Orlando AFA Forum

General William W. Hartzog
Commanding General
USA TRADOC
Force XXI
Orlando AFA Symposium
February 15, 1996

Thank you very much for letting me be here this afternoon. Joe Ralston called me a couple months ago and said, "Would you come out and give us about a 20-minute speech." I said, "You don t know what you ve asked." He said, "I really want you to come talk about the future of the U.S. Army."

What I will attempt this afternoon is to tell you a little bit about the Army that is in transition. I could not agree more with your Chief of Staff and my good friend, General Ron Fogleman, that your strategy, which you articulated very rapidly after 1989, signaled a change in where our world was and where it was going. We took longer to do that and have been in the process for about two years. We probably have another year or two to go on the process, but I d like to describe it to you today.

My former Chief of Staff, General Gordon Sullivan, and my predecessor General Freddie Franks, along with help from Mike Loh [Gen. John M. Loh] and others, coined the phrase Force XXI. Force XXI is actually a process. It will lead us to the Army of the 21st century, whatever that becomes.

We are two years into this process and have spent a lot of resources to figure it out, have bent a lot of metal, made a lot of mistakes and have learned a few things. We believe we are heading away from a "threat-based" Army you can quantify very precisely and very exactly, to a capabilities-based Army, an Army which can reach into its tool kit and take out whatever it needs to put into the joint equation to respond to whatever crisis exists at the time. That is probably a little simplistic. Certainly there is still a precise consideration of the threat, but it is more generic than it once was.

To get to the 21st century Army, given the realization of the need, we began to think about how we change. There are generally two ways the Army historically has changed. One was an event-based, cautious change such as when the horse replaced the foot soldier or when the saber came into use. During my 33 years in the Army, I have been involved with many changes of this type. When the helicopter arrived on the battlefield in the late 1960s, we created a division built around the notion of vertical envelopment using rotary-wing aircraft the 11th Air Assault Division.

That is cautious change. It s characterized by standing on today s concepts, euphemistically, looking around, understanding the threat and then cautiously anticipating what will have to be done with each capability, each system, and each process as you move forward to counter the threat. For example, if a plane flies at Mach X today, and it belongs to the enemy, then we need to go faster and turn inside its radius. This is typical of that sort of process.

In 1963, when I walked into a command center the first I had ever seen in the Army it was characterized by maps hanging all over the wall, acetate over the maps and people running around putting little sticky things on the maps while radios burbled in the background. It was controlled confusion with a lot of noise, and somehow, in the middle of that, there was one senior officer or senior NCO who was the ring master of this circus. Somehow it produced command and control.

In 1989, I had the privilege of being the J-3 for the force and running the command center when our Army and Air Force conducted Operation Just Cause in Panama. Our command center had maps on the walls and acetate over it and people frantically running around with little sticky things. We had progressed to grease pencils, but the radios burbled in the background and General Max Thurman was in the center as the ring master. From 1963 to 1989, not much had changed in the way we did business.

About a year and a half ago, I had the privilege of being the Deputy Commander in Chief of Atlantic Command during the Haiti operation. If you had walked into that command center, you would have been stunned by the silence. One wall quietly glowed with the four network news programs, and you could listen to the one you wished if you put on your headset. Each of the operators had a keyboard in front of them and if you wanted the situation report on anything, you pulled it up on your screen when needed. If you wanted to talk to the air component commander, the land component commander or the naval component commander, you did it on a video interlink. If you both wanted to look at the same map and do the John Madden light pen negotiation trick on the map, you could do that.

In the five years between 1989 and 1994, technology had come upon the Army in a way that we had not anticipated, and it was certainly a bow wave. Our move into the 21st century is trying to accommodate those changes. We started this move by saying we can t do this cautious, casual forward movement any longer, we have to try to take a major step. We gathered a lot of commanders and smart folks from all services, and we took a mental staff ride into the 21st century. We got on a mountain top, and we tried to write down and codify what we thought we saw. We put it in a book, TRADOC PAM 525-5. It had the vision of what we thought we saw in the 21st century.

