USMA IN THE NEWS
By Greg Jaffe, Staff Reporter
Wall Street Journal
December 12, 2003
FORT STEWART, Ga. -- The three dozen company commanders who gathered here late last month to chat with Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army's top officer, had every reason to expect a pat on the back. These, after all, were the soldiers who had led the charge that flattened Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard last spring.
Instead they got a preview of the sweeping changes that lay ahead for the U.S. Army, driven in large part by the messy aftermath in Afghanistan and Iraq, and by the post-9/11 realization that even a small, low-tech enemy could do huge harm.
"We're going to have to [change] some of the things that made us the best Army in the world," Gen. Schoomaker told them. "Our values are sacrosanct. But everything else is on the table."
Spearheading the change is an officer almost as unconventional as the Army he is trying to build. Gen. Schoomaker, who was called from retirement by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld this past summer, spent much of his career leading the military's most secret, counterterrorism units behind enemy lines in the Middle East, Central America and other places. His experiences set him apart in an Army that has focused largely on preparing for a major war against a large land power such as the Soviet Union or North Korea.
The net result of the 57-year-old general's changes will be a force that can fight big wars but will also be far more adept at counterinsurgency campaigns, peacekeeping and even some nation-building -- a task that President Bush repeatedly disparaged when running for office.
Some of the biggest shifts, which the Army has been stealthily hatching for several months, are just now emerging for the first time. Gen. Schoomaker recently proposed to Mr. Rumsfeld that the Army close several air-defense and artillery batteries -- units that are used exclusively in high-intensity combat. The move would shift thousands of soldiers to jobs as military police, engineers and civil-affairs officers, which are jobs critical in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan and the Balkans.
Mr. Rumsfeld supports the wide-ranging changes Gen. Schoomaker proposes, a senior defense official said. As many as 100,000 active-duty, National Guard and reserve soldiers could be affected.
The general and his senior staff are overhauling the Army's intelligence apparatus, adding senior intelligence analysts, who now work almost exclusively for generals, to front-line battalions where they can provide instant analysis to soldiers just back from walking patrols.
"You don't need that capability at such a low level if you are in a destruction mode, such as high-intensity combat," says Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, deputy chief for intelligence. But in peacekeeping and counterinsurgency operations where every soldier is a potential sensor, the Army has found that the "commander on the ground doesn't have enough analytic capability and horsepower to make sense of what he is seeing," Gen. Alexander says.
And the Army is revamping the way it trains and educates officers. Big training facilities are putting greater emphasis on urban combat, counterterrorism and peacekeeping, and less on tank warfare. At the U.S. Military Academy and the Army's war colleges there is more emphasis on studying foreign languages and cultures. At West Point, for example, the Army is considering requiring cadets to take four years of language classes and spend time abroad.
"Instead of taking a [cadet] and sending him out to the 101st Airborne Division during his junior summer, it would make more sense to send him to a foreign country for two months and put him inside a family where he will do nothing but speak a foreign language and learn another culture," Gen. Schoomaker says.
The general joined the Army as the Vietnam War was winding down and the service, troubled by racism, drug abuse and a divisive, morale-sapping war, was falling apart. In the early 1970s he remembers serving in South Korea at a time when fuel shortages forced troops to choose between powering their tanks or heating their buildings.
By 1976 Gen. Schoomaker had had enough. He put in his papers to leave the Army and take a job with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. While working an Army desk job and waiting for his discharge, he met up with the now-deceased Col. Charles Beckwith, who was putting together an elite, top-secret counterterrorism force. "Beckwith was looking for a bunch of bad cats who wanted to do something different," Gen. Schoomaker says.
He stayed with the military and spent the rest of his career shuttling between posts in the special-operations world and the regular Army. He commanded a squadron that was part of the failed 1980 Desert One hostage-rescue effort in Iran. He led the search for Manuel Noriega during the war in Panama in 1990 and oversaw the scud hunt in western Iraq during the first Gulf War in 1991. Dozens of other missions he took part in remain classified. In 2000 he retired as chief of the U.S. Special Operations Command. He maintained ties to the Army, serving as a senior mentor at war games, but never expected to resume active duty.
When the call came from Mr. Rumsfeld's office this past summer, Gen. Schoomaker was buying a 26,000-acre ranch in Wyoming where he planned to farm and raise cattle. The nearest town, population 1,100, was more than 30 miles away. "Exactly how I like it," he recalled recently.
So far the Bush administration has been supportive of the Army's new direction, despite the president's past reservations about nation-building
-- the wholesale rebuilding of a country's government and economy by an outside power. Mr. Rumsfeld's office is even weighing a 125-page plan, prepared by his own Office of Force Transformation, to create a separate force made up mostly of soldiers that would focus on postwar reconstruction. The plan calls for building units of about 5,000 soldiers with large numbers of military police, engineers and linguists as well as legal, contracting and governance experts. These troops would push into an area just behind the combat forces.
"Today's wars are not over when the last shell of the last big battle explodes," explains Joseph Collins, Mr. Rumsfeld's deputy assistant secretary of defense for stability operations. "They're over when we have established a government that can stand on its own, support its people, control its borders and not be a safe haven for terrorists."
