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This article examines the initial stages of the rebuilding undertaken by the U.S. Army after the Vietnam War. It emphasizes how the ending of the draft, rather than the lessons of the Vietnam War, shaped and drove the key changes during this period. It stresses the central role of General William E. DePuy in developing a trained, value-based, and doctrinal Army focused on the European Central Front, influenced by the lessons drawn from the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. It highlights how important the initial period of reform was to the later developments that aided the prosecution of the Gulf War.
NINETEEN seventy-three was a highly significant year in the history of the U.S. Army. During that year the Army lost its responsibilities in Vietnam and its nature as a mobilized draft force. In January 1973, three days after his second inauguration (and, ironically, the day after former President Lyndon B. Johnson died), President Richard M. Nixon announced the halting of all hostile acts by U.S. forces in Vietnam.2 This announcement ended the need for the draft. On 29 March, the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) was deactivated, and its last commander, General Frederick G. Weyand, flew home.3 Three months later, on 1 July, Congress finally rescinded the presidential authority to conscript, thereby severing the Army's identity as the "nation in arms" from its World War II draft heritage and ending the era of mobilization. The public will to fight had disappeared, and the Army was in disarray. As Shelby L. Stanton observed, "When the war was over, the United States military had to build a new volunteer army from the smallest shreds of its tattered remains."4
Traditionally, the U.S. Army had been a small professional body, nurtured as a constabulary force for the North American Indian frontier.3 During World War II the Army grew massively through the introduction of the draft, a situation continued by the needs of the Cold War. With the end of the draft in 1973, the U.S. Army reverted once again to a force of volunteers, but on a scale unique in U.S. history. Defining the crucial aspects of professionalism, the concern with being trained, value-based, and doctrinal, was a fundamental aspect of the period of rebuilding after the Vietnam...