Everyone of us was smart enough to understand we might have been on the wrong mountain, it might have been a cloudy day or our vision was not terribly correct. We knew it would take a lot of experimentation, a lot of testing, and a lot of probing at the hypothesis. Now, we are beginning see some things stand up.

First, we tried to determine what the Army would need to do in the 21st century. It will need to do four things, all as a part of a joint team. We don t think we are going to fight alone; we haven t for many, many years and will not in the future.

We need to deter or take our part in a deterrence role; to compel (read fight and destroy); to support when necessary; and to reassure when required by presence, help, aid and support. Those are the basic four roles we think the Army will have into the 21st century.

Given this bow wave of technology, what does that tell us about characteristics the Army will have to have?

We are going to have to be more doctrinally flexible than we ever have before and be able to work across a different layer or spectrum of conflict. We began to see glimpses of that change in Haiti and in Florida. We had 22,000 soldiers in Haiti, and more than that in Florida cleaning up after a hurricane. We need to be operationally agile so we can go 200 miles in a night and a half across a desert, form a six division force, and attack from the left flank. We began to see that in the Desert Campaign. We need to loosen our heads so that we can understand how better to work with other services and how to be more tailorable and more modular.

I had the privilege of being present when we put an infantry division and all of its aviation assets on a carrier deck. It was an opportunity to use the Navy s capability to have a floating air force base where it was needed and when it was required. We have to work across the full dimension of operations, and we will do it jointly, multinationally and with an interagency partnership, where necessary.

What about the future will let us do that better than we do today?

We think it has to do with information. It has to do with the ability to move information, to do it more rapidly quantum leaps more rapidly, and to put a picture of the battlefield in the hands of the private and general at the same time. We want to say with some assurance, "We know where the enemy is; we know where we are; and we are coming to get you."

I don t mean to be dramatic, but it is the biggest problem we ve ever had. I can t tell you how many times in the middle of the night someone handed me a rolled up order that they had very slowly written out in pencil or with grease penciled overlays, wrapped it nicely in a canister and sent me off in the middle of the night to take it to Colonel Garcia. I would get my jeep stuck in the ditch about two hours later and I would get it to Colonel Garcia about two hours after the line of departure should have been crossed. We cannot do that in this modern age. We realized that about two years ago, and started a three part campaign.

We needed to redesign the tactical Army and put a tactical Army on the ground about the turn of the century that would last twice as long as most have lasted. We wanted a tactical Army that would be relevant through 2015.

We understand many of our systems will be legacy systems. There will be some new ones, but we had to leverage information and information technologies to get the best bang out of what we have. It will also require redesign of the institutional Army.

I am a schoolmaster, and I run the schools for the Army. We think that s very important and I know you do, too. I am not so certain I can afford to run the kinds of schools that I have right now. I have 27 different schools at installations in 14 states and 14 liaison officers from 13 countries that support the United States Army. We bring soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines to those schools for instruction. We just finished teaching four complete courses to a battalion in the Sinai Desert totally by television through satelites and with the same quality we would in the classroom for much less than it would cost to bring all of those people to an installation for a period of time.

We also are beset by this bow wave of technology. As you know, all great ideas aren t. Some are wonderful. Some turn out to be somewhat less than wonderful. So, we put together an office in Washington whose sole purpose is to interface with the high tech part of industry, and after a great deal of scrutiny, pick those things we can afford. Or, better still, pick things we can t afford not to have. I am in charge of the centerpiece for that. I serve in the command which is responsible for redesigning the tactical Army. That is what I d like to talk about for the rest of my time today.

We've done three things. For about a year and a half, we put together our best minds the commandants of our schools, our division commanders, people who are serving in the field and on the ground through a series of work sessions, seminars, think pieces, and rock drills on the floors of large gymnasiums fighting with each other about how to fight. We've come up with some notions that I ll share with you.

