The Six Imperatives: Prioritizing for the Future Army 2007 Armor Conference Speech by General Ronald H. Griffi th

General Wallace, General Williams, General Wojdakowski, other fellow general officers, distinguished tankers and cavalrymen, ladies, and gentlemen. It is truly a pleasure to be back at Fort Knox and to be among so many old friends and heroes from the past. It is also good to be here to celebrate our great armor branch and to recall the enormous contributions that our branch, and the tankers and cavalrymen who are our branch, have made to the Army and to the defense of our Nation. As I am sure is the case with all of you retirees in the audience, I am frequently asked if I miss the Army. My response is always immediate and consistent — every day! When asked what I miss the most, my response requires a bit more thought because I miss so much — the comradeship and daily interaction with dedicated professionals, the excitement and challenges of training activities, such as gunnery, the National Training Center experiences, and the rigorous BCTP [battle command training program] warfighter exercises — that had a way of teaching us how much we didn’t know — and the REFORGERs [Return of Forces to Germany exercises], Team Spirits, the GDP terrain walks and all the other experiences that shaped us as leaders. When you are responding to civilians, these sorts of observations and memories from the past generally don’t have much meaning. So, in most cases, I tell them that what I miss most are the soldiers. I miss their enthusiasm, their dedication and courage, and I miss the inevitable humor that is associated with leading and being around soldiers. I have often thought that if I were to ever write a book about my experiences of 37 years in the Army, I would put together a series of humorous anecdotes about experiences with soldiers. I will leave the serious scholarly works on strategy, operational art, and leadership to others more qualified than I to write on these matters. But, if I ever write that book, I will certainly include PFC [Private First Class) Magully who, on several occasions, brought me the unwanted attention of my brigade commander. When I was commanding the 1st Battalion, 32d Armor in Friedberg, Germany, back in the mid 1970s, PFC Magully was a tanker in Company A, and he had acquired a hang glider shortly after arriving in Germany. One of his early flights was on a Sunday afternoon when he launched from the top of the post theater. His flight was brief, and shortly after takeoff, he crashed unceremoniously onto the parade field in the middle of the kaserne. That was bad enough. But, in the process of taking off, he damaged a significant number of the roof tiles on the building. My brigade commander called me early Monday morning and informed me of his displeasure with this serious breach of discipline and the resultant damage that a 1-32 Armor soldier had caused. The colonel was stern, but polite on this occasion. However, he became much more animated with me after soldier Magully’s next flight, which was launched from the top of the Friedberg castle at the exact time the city’s annual fasching parade was in progress. The lord mayor of Friedberg, who, as it turned out, had little or no sense of humor, led the parade. Magully’s flying skills had improved little from his prior flight off the post theater, and on this occasion, bare ly missing the lord mayor, he crashed into the middle of the parade, taking down a number of the participants. The lord mayor was not amused, nor was my brigade commander after he received a somewhat hostile phone call from the lord mayor’s office. In those days, we had a very handy tool called the expeditious discharge program. This program allowed a commander to remove a substandard soldier from the ranks with the stroke of a pen. I concluded that our hang glider pilot was a great candidate for this program. As PFC Magully was out processing, he asked to see me under the commander’s open-door policy. I initially said “No,” but, at the insistence of the command sergeant major, I relented. Magully reported properly and asked for permission to speak. I told him to go ahead, and he commenced by admitting that he had not been a particularly good soldier while serving in the battalion. I responded, somewhat sarcastically, that his assessment of his performance was significantly understated. He then asked if he could make a request. I agreed to hear his request. He said, “Sir, would you please consider giving me a 60-day extension before sending me home?” My immediate response was “Absolutely not!” But as I thought about this request, my curiosity got the best of me, and I asked the soldier why in the world he would want to stay in the unit for 60 more days. His immediate and very sincere response was, “Sir, I’ve always wanted to fly from the top of the Zugspitze — the highest point in the German Alps — and I haven’t had the chance to do that yet.” Before dismissing PFC Magully, I told him that I very much regretted that I had not known of his desire several months earlier, as I would have ensured that he had gotten the opportunity to make that flight. I 6 — September-October 2007 Prioritizing for the Future Army

2007 Armor Conference Speech by General Ronald H. Griffith

