Gregory Fontenot - The First Infantry Division and the U.S. Army Transformed: Road to Victory in Desert Storm, 1970-1991 (American Military Experience)

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THE 1ST INFANTRY DIVISION AND THE US ARMY TRANSFORMED

Published in cooperation with the First Division Museum at Cantigny, Wheaton, Illinois.
www.firstdivisionmuseum.org

Copyright 2017 by The Curators of the University of Missouri
University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65211
Printed and bound in the United States of America
All rights reserved. First printing, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-8262-2118-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017933331

This paper meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984.

Typefaces: Minion and Trajan

ISBN-13: 978-0-8262-7376-5 (electronic)

THE AMERICAN MILITARY EXPERIENCE SERIES

JOHN C. MCMANUS, SERIES EDITOR

The books in this series portray and analyze the experience of Americans in military service during war and peacetime from the onset of the twentieth century to the present. The series emphasizes the profound impact wars have had on nearly every aspect of recent American history and considers the significant effects of modern conflict on combatants and noncombatants alike. Titles in the series include accounts of battles, campaigns, and wars; unit histories; biographical and autobiographical narratives; investigations of technology and warfare; studies of the social and economic consequences of war; and in general, the best recent scholarship on Americans in the modern armed forces. The books in the series are written and designed for a diverse audience that encompasses nonspecialists as well as expert readers.

For my brothers and sisters in the 1st Infantry Division, including spouses and family support groups.

We served together.

Duty First!

FIGURES AND MAPS

FOREWORD

THERE ARE VERY few people qualified to create such a book as The 1st Infantry Division and the US Army Transformed: Road to Victory in Desert Storm, 19701991. Greg Fontenot is one of themprofessional soldier and professional historian, long-serving member of 1st Infantry Division as commander in peace and war, and a staff officer with a remarkably keen eye, not only for the relationship of the division to its higher headquarters but its connection to the intellectual and technical growth of the Army, from the depths of the post-Vietnam hangover to the victory celebrations of mid-1991.

To suggest, as others have done, that the transformation of the US Army from the early seventies to the Operational Just Cause and Desert Shield/Desert Storm simply represents the legacy of an old war is to miss a number of very significant and profound accomplishments that are glibly passed over as being too pedestrian for comment. Greg Fontenot has ably compiled the evidence to support his position, suggestive of a massive transition from the shambles of a formation suffering a post-Vietnam malaise, to a powerful combined-arms heavy division capable of strategic deployment, modernization-on-the-move while deploying and preparing for combat, combat, and post combat activities under inhospitable environmental conditions and threat of enemy fire.

None of what happened from August 1990 to July 1991 would have been possible without a profound transformation of the total Armyactive/Army Guard/Army Reserve and government civilians. This started and ended with quality soldiers, developed in a focused and rigorously enforced training system layered with a rigorous leader development program, and enhanced by a modernization program somewhat constrained by available dollars for the troops. Their leaders acquitted themselves well in combat, primarily because they had trained under conditions based upon the new AirLand Battle doctrine, a doctrine not fully resourced in low-priority divisions such as the 1st Infantry Division.

Given that the Army cannot freeze soldiers in place for significant periods, unit readiness is always problematic. The improvement in readiness throughout the Army from the mid-1970s through the late 1980s was profound, and it did not occur haphazardly. A long line of Army Chiefs of Staff, from Abrams to Vuono, worked long, hard, and diligently not only to transform the Army, but to create a more capable, responsible, and lethal Army with a winning spirit. Certainly it was only because the troops were capable, confident, and courageous that the deployed army and its allies prevailed in Operation Desert Storm, achieving a remarkable and fast victory with very few casualties.

There are important institutional training innovations highlighted in this book that bear emphasis: first, the creation of the National Training Center at Fort Irwin; its sister organization at Hohenfels, Germany; and the Joint Readiness Training Center (JRTC) at Fort Polk, Louisiana. In these sophisticated, instrumented, free-play maneuver facilities, featuring highly competitive opposition forces, the Institutional Army developed its leaders and soldiers as competent and capable members of tactical and operational teams.

The principal role of the training centers was to develop a more sophisticated awareness of doctrinal standards and the complexity of combined-arms warfare throughout the Army. This awareness changed the Armys appreciation of the roles of the individual soldier, as well as those of all NCOs and officers, in the application of military power on the battlefield, and it energized home-station training.

The combat-training centers provided the opportunity to all to train to the new doctrine, AirLand Battle, as if they had the programmed equipment, which in many cases the outfits did not. This imaginative training approach, plus the level of preparedness of the troops of the 1st Division saw them able to field modern equipment, some of which they had never seen, upon arrival in theater.

The 1st Infantry Division is perhaps the prime example of a unit that was low on the Armys modernization priority list but still muscled its way through an on-the-fly modernization phase, and demonstrated once again that the quality identified by John Blackjack Pershing in 191718 as a certain spirit... still existed in the ranks of the Big Red One in Saudi Arabia in 1991, as it does today.

From August 1990 to early November, troop tension remained high. Trained and ready soldiers, and their families, waited to learn if the 1st Infantry Division would deploy to Saudi Arabia or remain in Kansas. Emotions were mixed, and in early November the decision was made: The storied Big Red One was to be deployed from Fort Riley to combat once again. This time, the division was trained and ready. Under Tom Rhames mentorship and strong hand, the divisions competent and experienced leaders had honed their skills and those of their teams to a high level of professional practice.

I know of few accounts of the positive impact of the Post-Vietnam transformation focused on a division with the detail and breadth of this masterpiece by Greg Fontenot. Few other accounts provide such a complete picture of the entire process of strategic deployment, reorganization in theater, combat, post-combat, and redeployment.

The two constant characteristics of the US Army are change and the indomitable fighting spirit of the American soldier. The 1st Infantry Division and the US Army Transformed is ample evidence of the power of visionary and capable leadership from top to bottom with a clear mandateto transform the US Army from defeat into victory.

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