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1 Legacy An Army Ready to Fight the Next War We dedicated the book to your father because he was the person most responsible for GETTING IT RIGHT. —Letter from Ray Macedonia, coauthor of Getting It Right, to Bill DePuy Jr., 22 October 1993 These years were some of the richest for professional dialogue in the U.S. Army’s history. —Historian Richard Swain, on the doctrinal debate from 1976 to 1986 American boys know that the simplest way to terminate a schoolyard fight is to whip the other fellow and make him say “uncle.” When General Norman H. Schwarzkopf forced Iraq to say “uncle” to end the Gulf War in 1991, it had been almost half a century since America experienced such an apparently simple termination of hostilities . Since the German and Japanese unconditional surrenders in 1945, fog pervaded the commencement and termination of American wars as much as it pervaded the conduct of war. The war in Korea, for example, was never declared and didn’t officially end. Americans understand the ideas of “win” and “loss” very well, but they are confused and frustrated by indeterminacy, particularly when it takes the form of what they see as third-rate powers thumbing their noses at the United States. American forces left Vietnam in 1973 and watched it fall to the enemy in 1975. Vietnam, Mayagüez, Pueblo, Desert One, and Beirut became code words for ineptness, incompetence, lack of will, a drift from the greatness and promise of 1945. The U.S.Army looked like the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. To fully comprehend the elation of professional soldiers after Desert Storm, one needs to know their despair in the post-Vietnam era and the disrepair and demoralization of the Army in the 1970s. It felt  General William e. DePuy good to see the buildup of force, the air campaign, and the competent ground combat that culminated quickly in victory in 1991. There was a sense that the country was back on track. Americans prefer their wars to be short, decisive, and—of course—victorious. The Gulf War was all of that. When it was over, President George H. W. Bush exulted boyishly, “By God, we’ve licked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”1 Savoring the victory, the natural questions from the public and the media were: How did it happen? How was the ragged postVietnam Army transformed into the capable force that won the Gulf War? And who deserved credit for this transformation and for the gratitude of the nation? The short answer is that American soldiers fixed the Army. It was widely believed that the U.S. Army, indeed all U.S. forces, were the best ever committed to battle. Military analysts put Bill DePuy in the first rank of the soldiers who fixed the broken Army in the 1970s and 1980s. Many of the most knowledgeable single him out as the central figure of the reform movement. Bill Tuttle called DePuy the “change agent,” making the point that few human beings have all of the parts—mental, physical, emotional, experiential, and creative —required to turn around a large and complex organization. (Add to this the confidence and impatience required to make it happen quickly.) Others, particularly those closest to DePuy, often his acolytes, described him as the greatest soldier of his generation, the most influential officer since World War II. Some of that assessment may be discounted as the enthusiasm of the star-struck so common in our age of hyperbole, when even the ordinary is called “awesome ”; but attention should be paid when the discerning Paul Gorman assigns DePuy to a trinity with George C. Marshall and Lesley J. McNair as “past trainers of the Army” to whom much is owed. “In 1973,” Gorman wrote, “William E. DePuy’s TRADOC undertook to insure that the Army could train not only leaders at the strategic and operational levels who could draw arrows on the map to discomfit any enemy, but also units capable of advancing those arrows.” Gorman knew from experience that moving the arrows on the ground was a trickier and dirtier proposition than drawing them on maps. He believes the Army’s reform would not have gone so deep or so fast without DePuy. Nor, he implied, would it have taken root. DePuy enabled the fixing; the roots are his legacy.2 Donn Starry was asked directly if saying that “DePuy fixed the [18.222.121.170] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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