Then we took all of what we thought about designs in the Army and all of what we knew about what might be available in the way of systems, and we ran it through our simulations. I have the same fears and the same concerns that your Chief has about simulations. It is very easy to model tank against tank, but it is very difficult to model that the province chief s nephew runs the ice plant.

In any case, we took the best simulations we could generate, and we conducted multiple runs for six months to set a base line for further experimentation. Then, over the last year and a half, we ve run four advanced warfighting exercises. One of them was Roving Sands, and many of you were there. Within Roving Sands, we put a very stringent hypothesis on the table about the Army s part of theater missile defense. We came away with things you could not learn any way except in a live, experimental environment.

The second exercise was Prairie Warrior, a look at our division command capabilities. The Army has had the same staff organization since 1911. We have been functionally organized. We have had a G-1, having to do with personnel; a G-2 having to do with intelligence; a G-3 with operations; and a G-4 with logistics. It s been the same since 1911. Think about it. If you can get to relatively common situational awareness where everyone on the battlefield can see a great deal about the enemy and know a great deal about where your own assets are, do you really need that kind of a staff? Or, can you, in fact, have a multi-functional staff where some people can worry about tomorrow and others about next week.

We took all of what we thought about designs in the Army and all of what we knew about what might be available in the way of systems, and we ran it through our simulations.

We built the command post at Fort Leavenworth in warehouses; put the technology there; trained people for six months and then went and evaluated it. That was a great idea that wasn t. We are not quite ready for a paperless command center. It has to do with legacy systems and how fast we can move and how compatible we are with the other services.

The third of the four advanced warfighting experiments was a futuristic heavy tank battalion we put together with fewer tanks and far more technology. We did this at the western Kentucky training area near Fort Knox. We trained this battalion for six months, and then we fought against an enemy battalion "live" on the ground using all of the assets of our National Training Center to watch this. We began to learn some things that you probably have known for ages in the Air Force, but were a little foreign to us. I ll share one with you because it is both at the same time tremendously encouraging, very exciting and very scary to us.

For the last 10 years, we put every battalion-sized unit, 500-800 soldiers commanded by a lieutenant colonel roughly equivalent to a squadron, through a stiff, tough Red Flag/Blue Flag training experience at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California. We ve taped every single transmission that occurred and we conduct rough after action reviews. It has changed the way we think about training in the Army. We have a generation of people who are not afraid of accountability and are not afraid of talking about mistakes. I know, I was one of the first of those. It was painful.

We went back and looked at decision making over 10 years of that experience. We drug out all of the tapes and listened to them again. We found that 60 percent of the decisions our commanders made were sourced by information they either saw through their binoculars or heard from an FM radio net. The remainder of the input came from written orders, from indecipherable intestinal fortitude and whatever else.

With this experimental tank battalion, we took an average tank battalion commander, and we gave him a new command vehicle. It looked like sort of an excited porcupine, big steel box on tank treads, lot of antennas sticking out all over it. We downlinked all sorts of things right into computer screens in the command vehicle. The commander trained for six months and fought his battalion very well. We looked at everything he did, and then after the fact, we scanned all of his tapes, listened to everything he had to say and found that 60 percent of his decision making information came from icons on a flat computer screen.

That probably doesn t bother a fighter pilot at all because you ve been mentally working at Mach 3 for years. But when I look at an icon on a computer screen, my mind immediately looks at five or six levels of symbology. Does that square mean a battalion? I wonder how many tanks it has. I wonder if they have gas. How many people are there? Where is it located? Can it get to where I want it to go tomorrow?

You don t think that way and that commander didn t think that way. He said, "That is an icon, and I trust it to be a faithful replica of whatever it is supposed to replicate."

I have a 15 and a half year old so. He is an ice hockey player, but he broken his back last November so I had four months of quality time with him that I would never have had otherwise. He is fine now and he is back playing ice hockey again. During that period, he would drag me into his room at night, and we would play his computer games. I can t tell you how many times I crashed into the side of an aircraft carrier trying to land a Tomcat. My mind does not assimilate symbology in the same way that his generation does. He thinks about trend lines. The size of Mario has no meaning for him unless he falls off, in which case the game is over. He thinks in terms of trend lines and weapon stores. He plots a path along the way, and he looks way forward, anticipates and keeps a count of how many red light balls Mario has in his little sack. We are moving to a future where we think differently, and we are learning from the Air Force every day.