THE SIX IMPERATIVES

was confident that his limited flying skills would have saved me from a great deal of trouble later on. Now, I would like to spend a few minutes talking more seriously about our Army — the Army that all of us here love. I would begin with the assertion that today’s Army is in trouble and it needs our help. It remains a great Army, but is woefully under-resourced for the critical mission requirements it has been given in the support of our Nation’s security objectives. Our soldiers have never been better — never more professional or more courageous. They have great leaders at every level, but their numbers are far too few. They and their families are paying a disproportionate price, relative to other elements of our society, in service to country. Our political leaders frequently assert that we are in a long protracted war against violent Islamic extremists. If that is the case, those same political leaders must support an army that is large enough for the task and take measures to ensure that it is appropriately resourced. For 4 years, we have watched the evening news on our TV screens, and it should be clear by now to even the most casual observer that it is America’s soldiers and Marines who are taking the war to the enemy. We all understand and value the contributions of the other services, but I would submit without hesitancy and with no apologies, that it is our ground forces, and more particularly, the United States Army, that is the cutting edge against today’s threat, and those of the foreseeable future. The Army, in short, is the Nation’s strategic force. Soldiers on the ground are the only force that can ultimately compel our enemies to comply with our Nation’s will. T.R. Fehrenbach stated it clearly and succinctly in his book on Korea, This Kind of War. And, I paraphrase here, “to impose your will on your enemies, you must do it the way the Roman legions did by putting your young men in the mud.” This is not a new truth, but it is a truth that runs cross-grain with the thinking of some senior policymakers in Washington. Certain ones in key national security positions believe that wars can be won almost exclusively through the employment of modern technology and with weapons delivered from standoff ranges of great distance. And, those same individuals advance policies and allocate resources based on this ill-founded belief. History has repeatedly demonstrated the fallacy of this perspective, and everyday in Iraq and Afghanistan new history is being written reinforcing the critical role — the decisive role — played by forces on the ground. It is undeniable that our Army is too small for ongoing and future strategic missions. The question becomes how large an army do we need? General Gordon Sullivan has stated in recent AUSA [Association of the United States Army] editorials that our active Army’s end strength should be in the neighborhood of 700,000. At the end of the cold war, while General Colin Powell was still the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and General Carl Vuono was the chief of staff of our Army, there was a comprehen- “For 4 years, we have watched the evening news on our TV screens, and it should be clear by now to even the most casual observer that it is America’s soldiers and Marines who are taking the war to the enemy. We all understand and value the contributions of the other services, but I would submit without hesitancy and with no apologies, that it is our ground forces, and more particularly, the United States Army, that is the cutting edge against today’s threat, and those of the foreseeable future.” September-October 2007 — 7 sive assessment done by the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) looking at post-cold war force requirements. The results of that review concluded that we should maintain an Active Army of 12 divisions and, as I recall, an active Army end strength of around 600,000. That assessment was prior to the events of 11 September 2001. It would be presumptuous of me to try to describe how the Army we need for the future should be constructed. I would suggest, however, that there are some touchstones that have helped past Army leaders make such critical decisions. For a number of years, during the late 1980s and early 1990s, one of the key frames of reference used by Army leaders to evaluate need and prioritize the allocation of resources was the “six imperatives.” Many of you will recall that you rarely heard General Vuono, during his tenure as our chief of staff the Army, speak without discussing the six imperatives and the importance of the inter-relationship of these imperatives to the overall readiness of our Army. In the event some of you have forgotten, the imperatives are: adequate and appropriate force structure; quality soldiers; effective leader development programs; rigorous and realistic training; appropriate warfighting doctrine; and modern equipment. I’d like to briefly discuss each of these, as they are as relevant today as they were a generation ago. Force structure. In the past, the Army and other service force requirements were determined based on specific threats and scenarios, or combinations of scenarios, developed by the intelligence community and approved