Engaged Leadership: Linking the Professional Ethic and Battlefield Behaviors

DURING THE MID-1980s, the entire American defense establishment was reconstructing its sense of professional identity after Vietnam. The all-volunteer force and a decade of budget shortfalls, equipment shortages, and maintenance problems ensued. Debilitating racial and substance abuse problems eviscerated all four services from within. New Abrams main battle tanks, Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, and Apache attack helicopters rolled off assembly lines and steadily replaced the Vietnam-era M60-series tanks, M113-series armored personnel carriers, and Cobras. This was a result of an intellectual renaissance at the highest levels of Army leadership as well as an infusion of money into defense industry coffers by an administration elected on a strong national security platform. The renaissance generated a paradigm shift in the way the Army thought about how to fight and win a war against the Soviet Union in central Europe. In 1974, in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War, a U.S. Army general stood on a windswept hill in Israel and surveyed a vast expanse of wrecked Syrian tanks and armored personnel carriers littering the desert. The Israeli Defense Force had used American equipment-including American-made antitank guided missiles-to defeat a much larger Syrian armored and mechanized infantry force that had relied on Soviet-made hardware and Soviet-style tactics. The Israelis had demonstrated how effective army and air force coordination could disrupt follow-on forces with fighter-bombers and helicopters while tanks and missile-equipped mechanized infantry stopped the first wave of armor. The American general hoped he could use the lessons of the Yom Kippur War to devise a set of core doctrinal concepts to reframe the way the Army used its equipment and define requirements for its next generation hardware. Thus began the process that resulted in one of the most significant re-imaginings of Army doctrine in the 20th century: the 1976 and 1982 editions of FM 100-5, Operations.1 By the time I pinned on my gold second lieutenant bars in May 1985, the new doctrine had a name-AirLand Battle-and four imperatives to guide thinking at the operational and tactical levels of planning: agility, initiative, depth, and synchronization. Although the Fulda Gap face-off between Soviet and NATO forces never took place, AirLand Battle doctrinal imperatives provided the blueprint for Army tactical successes in the 1991 Gulf War and the "shock and awe" campaign of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The ideological impact of the 1982 AirLand Battle imperatives on my generation of Army officers is so pronounced that it is easy to underestimate the revolutionary nature of the doctrine that preceded it-the 1976 Active Defense doctrine. Even though AirLand Battle quickly superseded Active Defense doctrine, we should not forget that the primary author of the 1976 doctrine, General William DePuy, was a transformational leader in the doctrinal development process. DePuy identified a wicked problem, designed a conversation to address that problem, initiated a process that gave the Army an opportunity to exemplify the attributes of a learning organization, and affected the organization in lasting positive ways. DePuy articulated a clear, appealing vision; explained how the vision could be attained; remained confident and optimistic; expressed confidence in subordinates; used dramatic, symbolic actions to focus his organization on core values, and (always) led by example.2 In doing so, he infused the Army with moral purpose during an institutional evolution that culminated in the Department of the Army's publication of the new manual.3 This article uses a framework offered by conversational theorist Paul Pangaro to argue that General DePuy saw doctrine development as a wicked problem and then designed a conversation within the Army that continues today. It also leverages Peter Senge's and C. West Churchman's theories of the "learning organization" to show that the doctrinal development process General DePuy started and led changed the Army. …