Robert Dornan: “here is a particularly thoughtful statement by Col. David Hackworth: The brass decided early on that the best way to…”

“here is a particularly thoughtful statement by Col. David Hackworth: The brass decided early on that the best way to prepare for the coming mission is relentless training. Task Force Eagle has spent months rehearsing the details of this plan--even down to the level of briefings to journalist. ``I war-gamed what questions the press would ask, wrote them down, took them to the division public-affairs officer and we went over them,'' says Lieutenant Colonel Kooyman. Leave nothing to chance, and avoid a failure like Somalia. That's the idea, anyhow. The old army way of doing things-- ``stay loose and expect the unexpected''--won't hack it in Maj. Gen. William Nash's outfit. But I'm not sure what this kind of zero-defect mentality will do to soldiers in the First Armored. Murphy's law applied to combat says that nothing ever goes according to plan. My gut tells me these men may be trained in a way that could hurt them on a future hot battlefield where they'll have to think on their feet-- where they can't pull out the plan and consult Annex A. A CO's worst nightmare is to watch his warriors lose their hard-gotten fighting skills in peace enforcement missions like Bosnia. But this may be the price of post-cold-war soldiering.”