Everyone agrees that the U.S. Army began a decline during the Vietnam conflict, starting approximately post-Tet in 1968. There were many reasons for that --McNamara's Hundred Thousand, the retirement of the WW II and Korea generations of NCOs -- but my main concern here is the hard road back from there during the period when I served. What I have yet to figure out after a year of messages on the subject is whether DePuy and TRADOC were working to reverse the Army's decline, or whether their initiatives were a main cause of the slump in the first place.

The decentralized Army unit training of the '50s and '60s may have allowed for a lot of variability in the quality of training from unit to unit -- it may have been very good in some outfits but very poor in others. However, I still have yet to see how the Task, Condition, Standard and BTMS initiatives of DePuy's TRADOC actually weakened the Army of the late '70s and '80s.

I know that during that period the renewed command emphasis on training at the local level actually discouraged us from doing it because if we put anything on the training schedule inspectors with clipboards from brigade would be there to watch the instruction and rip us a new one. ("Did the instructor make full use of training aids?") One battalion commander in the 7th DISCOM at Fort Ord told his company commanders to never ever put training on the training schedule because it would only lead to adverse comment from staff officers working for higher-ups!

Ken, just out of curiosity, what did you work on when you were a DA civilian for the DePuy/Starry TRADOC? I'm trying to see where you fit into the larger picture of this period.