The center proved to be a great success, for several reasons.
First, the assessments were only given to the commanders training there and never to their superiors. So they could test their limits and work on their weaknesses without fear of report cards. (I fought off attempts to use the center to make reportable evaluations on the units training there.) This allowed me to be brutally honest about their shortfalls; and it allowed them to fail and improve.
Second, though my instructors were not always the very best available (and this was deliberate; taking the best guys would have gone down very badly with everybody else), all of them were competent enough to do the job, and I sent them to the best leadership and tactical courses to increase their knowledge and skills. The work for my instructors was hard and demanding and the hours were long, but they loved it.
We also did a great deal of instructor training at the center. I revised the Special Operations29 courses and further trained my instructors in these specialized skills. To spice up the training for the troops we added courses on survival and adventure training, but we never lost sight of our primary mission, to develop advanced infantry skills in the division units.
As time passed, the shooting qualification scores of troops and units that went through our training skyrocketed upward, and the positive feedback from the division was overwhelming. We even trained the division’s Competition Squads for the annual Marine Corps competition at Quantico, Virginia. The 2nd Division squads were traditionally the doormats in this competition, but the squads we trained that year took the top two honors.
I ran the Infantry Training Center for well over a year—loving every minute of it, learning a great deal, and experimenting with ideas I had wanted to try ever since Vietnam. Some worked and some didn’t; but the chance to concentrate on small-unit tactics, weapons, environmental operations, and combat leadership training was invaluable.
Later on, the Marines addressed the problem of tactical evaluation of units beyond the company level. Their eventual solution came from an Army program.
After Vietnam, all the services faced serious problems, but, of all the services, the Army had the longest way to go; they needed the most radical reforms. To their credit, they did what they had to do and did it superbly.
One of their biggest and most enduring reforms was to create the Battle Command Training Program (BCTP), which allows them to tactically evaluate unit and command performance all the way up to the corps level. The idea is to train people by letting them see how and where they make wrong decisions or wrong moves, and to see how they can more reliably make the right choices. The program is not used as a measure for promotion, or as a hammer to beat people with. But it is tough. A three-star Army general at the corps level goes through a battle test and an evaluation; and it’s cold and pointed, and the evaluators don’t want to hear any gripes, bitches, or excuses. That’s it.
The first time I observed a BCTP exercise, a three-star general screwed up somehow, and admitted it without excuses. “Yeah, I screwed up,” he said. “I should have made a different choice.”
This was a sign of a remarkable transformation.
When the Marine Corps saw how well the BCTPs worked, we grabbed onto the idea and developed a similar program, now called “the Marine Air Ground Task Force Staff Training Program” (MSTP). We found a site for large-scale combined arms field exercises at Twentynine Palms in California where battalion units and larger get tested and evaluated. (The Army does the same thing not far from there at the NTC—National Training Center.) And we developed a Marine Corps Combat Readiness Evaluation System (MCRES) that provided unit and individual standards and a test for our units preparing to deploy.
STAFF DUTY AND SCHOOL
As 1974 rolled around, Tony Zinni had been a captain for eight years and a company-grade officer for over nine. Early that year, he was selected for major, but the actual promotion was a long time coming, since he was very junior on the list. Since majors generally got staff jobs, he knew that his wonderful and exciting times “in the field” and “with the troops” were coming to an end. Since Marine advisers were still operating in Vietnam, he had dreams of still getting back to the advisory unit . . . yet he knew that possibility was becoming ever more remote.
Barring that, he hoped to teach tactics again at Quantico. But that did not happen. Toward the end of the year, he was ordered to Marine Corps Headquarters in Washington, D.C., to the Manpower Department, where he became the retention and release officer and later the plans officer of the Officer Assignment Branch. He couldn’t imagine a worse fate.
Zinni doesn’t like Washington—doesn’t like the high concentration of brass and paper pushing. His first job in the Manpower Department (think “Personnel Department”) was to be a plans officer, running the program that assigned occupational specialties to officers at the Basic School and that determined augmentation.30
In his words, “It was really boring . . . really boring.”
ANY AVAILABLE free time was spent moonlighting at Quantico (which is only a few miles southeast of Washington), helping with field exercises and teaching tactics. And the young officers continued their informal seminars in tactics and operations.
In those days, the feeling was growing among his peers that the Corps needed to revamp and reassess its operational thinking; officers at the schools at Quantico began meeting after hours to talk about these issues and discuss the future of the Corps. Much of their thinking was far outside of the conventional box, which some of the senior leadership and even some of Zinni’s peers perceived as a danger. But not Zinni. He was excited by this quiet revolution in the ranks.
With Vietnam winding down, the services were turning their focus back to the Cold War requirements of defending Europe. Because this was also a time of tough budgets, military value was being measured primarily by the capability of the services to meet that commitment and only that commitment. Since the battle with the Warsaw Pact was going to be fought by the heaviest mechanized forces, many questioned the existence of the Corps—at least in its current form as an expeditionary light infantry. Many defense experts were recommending everything from disbanding the Marines to radically altering it.
