Changing Minds in the Army: Why It Is So Difficult and What To Do About It - Napoleon Bonaparte, Rommel, Robert E. Lee, Admiral Kimmel, Amazon.com and Frames of Reference

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In October of 2000, General Eric Shinseki, the U.S. Army's Chief of Staff, delivered a speech announcing some very significant changes for the Army—a new readiness reporting system, improvements to the beleaguered military medical system, and a proposed increase in the size of the Army to alleviate the deployment strain on Soldiers. Somehow, however, these initiatives were overshadowed by a seemingly innocent policy change announced almost as an afterthought—issuing every Soldier a black beret.

Howls of protest followed the announcement almost immediately. Members of elite units—the Rangers, Special Forces, and paratroopers — were the first to decry their loss of distinctiveness through the egalitarian issue of the beret. Former Rangers marched from Fort Benning, GA, to the White House to deliver a beret in protest. Because some of the berets would be purchased from China (of all countries), Congress became involved. Finally, after congressional pressure and a nudge from the White House, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld put the plan on hold until further review. Meanwhile the media and public watched in puzzlement over what seemed to be an inordinate amount of discussion and dissent over a hat.

But the hullabaloo over the beret was not about fashion. It was about changing minds and how, in the U.S. Army, changing minds is an incredibly difficult feat. It was about the arduous process of changing an Army that had for half a century equipped, trained, and prepared itself to fight World War Ill—and did it very well. Yet that very success posed an obstacle for change in the future. The need for change became obvious in 1990 when the only forces that could be deployed quickly against the armored columns of Saddam Hussein were the outgunned paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne Division. A decade later, the difficulties in deploying Task Force Hawk to Kosovo reinforced the growing concern that the Army was still working with a Cold War mindset in a post-Cold War world.

General Shinseki put the Army on a dizzying pace of transformation that introduced radical changes to the doctrine, training, technology, and thinking of the Army. The result was an Army that was learning to be more agile and versatile yet still struggled to shed the vestiges of an Army that had existed mainly to fight the Soviet hordes on the plains of Europe. General Shinseki had put the Army on the route of acclimatization, the process by which an organism becomes better adapted to exist in an environment different from the one to which it was indigenous. Just as some animals shed their winter coats to acclimatize to the onset of spring, the Army needed to keep its high intensity conflict capability, yet shed some of the assumptions and habits of the Cold War in anticipation of peacekeeping, humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, and asymmetrical warfare of the future.