by the JCS. At some point in recent years, this threat-based approach was shelved for a highly nebulous “capabilities based” concept. I am not suggesting that there was malice of intent in going to this approach. But, it certainly works counter to requiring military leaders, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, specifically, to lay out force requirements against potential threats and scenarios likely to emerge as a result of those threats, and then demanding that those leaders articulate to the National Command Authority, and Congress, the risks in not having these requirements adequately resourced. I fear that today our military leaders are asking for what they perceive to be affordable, not what is truly needed to assure success in potential contingencies. As the world’s sole remaining superpower, and with the responsibilities that this label implies, we must have both robustness and full-spectrum capability in our forces. In our Army, we require light, heavy, and special operations forces, and each of these elements should be sized to assure high probability of success against the agreed-on threats and scenarios. We must not optimize the force to fight al Qaeda or any other single threat. And “As the world’s sole remaining superpower, and with the responsibilities that this label implies, we must have both robustness and full-spectrum capability in our forces. In our Army, we require light, heavy, and special operations forces, and each of these elements should be sized to assure high probability of success against the agreed-on threats and scenarios. We must not optimize the force to fight al Qaeda or any other single threat. And finally, the force must be sized to assure adequate combat support and combat service support to the combat arms and meet the inter-service support requirements provided by the Army.” 8 — September-October 2007 finally, the force must be sized to assure adequate combat support and combat service support to the combat arms and meet the inter-service support requirements provided by the Army. I cannot define the numbers to do all of this, but we certainly have the analytical capacity to inform us, if we use the right framework. Quality soldiers and leader development. No one in this audience needs to be told about the importance of having quality soldiers in the ranks. Sound discipline, the ability to learn and adapt rapidly, motivation, and initiative are all qualities that are determined largely by the quality of the young people we bring into the ranks. We owe these quality soldiers the best, most realistic initial entry training that we can provide. Additionally, we must ensure that they are led by officers and noncommissioned officers who are competent, responsible and committed professionals — leaders who are second to none. Our combat leaders of today were developed through programs put in place over several decades. These programs include rich training and educational opportunities at both service schools and civilian academic institutions. Our noncommissioned officers (NCOs) experienced leader development programs that truly prepared them to appropriately bear the mantle as the “backbone of the Army,” and made them the envy of every modern army in the world. These leaders, officers, and NCOs, also enjoyed appropriate developmental assignments and were encouraged to pursue other programs of study and self-development on their own. The shrunken size of our Army and the ongoing high-tempo operational requirements have seriously eroded these programs and experiences that contributed so greatly to building superbly competent leaders. These programs must be restored if we are to have a great Army in the years ahead. And, when our leaders sit down to compute the force requirements discussed earlier, it is imperative that the leader development requirements — a robust TRA DOC school system and an overhead account that supports civilian education, fellowships, and other important leader development activities — be fully considered in these calculations. Training. I think that all of you would agree that it was the tough, highly realistic training our soldiers, units, and leaders experienced in the three decades following Vietnam that was central to the renaissance of the Army. The intensive focus that was placed on training over several years gave us, in the view of many, the finest Army in our Nation’s history. It was rigorous and realistic training with effective feedback from seasoned professional observer controllers that led soldiers to comment after Desert Storm that the Iraqi republican guards were “a piece of cake” in comparison to the opposing force at the National Training Center. And, it was that same kind of training that enabled our airborne, air assault, special operations, and mechanized forces to make an extremely complex Panama operation, Just Cause, appear easy. We benefited from that training in the highly successful missions that our Army conducted in the Balkans, and later in the swift and highly successful attack that General Wallace and his V Corps conducted from Kuwait to Baghdad in 2002. The operational demands on our units today and the related reset requirements following redeployments have greatly diminished the training