There was a battle over the soul of the Marine Corps.
TONY ZINNI continues:
The first thing Marines have to realize is that our service is not vital to the existence of the nation. The second thing we have to realize, however, is that we offer to the nation a service that has unique qualities—qualities and values that the nation admires, respects, and can ill afford to lose. These include:
One: Our first identity as Marines is to be a Marine. We are not primarily fighter pilots, scuba divers, tank gunners, computer operators, cooks, or whatever. The proper designation for each Marine from privates to generals is “Marine.”
Two: Every Marine has to be qualified as a rifleman. Every Marine is a fighter. We have no rear area types. All of us are warriors.
Three: We feel stronger about our traditions than any other service. We salute the past. This is not merely ritual or pageantry. It is part of the essence of the Marine Corps. One of the essential subjects every Marine has to know is his Corps’ history; he has to take that in and make it an essential part of himself.
Four: We carry a sense of responsibility for those who went before us, which ends up meaning a lot to Marines who are in combat. We don’t want to let our predecessors down or taint our magnificent heritage.
Five: We make the most detailed and specifically significant demands on our people in terms of iron discipline and precise standards. Yet of all the services, we probably have the greatest tolerance for mavericks and outside-the-box thinkers. In other military services, if you don’t fit the usual pattern, you rarely succeed. You punch all the right tickets, and you move up. In the Marines, you’re much more likely to find people who succeed who don’t fit the usual pattern.
This means also that we are encouraged to speak out . . . to let
it all hang out, no matter whose ox gets gored. Outside the Marine Corps, I have a reputation for being outspoken. This has always sort of surprised me, because within the Corps being outspoken is the expectation.
This also means that we are an institution where people are judged on their performance and not their opinions.
Six: We have a reputation for innovation. After the Battle of Gallipoli in World War One, a badly blundered amphibious attack, the instant wisdom became: “You can’t accomplish an amphibious operation under hostile fire against a hostile beach.” But the Marine Corps decided, “We don’t agree with that,” and we created the nation’s invaluable World War Two amphibious capability.
Later, we looked at the traditional separation of air, ground, and naval power, and we came up with the idea of integrating all three capabilities at a much lower level. So today, we don’t need much artillery; we rely on our own close air support, closely integrated with ground actions into a single focused force.
We were the first to recognize the value of helicopters and used them effectively as early as the Korean War. Now we have the tilt rotor MV-22. Though it has been controversial, it will end up adding greatly to our mobility.
We’ve always gone after innovations like these.
Seven: Unlike other services, we aren’t tied down to fixed techniques and doctrines. We have never been hidebound doctrinaires. We are more flexible and adaptable; concepts based rather than doctrine based. That is, we really believe in the individual. We don’t like big proscriptive structures. We really believe that if we educate and train our leaders and our officers to take charge, and give them broad conceptual guidelines, but don’t bind them to these as a strict “doctrinal” necessity, they’ll do a better job.
Eight: We are by our nature “expeditionary.” This means several things. It means a high state of readiness; we can go at a moment’s notice. It means our organization, our equipment, our structure are designed to allow us to deploy very efficiently. We don’t take anything we don’t need. We’re lean, we’re slim, we’re streamlined. We don’t need a lot of “stuff”—whether it’s equipment or comforts. We can make do with what we have, or else live off the land. We are the taxpayers’ friend.
It’s a mind-set, too, about being ready to go, about being ready to be deployed, and about flexibility. We can easily and quickly move from fighting to humanitarian operations.
There are also systems we have to know, either to board ship or get into airplanes or get our gear ready to go; and there are computer programs that tell us what we need and how we can load it rapidly. The Marine Corps has perfected all these systems.
Finally, it is how we organize, prepare, and train.
ALL OF this came home to me most powerfully back when I was lying in the hospital after I’d been wounded in Vietnam. It wasn’t a conceptual thing then, but an overwhelming feeling. It just sort of hit me: This is my home. These are my guys.
In the hospital, I was seeing how my Marines were dealing with their own wounds. And on TV I was watching images of my Marines fighting for other Marines. I was watching how we all care for each other, and how they cared for me.
The moment took my breath away. Suddenly, all of what the Marine Corps means in itself and as an institution came home to me. These were my Marines. That’s the only way I can put it. These were the guys I wanted to lead and to care for. I loved my Marines. They’re the greatest treasure America has.
There were times later on when I was tempted to get out. But, ultimately, that’s why I stayed in.
MEANWHILE, in 1974, ’75, and ’76, those of us within the Marine Corps recognized that we had to change. The battle was over how.
Some defense thinkers began talking about the Marine Corps as an institution that had passed its prime. In today’s world, they believed, light forces were fading into extinction. The future was with heavy forces.31 In their minds, we could neither adapt nor contribute to the kind of fighting we could expect in the Fulda Gap (the plain in Germany where it was expected the battle for Europe would be decided). Their solution was for the Marines to make itself over into a very different kind of organization . . . to “heavy up”—“mech up”—with many more tanks, armored personnel carriers, and heavy artillery pieces.
