COLUMN ONE : The Army Does an About-Face : Over two decades, there has been a revolution in technology, training and morale. The new competence was displayed in the Persian Gulf War.

Lt. Col. Bill Feyk has served in two armies during his 20-year military career.

He entered the U.S. Army of 1972 as a second lieutenant assigned to West Germany, a green officer in a demoralized force riven by drug abuse, racial hatred and an appalling breakdown in basic discipline.

He also served in the U.S. Army of 1991, commanding an armored battalion in the breathtaking blitzkrieg that demolished 40 Iraqi divisions in four days.

Feyk remembers, back in ‘72, asking the first sergeant at his post in Erlangen, West Germany, to enter the enlisted men’s barracks with him at night--and seeing the sergeant disappear for a moment and return with a length of steel pipe. The dark passageway between two barracks was known as “Blood Alley” because it was there that black and white troops settled their differences, many of them carried over from the violent streets of America.

“The soldiers today can’t even conceive of how bad it was,” Feyk says. “The drugs, the violence, the guy in your platoon who’s in there because the judge said: ‘Go in the Army or I’ll give you three to five (years in prison).’ ”

Over the last 20 years, largely out of view of the public, the Army has undergone nothing less than a cultural revolution, sweeping aside an ineffective training system, a bloated and rudderless officer corps, mutinous enlisted ranks and a war-fighting doctrine based on avoiding defeat rather than attaining victory.

Led by a handful of visionary senior leaders and a larger number of committed junior officers, beginning in 1973 the Army bought a new generation of high-technology weapons, solved most of its disciplinary problems and instilled a spirit of confidence and competence unmatched in recent history.

“There’s no question, this is the best Army any of us has ever seen,” says retired Gen. William R. Richardson, former commander of the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command and one of the architects of the Army’s renewal.

To be sure, the rout of the bomb-shattered Iraqi army in a four-day ground war was hardly a decisive test of what U.S. soldiers and equipment might have done against a more formidable foe. Even against a broken enemy, the fighting revealed serious shortcomings in the Army’s ability to communicate, to haul fuel over long distances and to discern friend from foe. At the same time, the enforced rigor of a Spartan life in the Saudi desert obscured the fact that discipline cannot always be taken for granted.

No matter how brief, however, the clashes of the ground war showed off advances in weaponry and in war-fighting that caught even keen observers by surprise. And of all those that played a role in the triumph, the ones that Richardson and others credited most involved the Army’s new emphasis on tough, realistic training, from the squad level up through division-sized maneuvers, with measurable standards and a searching process of self-evaluation at every step.

After the lightning defeat of the Iraqi army earlier this year, Feyk sat in a Humvee deep inside Iraqi territory and shook his head in wonder at the terrifying efficiency of his own force. He, too, cites training--at the Army’s National Training Center at Ft. Irwin, Calif., and in Europe--as the key to victory. “The training was tougher than the war,” he says.

Gen. Carl E. Vuono, the soon-to-retire Army chief of staff, contends that even more than the new weapons, new doctrine and new training techniques, the Army’s turnaround can be ascribed to rigorous self-criticism. While the Army’s critics in the 1970s and ‘80s were complaining about overpriced hardware, low-quality recruits and poor leadership without offering workable answers, the Army was searching its soul and coming up with constructive solutions. “We were able to criticize ourselves--and do something about it,” Vuono recalls.

A Changing Society

Much of what changed the Army over the last two decades grew from a mellowing of American society at large. A less-rebellious generation proved more tolerant of military rigor. Racial tensions subsided in the military as they eased--simultaneously--on the streets of American cities. And with fewer students dropping out of high school, it became easier for the armed forces to fill their ranks with diploma-holders. An erosion of student aid funding added to the appeal of ROTC, the campus-based Reserve Officers Training Corps.

At the same time, mounting concern about Soviet military power ensured that the U.S. military continued to prepare for the worst of wars. And in a 1980s climate that gave high priority to national defense, there was support for costly programs that were judged to be instrumental in the overhaul--from lethal new weapons to mundane issues such as upgrading of base housing that had fallen into disrepair.

With the military now facing sharp cutbacks, the changes that lie ahead may make these gains difficult to preserve. The Soviet threat has faded and the bogyman that gave training its urgency may be difficult for authorities to replicate. And with the Pentagon committed to shrinking military ranks by 25% over the next five years, many critics wonder whether the same factors that contributed to the Army’s renaissance might now become casualties.

“The rest of my career is going to be anticlimactic,” says Sgt. 1st Class Tim Brett, a 15-year Army veteran from Menominee, Mich., who served in an air cavalry squadron in the Gulf and who embodies the sort of battle-tested soldier the shrinking military now most hopes to retain.

“If you look at where we will be two years from now in terms of restructuring the military, I don’t know if we could have pulled this off,” warns Brig. Gen. Steven Arnold, the Army’s director of operations in the Gulf, expressing the fear of many senior officers that the radical cutbacks in Army forces and spending threaten to wipe out the gains of the last 20 years.

