The Modern Louisiana Maneuvers - US Army Center Of Military History

options was feasible .43 Sullivan also recognized
that he would have to balance his own
need to exercise control over the Louisiana
Maneuvers and direct the Army's future with
Franks' focus on TRADOCs role as architect
of that future. His ultimate decision was to
create a task force that would be part of his
office and under his direct auspices as the
overall director of the maneuvers. However,
he would place the task force at Fort Monroe,
in part to take advantage of Franks' offer
of support, and also to allow Franks to serve
as Deputy Director of the maneuvers, a decision
he had made earlier. 44 An independent
organization was also necessitated by the evolution
of Sullivan's conception of the maneuvers
away from a single, one-time event, however
large, that an existing agency might well
have organized and run, to an ongoing process
whose end he could not then envision.
As Harper remembered, between Thanksgiving
1991 'and mid-February 1992, Sullivan's
thinking about the Louisiana Maneuvers had
evolved from a single event to an ortgoing
process to stimulate learning. 45 In his address
to the AUSA Winter Symposium in Orlando,
Florida, 19 February 1992, Sullivan first publicly
described the Louisiana Maneuvers 1994
as a process rather than a single event.46 This
characterization continued into the future.
Competing Visions of
How To Change an Army
Sullivan approached changing the way
the Army changed knowing that he needed
to get the resulting process "about right"; he
could not imperil readiness nor could he
leave the Army without an effective change
process. To do this, he understood clearly
that he could not mandate change without
input from his senior colleagues; nor could
he simply enunciate his own ideas and expect
those colleagues to fall meekly into line.
Indeed, for them to have done so would have
been dangerous for him and for the Army.
Instead, he would have to foster the sort of
creative tensions among the Army's senior
leaders that would elicit a full debate of all
competing views as to how a new change
The Genesis of the Louisiana Maneuvers
process should evolve and proceed. Without
such a debate and the achievement of a
solid consensus, grounded in the collective
wisdom of the group, he might risk deciding
on a less prudent or fruitful course of
action for the Army than it might otherwise
take. 47
Such debates naturally took place at the
executive sessions of various commanders
conferences and meetings of senior leaders.
The assembled leaders generally agreed fairly
qUickly upon the vast majority of the items
discussed at such gatherings, since most had
been discussed often and generated little
controversy. But these meetings also involved
very different people with different experiences
and, sometimes, opposing, strongly
held views of what might be best for the
Army. All views normally would be forthrightly
expressed. These senior officers held
firm to the principle that "disagreement is
not disloyalty," enabling disagreements to be
aired and debated in the spirit of arriving at
the best solution for the Army. Never did
GEN Sullivan perceive any of the opinions
aired in these meetings to indicate a lack of
loyalty on the part of the disagreeing party
to him personally or to the Army. In fact,
several very' senior leaders worked actively
to muster support for Sullivan's effort. The
challenge for the participants lay in ensuring
that their disagreements remained inside
the conference room and did not color their
actions outside it. 48
While Sullivan's thinking about the Louisiana
Maneuvers as a process to govern
change in the Army was evolving, the
DCSOPS, the Staff Group, and TRADOC
DCS-A elements made several efforts over the
course of late 1991 and early 1992 to develop
a statement of the concept that would
govern the maneuvers. Of necessity, this
statement proved hard to finalize, for although
all sought as best they could to support
and give substance to Sullivan's intent,
the Chief of Staff's own thinking about LAM
constantly evolved during that time as he
learned more about how he would have to
proceed. The back-and-forth exchanges
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