This trend is something we all see. I talked to the Commandant of the Marines Corps and admire him a great deal, but he took a different approach. He took his senior officers, gave them a handful of monopoly money and sent them to the floor of the stock exchange to learn how to bid rapidly enough not to lose their money. An interesting concept in learning to think more rapidly. He also has them playing three checker games at a time in a computer to deal with more information. We haven't gone quite in that direction. So what is the "so what" of all this.

We think we will visualize the battlefield differently than we have done before. Your Chief of Staff and I have talked about this, and we see this about the same way. We also think we ll use information more rapidly and in slightly different ways than we ever have before. As a result, we ll fight in slightly different ways than we have before.

During most of my career, the AirLand Battle notion was linear. We thought the enemy was coming from one direction with air corridors and ground boundaries drawn with straight lines. There was a deep, close and rear battle. I can t tell you how many hours we ve argued about the FSCL and where it was, what it meant, who owned it and who did what on each side of it. By the way, that is an "Inside the Beltway" argument. It never seems to be a great deal of trouble when the guns start to fire. We work it out pretty well.

From all of this experimentation, we have learned the battlefield of the future is more likely to be circular or amorphous with an enemy that can come from any direction, maybe from one place one day and another the next day. In fact, they may be the enemy one day and not the next day. If you think about your last six years of battle experience, it has been that way. It is a good predictor of the future where we must think multi-dimensionally.

We must think about the human dimension, about cyberspace, about battlespace in the classic sense, height to the stratosphere and above and unlimited boundaries. The only two sure things in the future battle space are centers of gravity your Chief said you must figure out at the outset what the strategic and tactical centers of gravity are and you must also at the same time determine what the shaping events are that will allow you to reach that center of gravity with whatever the tool is. It can be air alone, air and ground, or maybe ground alone, though I don t see that, and hope I never do.

We've had glimpses of this already. We were involved in a lightning strike or a little war, but quic lethal war, in Panama. The "center of gravity" was a place called the Comandancia. It was the command and control center with its commanding general. There were many supporting events that took place simultaneously to allow overcoming that center of gravity. Some were pure air targets. One of my most prized possessions is a little silver coin from the AC-130 "Ghostriders." I will never forget the precision with which you can put a 105mm round out of an aircraft.

We need to seek ways to make sure we build equipment and teach tactics that will allow us to shape the battlefield with as much simultaneity as we possibly can.

It worked for the Desert Campaign. We had a marvelous and wonderful air campaign. Air got there first, and did everything the Chief said. We got into the five-day air-ground campaign at the point of decision and we shaped the battlefield with special operations forces on the northern and north eastern flanks. We had an amphibious deception off the southeastern shore, the feint up Wadi al-Batin and the special operations forces and the Scud hunt in the western desert. It involved simultaneity and shaping the battlefield. Then we had the air-ground strike from the left flank into the center of gravity, the Republican Guards.

About seven months ago, General George Joulwan [EUCOM] and I spent a weekend together in a house on Fort Story [Va.]. He showed me a map of Bosnia and said he looks at this problem in terms of centers of gravityand shaping events. If you think about the sectors and where the important spots are today, it wasn t a bad guess that he had. How do we use information technologies to do all these things?

We have to do a number of things. We have to link strategic, operational and tactical sensors together vertically so we can all see the same picture at roughly the same time. That scares some of us who served in Vietnam as ground commanders who had a battalion commander at a thousand feet in a helicopter and a brigade commander at 1,500 feet in a helicopter and a division commander at 2,000 feet in a helicopter. Eventually the kind of guidance you would get in that sort of vertical arrangement was, "They are right behind that tree; go get them." That is a little difficult when all you can see is ten thousand trees. That is a real problem because today we can make the same kind of information available in the flip-down monocle on a soldier s helmet as you have in the battalion command post and in the hands of the brigade, division and corps commander. The real challenge is: How do you use that information, how much do you need and when?

