The Modern Louisiana Maneuvers - US Army Center Of Military History

Appendix I
CHIEF OF STAFF MESSAGE
BUILDING THE FORCE FOR THE 21ST CENTURY-FORCE XXI
Over the past four years America's Army
has undertaken an enormous and very important
transformation. We have not only
remained trained and ready, we have also
built a strong and enduring bridge to the
future. We have shifted our intellectual and
physical substance away from the Cold War
and beyond the Industrial Age. We have aggressively
sustained our commitment to
leader development. We have broadened the
focus of our training centers, not only to
enable us to train for "traditional" missions,
but also to train for those "operations other
than war" to which we are more likely to be
committed and which, as we saw in Somalia,
can be anything but peaceful. We have
made major shifts in Army and joint doctrine,
shifts which better describe how we
will operate. We have rescoped our modernization
vision to improve our ability to acquire
and assimilate post-industrial technology.
Modernization is no longer about systems;
it is about capabilities. We have reshaped
the force structure to inactivate, so
far, eight divisions, one corps, and associated
infrastructure. We have completely refocused
our concepts for operational planning
based on force generation, adaptive
planning, and innovative force packaging
from resource pools. We have forged a new
partnership throughout America's Army-a
partnership which leverages the strength of
each component at balanced resource lev-
7 MARCH 1994
els. We have made the initial steps to bring
the Information Age to logistics and sustainment.
We have reengineered many of the
MACOMs. We have initiated strategic mobility
programs vital to the nation. And we
have changed the way we change by means
of Louisiana Maneuvers, Battle Labs, and
Information Age management techniques.
Most importantly, we have sustained our
commitment to quality people as the keystone
of excellence. We in the Army recognize
that, as we are building for the 21st century,
quality people are the most important
element of the force.
None of this has happened by accident. It
is the result of a sophisticated campaign to
move us into the 21st century, a campaign
incorporating every element of our Army. But
the campaign is far from over. We are now
entering what may very well be its most critical
stage-the work of redesigning the forcethe
division, the corps, and echelons above
corps, including the sustaining base of the
Army. This work has been left undone up to
this paint-undone because it was necessary
to allow the turbulence to abate and uncertainty
to settle, to learn more about the future
environment and "what could be," to set
the stage by putting in place the initiatives
enumerated above. It is time to redesign the
force to better leverage both the power of our
people and the power of our technology.
This 21st century force will be called Force