opportunities possible during the more stable times of the past. But, in planning for the inevitable phase down of Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom, Army leaders must reinvigorate our training capabilities and give high priority to the resource requirements associated with such a commitment. Units training at the combat training centers (CTCs) need not train against the same scenarios employed in the past. The CTCs should, however, be resourced to provide the same degree of rigor, the same level of professional feedback to the training units, and encompass the other essentials that go along with making the CTCs graduate-level training experiences for battalions and brigades. Finally, to reach this end, field commanders must be resourced sufficiently to enable the appropriate demanding home station training so that the very expensive CTC experiences are optimized in terms of results. The goal of a CTC rotation should be that units reach the upper end of the readiness band of excellence on completion of the experience — tough effective home station training prior to a CTC rotation is imperative to support this end. Doctrine. Our warfighting doctrine sets the basis for a wide range of critical functions — materiel development and systems acquisition, force development, command and control, and training and leader development, to name but a few. During the cold war, in the post Vietnam era, the doctrine development process was much simpler than in the current environment. While it was tough intellectual work and involved many of the Army’s most thoughtful leaders of the day, it was simplified by the fact that we had an overarching and galvanizing threat to focus on — the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact allies. I think that it is fair to say that our senior leaders of that period were of the view that any contingency we might have to respond to would be appropriately covered by the AirLand Battle doctrine developed for the central Europe threat. Clearly, that proved to be the case in early 1991, immediately following the end of the cold war, when in the deserts of southwest Asia, two U.S. Army corps took on the fourth largest army in the world and left much of it burning in the sands of southern Iraq and Kuwait. The Army of Desert Storm achieved an overwhelming military victory while executing the AirLand Battle doctrine that we studied in our schools and internalized in our thinking from CTCs, BCTC [battle command training center] experiences, terrain walks, and other venues in which we studied our profession and thought about how to fight. The doctrine developed for fighting in central Europe continues to have application against certain potential future threats. But, today the focus has shifted to developing, expanding, and refining our doctrine for counterinsurgency operations based on the experiences of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the nature of the threat from al Qaeda and other international terrorist groups. This renewed emphasis on counterinsurgency operations is right and appropriate, but it should not overshadow the need to think about, and prepare for, the full range of threats our Nation and our Army may face. While we enjoy the benefits of being the world’s sole superpower, we also bear the burdens that come with that status. As I stated earlier, our Army must be a full-spectrum force capable of fighting in the counterinsurgency en- “No one in this audience needs to be told about the importance of having quality soldiers in the ranks. Sound discipline, the ability to learn and adapt rapidly, motivation, and initiative are all qualities that are determined largely by the quality of the young people we bring into the ranks.” September-October 2007 — 9 vironment, but equally as capable of being dominant on the battlefield in mid- and high-intensity conventional conflicts. As all in this room know, we have never been very good at predicting where, when, or against what enemy our next war will be fought. Equipment. Clearly, having the appropriate modern equipment is important for success on the battlefield. And I think we should all be proud of the masterful job that our Army has done over the course of the ongoing conflicts to rapidly field the equipment our soldiers need to meet the changing threat environments. But, as we look to the future and the difficult resource prioritization decisions facing our senior leaders, I think that we will see little activity in the procurement of major Army weapons systems. On the other hand, we should expect large investments in the upgrade and refurbishment of existing equipment. The future combat system (FCS) appropriately continues to be a priority for the Army, but it will be at least a decade before FCS will come on line in any numbers of significance. I personally do not view this with alarm; I cannot think of a contingency in the foreseeable future where we would not enjoy a very big weapons technology overmatch, even without the significant improvements that are planned for our existing combat systems and the ongoing FCS spin-off/spiral-down initiatives. So, from an equipment perspective, it seems to me that we are in reasonably good shape when equipment is considered in context with