A second way to use information is to link sensors to shooters more rapidly. Where it is feasible and smart to not have a human in the loop, we ve taken him out. There are some places where it is not smart to do that. You may want an override in some cases, but not all things.

We are into "enroute rehearsal" business. Today in a HMMWV with four missiles on the back, you can flip down the console in the shotgun driver s seat, and with a key board , you can rehearse 26 scenarios enroute to wherever you need to shoot that missile. When you get there, just flip one switch, and it goes hot, and you shoot the missile.

You've had "embedded training" for years. It is the last thing that happens on every watch in an aircraft carrier. They put the disk in and exercise during the last ten miutes of every watch. We learned all that. It all boils down to real-time situational awareness where we know where you are and we know where we are. It s a wonderful new thing. How does that change the way we fight?

We think there are six steps in this process. This is viewed from the ground commander s perspective, but never from the ground commander alone because we don t intend to fight alone. We have to project our force and that means tailoring, modularity, strategic lift, and training. We have to protect it, and that is everything from a flak jacket to satellites and everything in between. We have the capability to gain information dominance on the battlefield overmatch the opposition s ability to pass information, protect ours, and disrupt the enemy's. That is security jamming technology. We think we need to spend time learning how to shape the battlespace with simultaneity, and air-ground, not alone. We are going to retain a capability for decisive ground operations because there are places where tanks, armored personnel carriers and ultimately individual soldiers are the right answer. And, finally, we must be able to sustain and transition our forces from operation to operation.

What did we learn? We learned that this is not just putting appliques and screens on our equipment. We learned that this requires a full fabric mosaic. It is a puzzle and we ve learned a lot of things from those three paths. Well, we have a stack of manuals that are about digitized squads, platoons, companies, battalions, brigades, and divisions, and they are in the hands of the 4th Infantry Division today at Fort Hood, Texas. That is our experimental force.

We are putting 51 new end items into that division, rolling in on rail cars as we sit here. We are digitizing the division from the individual soldier to the division commander. We ll have that all pulled together by the first of June. From the first of June of this year until February of next year, that division will train so we will see a new ground force of the 21st century, or as close as we can make it. Then next February, we ll take it to the National Training Center and fight against the OPFOR. Based on the outcome, we intend to buy only those things that are crucially important. We hope that process will tell us what is not a good idea as well as what is a good idea. We hope to put it in the 98-03 POM, and put it into the force about the turn of the century and have it last until 2015.

That is a snapshot of our Force XXI.

I can't resist telling you one personal thing about the Air Force. I've had the privilege of serving in four wars during my 33 years of service. I was a young company commander in the first one. I can t remember the face, but I remember the call sign, "Cherub Zero Three" because it was my link to Phantoms and all of the other things in the air that were so vital. In a later iteration as an advisor to a Vietnamese unit, I learned that an A-1E is a wonderful platform because it is slow, stays a long time and carries a lot of ammunition. In Panama, we put 247 planes in the air at one time at night, and I watched professional airmen make sure they did what they were supposed to do. It was a faultless plan. In Haiti, just a year and a half ago, when we were all bobbing around in the sea trying to get Mister Cedras to leave, and he wasn t about to leave untl he got a phone call from somewhere close to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and someone said to him, "You might want to reconsider; the C-5s are taking off." It took him about 10 minutes to leave. I thank you for letting me talk. I listened very carefully to your Chief s words today. He s got it just right. He used the word asymmetrical. I am an infantryman. I understand what it means to swing a 12-pound sledgehammer at a carpet tack. It works pretty well. Before you start the questions, I would say one more heartfelt thing. I even understand what a sledgehammer is, but it is most comforting to understand that the head of that hammer is the Air Force.

GEN. SHAUD: How would you assess the current status of joint Army-Air Force training and what do you envision for the future?