Challenges for the Army most assuredly lie ahead, but that cannot diminish what has been accomplished. In the space of two decades, an institution was turned on its head.

Nowhere was the revolution more dramatic than in the enlisted ranks, where today’s Army bears little resemblance to its recent past.

Lt. Douglas Morse, a 30-year-old who spent a decade in the Special Forces as an enlisted man before earning a commission as an officer and leading an infantry platoon in the Gulf, recalls that when he began his career--in the Army of 1980--”most of the soldiers were concerned with getting a beer, getting (sex) and getting the sports page.” But not any more, he asserts.

Indeed, in an Army that assesses its soldiers’ intelligence by assigning them to one of four “mental categories,” a comparison of recruiting statistics across that decade alone makes clear how remarkable the change has been. As recently as 1980, half of all new soldiers enlisting in the Army were labeled “Cat IV”--the lowest grade, assigned to high school dropouts. By 1990, the proportion of such bottom-of-the-barrel recruits had dropped to less than 2%.

And in contrast to the waning years of Vietnam, the transformation in troops’ discipline, morale and motivation has been just as dramatic.

The first phase of that cleanup in the wake of Vietnam focused on efforts to root out the misfits, often through mandatory drug-testing programs and more vigorous use of powers--particularly a new “administrative discharge” that enabled the Army to discharge undesirables without going through a court-martial. In some units in the late 1970s, the administrative discharge rate during basic training approached 30%.

Allure of the Army

If there was a watershed in the ranks, it came in 1980, when the promise of a better life in the Army was reinforced with an across-the-board boost in pay and benefits that saw basic pay rise almost 12% and sent enlistment bonuses soaring by one-third.

The near-simultaneous launching of the aggressive--and expensive--”Be All You Can Be” advertising campaign sold the service as a quality experience and a route to advancement in civilian society. The Army allure was enhanced in the years that followed with even more lucrative inducements, including the approval of a new GI Bill in 1985. Recruits are eligible for tuition grants, loans and matching funds for college either during their service or after they leave the Army, as well as college credits for on-the-job training in the military.

But the transformation didn’t take place overnight. Even as better-qualified recruits began to fill out the lowest ranks, they remained under the immediate control of corporals and sergeants who came largely from the ranks of holdovers from the 1970s.

The lag meant that for the early part of the decade, soldiers were led by men and women who had come from the days when “Cat IV” troops were more the norm. Not until after 1985, officers say--after attrition took its toll and new training programs added a professional spirit to the NCO corps--were the Army’s sergeants restored to their traditional leadership role.

Nor did the turnabout take place entirely within the enlisted ranks of privates, corporals and sergeants. The quality of officers also improved with the increases in pay and benefits. More important, a revulsion at the disdain officers of the Vietnam era sometimes held for enlisted men and women caused their successors to embrace a more personal style of leadership.

“There was great dislike for a lot of what we saw from some of our leaders in Vietnam,” says Maj. Gen. Ronald H. Griffith, commander of the 1st Armored Division, accounting for the new down-in-the-dirt approach that in the war against Iraq saw U.S. officers living in the same tents and eating the same food as their soldiers.

“There were bumps in the road,” Vuono concedes. “We didn’t get good until we broke out of the later 1970s into the early ‘80s. We had a vision of what it took to build a good Army--you needed officers and an NCO corps with high standards and good values. We had to build them, and the ones who didn’t measure up, we flushed out.”

The Army emerged from a decade of war in Vietnam defeated, demoralized and directionless. The first imperative facing the leadership was to slash its ranks from 1.6 million men and women to 800,000. A handful of generals began to wonder how this smaller force, which could not defeat even a guerrilla army in Vietnam, could possibly prevail against the far larger and better-equipped Warsaw Pact forces in Europe.

U.S. military doctrine, which had not been revised in more than 10 years, depended in large measure on nuclear weapons to deter attack or, if that should fail, the activation of America’s population and industrial base to produce vast numbers of soldiers and weapons to overwhelm the enemy. It was a crude strategy of attrition that had worked in the two world wars, but by the early 1970s it was thought to contain serious gaps.

“We had developed a defensive mentality in the officer corps--a withdrawal or defeat mental attitude,” Richardson says. “We assumed we couldn’t beat the Soviets (in Europe). It was getting to be a mental problem: How are we ever going to win?”

The eye-opener for U.S. military thinkers was the October, 1973, Arab-Israeli War. New generations of highly lethal and highly accurate weapons were seen in battle for the first time. The pace and deadliness of warfare stunned American officers, who realized that their equipment and fighting doctrine were badly outmoded.

A New Doctrine

The critical lesson that the Army took away from the 1973 war was that the United States and its allies could not afford to lose the first battle of the next war, as it had been accustomed to in previous conflicts.

Led by Chief of Staff Gen. Creighton Abrams and Gen. William E. Depuy, the Army consolidated its disparate educational and training establishments into a new Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) and set about writing a new war-fighting bible.