If the focus on post-conflict operations represents a change for the Bush administration, it's an even bigger shift for the Army. The service emerged from its scarring defeat in Vietnam deeply committed to avoiding counterinsurgency, nation-building missions.
Instead the Army focused almost exclusively on fighting a big war with the Soviet Union. It designed new equipment such as the M-1 tank and the Bradley fighting vehicle that was ideally suited to war with the Soviets. It developed a demanding, new concept of fighting war -- the highly complex and coordinated air-land battle -- that drove Saddam Hussein's forces from Kuwait in the Persian Gulf War.
With the end of the Cold War, the Army began to see regular demands for peacekeeping. It handled such missions well in Haiti, Kosovo and Bosnia, but it never fully embraced the task of maintaining stability after the end of a combat mission. Officers frequently complained that peacekeeping undermined their readiness to fight a big war. The Army broadened the scope of some of its training centers in the late 1990s to focus more on urban combat and crowd control, but it didn't provide written peacekeeping procedures for front-line company and platoon commanders until this year.
"We haven't approached stability operations in as intellectually rigorous a way as we have combat," says Army Maj. Gen. James Dubik. "Maybe we allowed ourselves as an army to define ourselves too narrowly and in ways that were inapplicable to how we actually served the nation."
Before Gen. Schoomaker made any major decisions about the Army's direction, he met with hundreds of Army colonels and generals around the world. He came away convinced that the Army, which had long structured itself for big wars, had to add more military-police officers, civil-affairs soldiers and engineers so that it could be more effective in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Army could afford to add those extra troops by cutting some air-defense units geared mainly to protecting ground forces from attack by enemy planes-- something that hadn't happened since the Korean War, 1950-53.
Precision munitions and better communication systems had reduced the need for some kinds of artillery fire. That allowed him to convert those positions to other specialties better suited to places such as Iraq, Afghanistan and the Philippines.
But even those shifts won't be enough, Gen. Schoomaker concedes. Some in Mr. Rumsfeld's office have proposed the creation of separate peacekeeping brigades to cover the gap. But senior Army officials, including Gen. Schoomaker, oppose that idea, insisting that a highly specialized stabilization force would be too vulnerable to attack. "A security force works because of its capacity to inflict violence. It is that threat of force that makes it credible," says Army Brig. Gen. David Fastabend, a top adviser to Gen. Schoomaker.
Instead Gen. Schoomaker envisions an Army made up of smaller, more modular units that could be brought together for specific missions and then broken apart. Right now the Army is organized into 10 heavy-mechanized and light-infantry divisions of about 15,000 troops each, designed primarily for major land wars.
Gen. Schoomaker is pushing the service to organize itself into smaller 3,000-4,000-soldier brigade combat teams that could be deployed individually or in groups of three, four or five under a larger division headquarters. Some of the brigades would be dominated by attack helicopters. Others would bristle with heavy tanks. Still others would revolve around light infantry. Senior-level commanders would have the flexibility to mix and match brigades as needed depending on the mission.
Rank-and-file soldiers will have to change the way they see themselves and their missions as well, Gen. Schoomaker says. That view was clear during the general's visit here to Fort Stewart. After a short introduction, the general asked the troops what he could do for them as chief of staff. An artillery officer quickly raised his hand, complaining that his troops' postwar duties in Iraq, walking foot patrols and clearing buildings, could prevent them from being as sharp as they should be for the next big war.
Gen. Schoomaker curtly cut off the artillery commander. "An artillery piece does me no good if I don't have a role for artillery," the general said. "We are very good in the army in developing single-event people. If we were a track team, we'd have the best 100-yard-dash people, the best milers and the best discus throwers. But what we really need to be making right now are decathletes that are just good enough at everything."
A few hours later Gen. Schoomaker got a glimpse of his vision for the future when he dropped in on a company of North Carolina National Guard combat engineers training for deployment to Iraq early next year.
In high-intensity wars, combat engineers' primary job is to clear minefields and help combat troops push across rivers and through enemy barriers. In Gen. Schoomaker's vision for the Army, the engineers would also be able to fight capably as infantry, defending supply lines or running checkpoints. When the high-intensity fight was over they would shift to rebuilding schools and hospitals in support of civil-affairs troops.
If necessary, he says, they should be able to "lock eyes with the enemy and stick a knife in their gizzard" in close combat.
As the general looked on, the North Carolina combat engineers were running a traffic checkpoint. Local Muslims had been hired as role players and were meandering around outside the razor wire.
"The soldiers manning this checkpoint right here are my cooks, mechanics, medics, clerks and typists," explained Capt. Luke Burnett, a neurobiologist in his civilian life and the unit's commander.
Gen. Schoomaker asked Capt. Burnett, "Do you have any cops in your outfit?" When the captain nodded yes, Gen. Schoomaker told him to let the civilian police officers try to beat the captain's security system.
"You've got to get the most devious minds you got and get them to wear the other guy's sandals," Gen. Schoomaker said.
Before he headed back to his Humvee and Capt. Burnett headed back to his company, Gen. Schoomaker passed on one last bit of advice: "This is a game of wits and will. You've got to be learning and adapting constantly to survive."