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1 TRADOC Commander The Army’s Road Back I am utterly convinced that the lesser man has been rewarded. —DePuy, letter to Richard Stilwell as DePuy was promoted and assumed command of TRADOC You know, I consider this to be my life’s work. —DePuy, as TRADOC Commander, to Sam Wilder On 7 June 1973, just three weeks before taking command of Training and Doctrine Command and four months before the Yom Kippur War, DePuy told a Fort Polk audience of infantry trainers that in World War II “we were an ill-trained rabble compared to what we have in the U.S. Army today.” But now, he said, the training in the professional Army had to produce units five times as good as the enemy. Because U.S. and Red Army equipment was roughly equal, the key was training. Even as DePuy was about to pin on his fourth star, his message was that preparing for war is about producing “infantry squads and platoons to do the mission of the Army, to fight.”1 The lethality of the Yom Kippur War convinced him that the next war would be a deadly come-as-you-are affair requiring the United States to win the first battle while fighting outnumbered. He would use the Yom Kippur War as leverage to get the resources he believed to be essential to the revitalization of the Army. When DePuy retired four years later, his Army was on its way to becoming a harmonized system of systems ready to fight. Army Chief of Staff Creighton Abrams did not know DePuy before they began to have regular contact in 1972. He had reservations about DePuy, based upon hearsay, but it wasn’t long before DePuy won his confidence. Abrams told Bruce Palmer that DePuy’s papers were the best he had ever seen; that DePuy’s anticipation of  General William e. DePuy issues was unmatched; that in almost every case DePuy was way out ahead of everyone. So when it was time for Abrams to find the right men for big jobs at a critical time of need, he chose Bill DePuy for Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) and Dutch Kerwin for Forces Command (FORSCOM).2 Abrams made the assignments in his usual direct manner. He called Kerwin in and told him what he was going to do. Kerwin was going to CONARC as a “special assistant” to the incumbent, General Ralph E. Haines. Kerwin would then become CONARC Commander with DePuy as his Deputy. Next, CONARC would be disestablished, as Kerwin took FORSCOM and DePuy took TRADOC . Abrams looked at Kerwin and asked, Do you object to that? Kerwin did not. Abrams may have heard that DePuy was a difficult person or that there was bad blood between Kerwin and DePuy. Kerwin had made clear to Palmer his feelings about the AVICE office . But Kerwin was emphatic in dispelling any notion that he bore personal malice. He regarded DePuy as an exceptional professional and would later describe the 1973 transition “the best turnover.” Abrams knew Kerwin. Kerwin, an artilleryman, got command of the 3rd Armored Division in Europe because Abrams, when Vice, made it happen by talking to Harold K. Johnson, then Chief. Kerwin later said that giving that division to an artilleryman was a departure from previous practice. “It was the cause of great heartburn to all the armor officers who thought that the division belonged to them,” he said. Kerwin did well in that command and was later Abrams’ chief of staff in Vietnam. Not all relations among the general officers were amicable. Kerwin believed that the reduction of the Army in the 1970s was badly done. About thirty-five or forty general officers were asked to leave as part of the drawdown, among them General Haines, the CONARC Commander, and his three-star deputy. Haines blamed Kerwin , the DCSPER, but Kerwin contended that his part of the action was “the pick and shovel work of managing general officers,” not the decision of which generals had to go. Haines was sufficiently angry that he told Kerwin, who had been designated as his “special assistant” in November 1972 and had already been named as his successor, “not to come down” to Fort Monroe. So, when Kerwin left his DCSPER job, he spent his time visiting CONARC units in the field until Haines left Fort Monroe.3 For a very brief time, Kerwin was commander of three four-star [13.58.82.79] Project MUSE...

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