the pressing demands associated with the other imperatives that I have already discussed. So what does all this mean to those of us who care deeply about our Army’s future? Our new chief of staff, General Casey, has made it clear he wants to move to the new higher end-strength authorizations as soon as feasible. But, there are already those in positions of authority in Washington who are talking about Army end-strength reductions as soon as OIF/OEF phase-downs are initiated. Again, I would reiterate that the Army — our Army — is the Nation’s strategic force. It is the most important military element of our Nation for as far into the future as we can see. We need to help Army leaders make that case at every opportunity. Many of you here tonight frequently speak to groups where you have the opportunity to tell the Army’s story. And we all have congressional representatives who need, and in most cases want, input from those knowledgeable on national security matters. The lack of knowledge on national security by most congressional members is alarming. But, it is my experience that the strongest political supporters of our Army in Washington are on Capitol Hill. They will help us if we take the time and make the effort to educate them and assist them in focusing their support. We should never forget Congress is responsible, under our constitution, for resourcing the requirements of the Army. To attain and maintain the Army that we need for the future will be expensive. National security is not cheap! But, with the present threats to our Nation’s security — and by most accounts those threats are growing — we simply cannot, as a nation, afford not to provide for a robust, well-trained and well-equipped Army. While on the surface, Army requirements appear to be daunt-ingly expensive, we need to understand these costs in perspective. Presently, the DOD [Department of Defense] budget, including the supplementals, is about 4 percent of our Nation’s gross domestic product (GDP). And from an Army perspective, we are receiving less than 1 percent — actually, about eight-tenths of one percent — of GDP. This is at a time when our Army is shouldering, by far, the heaviest load in the Global War on Terrorism — the current administration and our government’s highest priority endeavor. If you look at the Army’s budget, coupled with the recent and planned supplementals, the picture is fairly positive in comparison with the other services. But, the reality is that the Army’s dollars, in large part, are being used to support the ongoing war effort. And, while the Army has been continuously forced to slip the fielding of the FCS-equipped brigade combat teams, the Air Force and Navy continue to program and budget for new fighters, bombers, and ships. The other services are making long-term capital investments while the Army is, in large measure, paying for combat operations. I recently read an assessment that concluded that the Army will need in the neighborhood of one-hundred billion dollars just to replace and refit equipment that has been destroyed and used up in Iraq and Afghanistan. If the Army is to do our Nation’s business, it must be adequately resourced in the six imperative areas. And to achieve that, the Army needs a larger slice of defense dollars, both near term and for a considerable period into the future. Some say a sustained 30 percent slice of the DOD budget for the Army is about right. Clearly, jointness and collegiality in our relationships with the other services are important, but we must speak out strongly on behalf of our Army and be advocates for an appropriate balance in resourcing between the services. Balance has not been the case for a very long time and the health of the Army has consistently been put at risk as dollars went to big ticket weapons platforms for the other services. Today, our Army is the Nation’s “thin red line” in this protracted global war against Islamic terrorism. It needs our help and our support to tell its story. I encourage each of you to do that at every opportunity and in every venue of influence to which you have access. We owe that to our Army and to the great soldiers who serve so nobly in its ranks. Again, it is a pleasure to be with all you great tankers and cavalrymen this evening and I thank you for your attention. General (U.S. Army, Retired) Ronald H. Griffith serves as executive vice president, MPRI, Alexandria, VA. General Griffith retired from the U.S. Army on 1 November 1997 after nearly 37 years of active duty service, during which he served in various high-level positions, to include vice chief of staff of the Army and Department of the Army Inspector General. During the course of his career, General Griffith commanded combat organizations at every level through division and led the 1st Armored Division during the Gulf War of 1991. “Our noncommissioned officers (NCOs) experienced leader development programs that truly prepared them to appropriately bear the mantle as the “backbone of the Army,” and made them the envy of every modern army in the world. These leaders, officers, and NCOs, also enjoyed appropriate developmental assignments and were encouraged to pursue other programs of study and self-development on their own.” 10 — September-October 2007