The Modern Louisiana Maneuvers - US Army Center Of Military History

LTG ]. H. Binford Peay III
leader development to implement it. Doctrine,
in this system, drove the other
changes. Both CBRS and the whole force
integration process were closely tied to the
Army's Planning, Programming, Budgeting,
and Execution System (PPBES), DOD's
PPBS, and the congressional budget cycle.
A primary philosophical underpinning of
CBRS was that innovation would be integrated
into the force in ways that would
always leave it ready to fight at a moment's
notice. Potential innovations thus moved
usually slowly and always deliberately
through an elaborate series of careful
evaluative steps that necessarily consumed
great amounts of time-hence the fifteen
years it took to field the M1 tank, to which
Sullivan frequently referred. Almost never
were those involved with starting a development
program still in place when the
system was fielded. A refined, streamlined
version of CBRS , called Enhanced CBRS,
was promulgated in 1993 in an effort to
make the process more flexible and responsive
to the Force Proj ection Army's
needs in the post-Cold War era. 14
10
CBRS was not without Significant merit.
Using it, Army leaders had produced the force
that was successful in the Cold War and in
Operations JUST CAUSE and DESERT SHIELD/
DESERT STORM. In addition, advocates of CBRS
were many, vocal, and highly placed, with
most believing that it and the Army's associated
Cold War-based change processes were
adequate, with only minor modifications, for
the post-Cold War period's uncertainties. 15
Some of these leaders' earlier experiences,
like those of LTG ]. H. Binford Peay III,
Sullivan's DCSOPS, also contributed to their
reliance on the established processes. Peay
had had considerable dealings with the 9th
Infantry Division/High Technology Test Bed
(HTTB) and the Army Development and
Employment Agency (ADEA) as both the I
Corps G-3 and later as the division artillery
commander in the 9th during the mid-1980s.
The 9th ID/HTTB was conceived as a means
of rapidly developing new concepts in the
areas of battlefield mobility, lethality, and strategic
deployability. As a "motorized" division,
it enjoyed a priority on resources, both human
and materiel. But the division was organizationally
isolated, both from the rest of the
Army, since it reported almost directly to the
Chief of Staff, and from the established means
of institutionalizing lessons learned from its
experiments through the normal TRADOC
combat developments process. This isolation
from established processes and channels had
caused many potentially useful and valuable
concepts to be lost and much of the Army's
investment in them apparently wasted. Peay
thus was concerned that the Army protect itself
and its future investments from a similar
fate and believed that the best way to ensure
the viability of proposed changes was to integrate
them from the beginning into the established
change and resourcing processes:
CBRS and PPBES.16
Sullivan himself understood that much of
the mainstream, high-cost change in the
Army, at least for the present, would have to
proceed within some version of the established
system because of its ties to PPBES and
the ways in which Congress and DOD allo-
The Modern Louisiana Maneuvers