The product, known as Army Field Manual 100-5, Operations of Army Forces in the Field, was published in 1976 and sparked a storm of controversy. Built around the concept of “active defense,” the manual focused on potential conflict in Central Europe and envisioned a small, highly mobile U.S. force deployed along the inter-German border to block a Soviet-led invasion of Western Europe. U.S. forces, although vastly outnumbered by their Warsaw Pact counterparts, would respond quickly with high-technology weapons to an incursion and hold the line until reinforcements could arrive from NATO nations and the United States.

Depuy, who oversaw the drafting of the new doctrine, saw it as the driving force behind a tactical and technological revolution in the Army, supporting the acquisition of numerous new weapons systems and inspiring a radical change in training procedures.

But while the doctrine was a substantial departure from previous approaches, it was assailed as unimaginative and too defense-oriented. It fell to Depuy’s successor as TRADOC commander, Gen. Donn Starry, to revise the manual to meet the objections and fashion the basis of the Army’s approach to fighting the next war.

“Depuy and I had a fundamental difference on defense versus offense,” Starry asserts. “I felt the Israeli war proved that the guy who seized the initiative, who attacked, would likely prevail.”

Starry recalls that a trip to the Golan Heights in 1977 provided a revelation. He stood on a crag overlooking the horseshoe-shaped battlefield as Gen. Rafael Eitan, an Israeli armored commander during the 1973 war, explained how Syrian tanks had attacked in wave after wave in the battle of Kuneitra.

“Eitan’s description was dramatic and eloquent,” Starry says. “He said the Syrian tanks were arrayed on a front about four to five kilometers wide and 20 kilometers deep, in rank after rank after rank. You could see them coming practically from Damascus.

“It was like seeing a battle re-enacted on a sand table,” Starry recounts. “I translated that into the great forests and valleys that faced us in Europe and realized you had to deal with the follow-on echelons at the same time you go at them at the front.”

The answer was a concept known as “deep battle,” which would employ the Army’s new attack helicopters and long-range rockets and artillery, synchronized with waves of Air Force bombers and ground-attack planes, to target forces in the enemy’s rear before they could be brought to the front. The new approach called for commanders to expand the battlefield 100 miles behind the front and think days into the future, rather than merely minutes or hours.

It formed the basis of a new doctrine called “AirLand Battle,” and was the core of the strategy that won the Persian Gulf War.

Military doctrine is only as good as its execution, and that means weapons that work and soldiers who are properly trained and motivated to fight. It was in those two areas that the Army completed its renaissance in the 1980s.

The senior officers who rewrote the doctrine in the 1970s had designed it as a procurement strategy as well as a war-fighting manual. The document hinged on the acquisition of the so-called “Big Five” weapons systems that began development in the 1970s: the Apache and Blackhawk helicopters, the M-1 Abrams tank, the Bradley fighting vehicle and the Patriot air defense missile system.

All were assailed by the Army’s critics as too heavy, too complex, too expensive and unreliable. The reformers said the weapons would never perform under the stresses of combat and that the troops could never be trained to operate them. The critics said the Army should instead buy large numbers of simpler, cheaper systems.

The Gulf War proved the critics wrong, Army officials say. The weapons were devastatingly powerful and accurate and far more reliable than even their proponents had predicted. “The military reform caucus, the light-is-better, more-is-better crowd--we never paid much attention to them,” Richardson says. “We knew what we were doing.”

Along with the new weapons came a revolution in training, built around the rallying cry, “Train as you fight.” Instead of lining up against a hypothetical enemy, the Army instituted stressful and realistic exercises pitting soldiers against mock opponents who used actual Soviet weapons and tactics.

Today there is more training, tougher training and more attention paid to learning lessons from exercises. New equipment, such as laser guns that “paint” targets and troops who are “killed” in training, has added realism. Funding increases in the 1980s allowed the use of more live munitions in training, helping soldiers become accustomed to the sound and feel of the battlefield.

Perhaps most important, officials say, Army trainers have established standards for virtually every task, from the time it takes to put on a gas mask to how many times a tank gunner has to hit a target at a specific distance. If troops don’t get it right the first time, they repeat the exercise until they do.

The opening of the National Training Center at Ft. Irwin in 1980 was another turning point. Virtually every commander in the Gulf had taken his troops through the center, and virtually every one of them had been beaten by the mock Soviet-style opposing force. The rotation is designed to be so difficult that only one in four U.S. units defeats the “Soviets.”

Two similar training centers followed, one at Ft. Chaffee, Ark., where paratroopers and other quick-reaction battalions train, and the other in Hohenfehls, Germany, where European-based units are tested.

“Training is the essence of our business,” Vuono told the newly minted commanders at Ft. Leavenworth, Kan. “Your top priority, bar none, is training your unit. There is nothing more important to our Army, to your battalion or brigade.”

Maj. Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who commanded the 24th Infantry Division in the Gulf, said that the rigorous training, successful recruiting and rational modernization paid off in the Arabian desert.

“That war wasn’t won in four days,” McCaffrey said last week at an infantry reunion at Ft. Benning, Ga. “It took us 15 years.”