GEN. HARTZOG: I ll answer that in two parts. Anecdotally and situationally there are places where it is excellent. Our unit training, where we do interservice or joint training is really in two parts. One is home station training at Fort Riley, Kansas, at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, etc. We have places where Army-Air Force home station training is a way of life. Fort Bragg with the Composite Wing, 82nd Airborne Division, 18th Airborne Corps, would never think of going to an exercise without appropriate air cover. It just would not occur. There are some places within our home station environment where it is not as robust as it should be.

Second, we put all of our heavy units through the National Training Center at Fort Irwin [Calif.], all of our light units through the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk [La.] and all of our European units through the CTC at Hoehenfels. At each of those places, we have a heavy resident partnership with the Air Force. Air Warrior has been on the ground at the National Training Center at Irwin and flown out of Nellis [AFB, Nev.] and other places for years. It is progressing, in my judgment, rapidly and at the right pace. In both places, using lasers you can now shoot down an aircraft or an aircraft can kill on the ground.

It was a long time coming because it was a tough technical problem. We can do it now with assurance that makes for a very real battlespace, both air and ground. The next challenge immediately before us is to link our simulations better than we have done before. We had a good exercise in Atlantic Resolve in 1994. We are spending the money now to link Twenty-nine Palms [Calif.] and Nellis and the Western Ranges with the National Training Center. Eventually, we will both come to the conclusion that we won t be able to afford to bring students to institutions anymore, but we ll have to pipe the training to the students wherever they are and link it together with more facility than we have in the past. I d rate us in the "C" category or "C plus" and sort of spotty across the local training which mostly has to do with resources. I d give us an "A minus" in the training centers and the card is blank on the future of how well we can put the simulations together.

GEN SHAUD: Concerning operations other than war, as you prepare your troops for peacekeeping as opposed to combat operations, is that having an impact on your readiness?

GEN. HARTZOG: First, I absolutely hate the term "operations other than war." I don t propose to change it because too many people understand what it is and none of the alternatives were very good, such as low intensity conflict, etc. When going into a situation currently characterized as "operations other than war" where there are belligerents on the battlefield such as Somalia, Haiti, or Rwanda, you must go there with the attitude that you are prepared to be overwhelming, and you have at least a mental sledge hammer in your pack.

In most cases, the Army has tried to deal with that by having different types of units. We pick the right kind of unit to go, and have it fully trained to do its battle mission when it arrives. That works for about the first month or so. But if your standard stock is patrolling a city and doing what is closer to police functions than military functions, your ability to sustain all of the skills is not easy. TRADOC has worked on that. We put a lot of training ranges in Haiti. We put a lot of training ranges in Kuwait, and we already have put training ranges in Bosnia so the local commanders, as they rotate through the operational period, can rotate through a training cycle and keep the interest and the skills of their troops high as well as interperse new people as they rotate in. It is a challenge, but you have to work at sustainment of training throughout operations.

GEN. SHAUD: How would you assess the performance of the C-17 in Bosnia from the Army s perspective?

GEN. HARTZOG: The C-17 is a hero to the Army. I had the privilege to serve on the first requirements panel for the aircraft back in the early 1980s. We were thinking then about landing the C-17 on an autobahn and how many places you could put it to load without having to kneel. It is a hero. We would not be in theater if it were not for the C-17. It s a wonderful plane, well put together, and I must tell you a story.

I was at Fort Knox [Ky.] not long ago. They had a big demonstration of new equipment, and they flew in the C-17 for the local folks to see it. They also flew in a C-47 from the Confederate Air Force. I crawled into the front of the C-47 and sat with the pilot a little bit. He was parked exactly at the tail of the C-17. When he tried to look out the window of the C-47, he could not see the top of the C-17. The man had tears running down his face. This was an old, gray-haired pilot who probably flew in World War II and was probably in his 80s. It was so profound when he realized you could put the C-47 into the back of the C-17 by trimming off about two feet of the wing on each side. He just couldn t handle it, and I couldn t either. It was astounding.

GEN. SHAUD: Thank you very much for joining us; it has been our honor.

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