Others felt: “No, that’s the wrong way to go. It’s going after what’s trendy and not what’s necessary and right. It’s not our mission to duplicate the Army’s heavy units. They do that job just fine. Yes, we’ve got to change; and yes, we’ve got to find ways to make ourselves more relevant in Europe; but we shouldn’t dump our expeditionary nature doing it. The nation still needs a highly expeditionary and ready crisis response force, and that’s what the Marine Corps does best.”
This was another area that really fascinated me: How the Corps could mech up and fight tanks and infantry in this new environment but not lose its expeditionary character. And I got caught up in these debates and injected myself into them wherever I could.32
Meanwhile, a number of thinkers inside and outside the Marine Corps were beginning to look at ways to fight that differed from the traditional force-upon-force, attrition-type models. Though these people came to be called “maneuverists,” the term was not used in its normal technical military sense—the movement of forces to gain position. Rather, it was a mind-set, where you weren’t necessarily looking to apply brute force and then grind your enemy into submission. The idea was to find innovative—and unexpected—ways to checkmate the other guy. The concept became known as “Maneuver Warfare.”
In history, there have been many cases where small forces have defeated much larger ones after creating a situation that convinced the opposing commander that he had lost, or that made the larger force’s situation untenable, by outpositioning it, or by disrupting, dislodging, or destroying what Clausewitz called “a center of gravity”—anything essential to a force’s ability to operate. There are many centers of gravity: It can be a person, like an indispensable leader; a place, like a national capital or other strategic location; command and control; transportation; fuel supplies; and much else.
The Maneuver Warfare advocates looked to discover an enemy’s centers of gravity, pick one that would cause the enemy’s eventual unraveling, and focus on it.
The primary objective was to get inside the enemy commander’s decision cycle and mess him up—gaining both a psychological and a physical advantage by gaining control of the tempo of operations, conducting relevant actions faster and more flexibly than the other guy can.
Accomplishing these aims became quite complex, sophisticated, and subtle. It was not easy to correctly blend the components of maneuver, fires, control and protection of information; and then to sustain and secure the force and put it into action. We had always been too rigid about the standard organization of units, thinking it had to fight that way and only that way. Instead, the maneuverists began to realize that we might have to break units down and modify them in the field in a more flexible and adaptive manner.
I took to these revolutionary ideas like a duck to a pond.
Naturally, the old thinking was very hard to change. Not only did senior officers feel challenged because these ideas were new and different, but these same ideas challenged an entire operational culture which didn’t take easily to its subtlety and intellectual sophistication. There was a lot of controversy and many camps; and all kinds of people misunderstood the new ideas; but the Marine Corps eventually grasped them and adopted them—though it took several years for that to happen.
When General Gray was named commandant, he came in as a strong proponent for Maneuver Warfare. We had someone at the top advocating change in operational thinking, the way we fight, and the way we train and educate our leaders. This generated a tremendous upheaval as we transitioned over into the 1990s; but acceptance did come (though with holdouts).
Years earlier, in the spring of 1975, Tony Zinni had been hit by a double blow. Shocked and sickened as South Vietnam crumbled, he’d followed the
remnants of his Vietnamese Marines as they fought on in the hills north of Saigon until all radio transmissions ceased.
The day Saigon fell, he took off from work, and then for several hours immersed himself in what you could call “a warrior’s meditation” . . . thinking about all the troops—and the many friends—that had been lost, and about the fate of the many Vietnamese he had known.
As these thoughts pressed down on him, he had a sudden flash: He had been a Marine for ten years, halfway through a normal career, and he had never made a conscious decision to stay in . . . or even given staying or leaving much thought. It was always just a matter of not leaving because he couldn’t do that while there was a war to be fought. It was always the war—and his connection with the guys on the ground fighting it—that had given his life in the Marine Corps meaning. And now that meaning was gone. His whole purpose for being was ripped away.
Fortunately, it was not a lasting depression, and as it faded, he came to realize that an era had ended for himself, for his nation, and for the Corps. It was time to move on.
With that came a deeper realization: He was going to stay in for as long as the Corps wanted him. He could think of nothing else he could ever do.
AS THE years passed, Zinni’s career followed a more or less traditional pattern, considering his antipathy to staff jobs: a year at the Marine Corps Command and Staff College at Quantico; operations officer for the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marines, at Camp Lejeune (beginning in August 1978); battalion executive officer, 1st Battalion, 8th Marines; regimental executive officer (1979-80); and in April 1980, he took command of the 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines (initially as a major, which was very rare; he was selected for lieutenant colonel during his time commanding the battalion). Battalion command was, in Zinni’s mind, a perfect completion to his third tour in the 2nd Marine Division. He had deployed several times to significant NATO exercises and Mediterranean commitments with the Sixth Fleet and was proud of the superior achievements of his battalion by virtually every administrative and, more important, operational measure.