The Modern Louisiana Maneuvers - US Army Center Of Military History

move an issue from approval by the Board
of Directors through investigation and evaluation
to recommendation for the next
GOWG/Board of Directors cycle. II
A cardinal rule governing the entire process
and the relationship of the Task Force to
the rest of the Army was that the LAM Task
Force itself should only facilitate and catalyze
the investigation of issues; it should never
become an issue proponent or an action
agency on a par with the other participants
in the process. Some of the organization's first
members had thought that the Task Force itself
would be primarily responsible for issues
and their analysis. BG Franks and his senior
staff, however, realized that he had insufficient
status, as a brigadier, to resolve issues
on his own and that the only way to ensure
the Board of Directors would react obj ectively
to and assume responsibility for proposed issue
resolutions was to make the members of
the Board the issue proponents. This proved
to be the best solution under the circumstances.
Sullivan needed the Task Force to be
free to ensure that proponents lived up to their
responsibilities and to facilitate their issue experimentation
and evaluation programs and
not to be burdened with furthering a competing
agenda of issues of its own. 12
Birthing and Growing Pains
Like most such processes, this one suffered
birth pains as the proposed procedures
and methods of operation met the test of
implementation. The initial set of issues submitted
by the commands was criticized as
being too oriented toward the present and
too concerned with lower level problems;
many addressed only local procedural challenges.
GEN Sullivan himself even worked
over drafts of a number of the issue statements,
modifying them for inclusion in the
LAM process. Thus, among the first set of
issues actually submitted to the GOWG,
many bore the imprint of the Chief of Staff
himself, though few in the GOWG knew this.
The initial GOWG also demonstrated
some of the challenges inherent in attempting
a collegial process to evoke and evaluate
issues. The first gathering, on 15-16 September
1992 at Fort Monroe, brought together
sixteen officers as primary participants,
most of them maj or generals. Dr. Lynn
Davis, head of the RAND Arroyo Center,
moderated the working sessions. Most of
those present at the first meeting had only a
vague understanding of what they were to
accomplish. As a result, the more vocal members
of the group felt little constraint in voicing,
sometimes loudly, their strongly held
opinions. This tendency was exacerbated
when the group was divided into two committees
that met in separate rooms to consider
the issues submitted and to identify
other issues for the Board of Directors' consideration.
Since the participants were still
operating with only vague ideas of what they
were to accomplish, the committees came up
with a combined list of nearly 300 issues,
many of which overlapped or restated other
issues or which were the concern of one or
two of the participants. The resolution session
toward the end of the conference was
as loud as the initial sessions and, in some
instances, rancorous. Cooler heads prevailed
as Dr. Davis helped the participants understand
that the list of issues they forwarded
to the Board of Directors must, of necessity,
be much shorter than three hundred. The
voting process that followed produced a list
of twenty issues. 13
Before the issues could go to the Board,
they passed through two more reviews.
Rodgers' Issues Directorate reworked and
polished the issue statements, forwarding
them to GEN Franks and LTG Peay. These
officers refined and combined several of the
issues, arriving at a list of ten items for the
first LAM Board of Directors.
The first Board of Directors meeting took
place as an adjunct to the 1992 Association
of the United States Army CAUSA) Annual
Convention in Washington, D.C., and the
associated Fall Senior Commanders Conference.
The four-hour session, which involved
the fifteen-member Board of Directors and
several other general officers who witnessed
its initial segments, was held at the Institute
The Louisiana Maneuvers Process in Action, 1992-1994 37