College student, 110 battalion commanders reported that about one-third of the Army’s new generals did not care about their soldiers, did not develop subordinates, and were more managers than leaders. Even more damning, the same percentage said that the new general they knew should not lead in combat and that they would not want to serve under that general again. Half the new generals were seen as micromanagers.

This was a damaged crop of generals.

An effort had been made to address these leadership flaws. In 1975, the Army established the Organizational Effectiveness Training Center, at Fort Ord, California. This was a radical departure for the service—a program that emphasized team building and adaptation. A study by the Army five years later found that the program had improved morale and the quality of leadership as judged by subordinates. Yet the program was always seen by many in the Army as suspiciously “touchy-feely,” even “beads and sandals.” Nor was it clear where it belonged in the Army: Was it a personnel function, or, as a leadership issue, should its commanders report directly to the chief of staff?

In 1985, with its post-Vietnam reconstruction well under way, the Army terminated the program. In other words, as soon as the crisis was perceived to have passed, the Army’s leadership went back to the old ways. Army chief of staff Gen. John Wickham and Secretary of the Army John Marsh said as much in a statement to Wickham’s predecessor, Gen. Bernard Rogers, who had protested the closure. “While organizational effectiveness has served the Army well since the mid-seventies, the environment we find ourselves in today is different than when we took advantage of emerging behavioral science initiatives to help the chain of command solve tough issues,” they wrote. “Today, as you know, we are providing much better preparation for leaders prior to their assumption of command.” The official reason given was that leadership would be taught at the new Joint Readiness Training Center, which, as Col. Peter Varljen pointed out, really represented a reversion to the old development of leadership skills “that could easily be measured in terms of mission accomplishment.”