| One could say that Black was born into and raised by the military. He spent the first 40 plus years imbued with the military life. Indeed, it wasn't until he came to the UW-Madison and started his transition to civilian life that he wasn't living on or around a military base. Black's father was an enlistee back in 1948 after World War II and just as the Cold War was starting to unfold. "He enlisted in the Air Force at 18 years old," Black said. "He was immediately sent over to Japan. My dad was a part of the first integration of Black and White units. I think Truman passed the law on July 26, 1948 to integrate the services. I often think about doing a book "20/20," his 20 years as an enlisted man from 1948-1968 and my 22 years as an officer from post-Vietnam to the transformation of the army." Black graduated from the Central State University's ROTC program in August 1979 and was immediately commissioned and joined the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina as an artillery member and an operational type person. Black emphasized that the military is all about training and preparing. He went to Ranger school and airborne school. He went to jump master school and became a master parachutist. Black spent his entire 22- year military career preparing to go to war, but he never went to war due to the chance of the rotation. While Black was stationed in Germany and Korea, most of his career was spent stateside. And he rose through the ranks during his career, retiring as a lieutenant colonel. And what did he do in all of these bases? He trained, trained and trained to go to war. "It's kind of like if I take your profession for instance," Black said. "If I would send you to school for 25-30 years and say 'One day, we're going to let you do this.' Until then, you just keep going to school, but one day you will get to do this. And you're wondering when you are going to do it. In the military, it's like sending you to school forever. Mostly, in the military, we're in the business of training to maintain our level of excellence. I'm proud to say that I was in the best in the world. I didn't come from IBM or Kraft or Ford. I came from the best military in the world. I still wear that with pride. I was a part of that on a day-by-day basis. I will always carry that with pride." "You've got to maintain a certain level of excellence," Black continued. "The goal is to be, quite frankly, to be at such a high rate of readiness that when you do go, you come back with all of your people and achieve your objectives. The less trained you are, the less competent your people are and the increased chance you have to lose people. The goal is to get as efficient as possible, so that you go in, do what you have to do and come out with all of your people with you." Outside of training, the most important thing the military does is plan. Military actions do not happen by happenstance and don't happen overnight. It takes a lot of planning to move an organization composed of thousands of individuals from one geographical location to another as a self-contained unit that may be expected to remain in a hostile environment for a long period of time. "There's an extensive planning process that we go through in order to figure out how we're going to seize or take objectives," Black said. "It's not something that we just do on a whim. We have ways of doing things in the military and we practice over and over again. When I go to the field to train my soldiers, I write a plan prior to us going to the field. Everything is based on the plan. We sit down and I bring all of my key staff members in and we figure out how we're going to achieve the goals that we want to achieve while we are out in the field training. We write the plan and we go out and actually execute the plan. Then we sit down and have after-action reviews where we sit down and determine how well we did and what we didn't do so well and what we might need to do to do it better the next time around. And then we get ready to write plans and go again the next time. That's what we constantly do." There was one time when Black was on the verge to go to war. In 1991, Haiti's democratically-elected President Jean Betrand Aristide was ousted from power by a military coup. Economic and other sanctions had been applied to the country in order to force the Haitian military to return Haiti to democratic rule. The next stage in the process would be warfare. "The military is just one of three mechanisms the administration has in place to force change," Black said. "You can do it democratically, through military power, and economic power that places sanctions. That's what our government uses to get someone to come our way and see it our way. We typically use democratic power to get them to come across first. If they don't, then we start to use economic power. After that, if they don't see it our way, it makes it very difficult for us to get things done. And then we just start to exercise our military power, which is the last resort." The military junta remained obstinate in its clinging to power in Haiti. The military began to prepare for the military option in 1992. "We planned that for 18 months," Black said. "It wasn' something we just decided to do. We were running on how we were going to go into that country for 18 months straight. We wrote the plan and we practiced it over and over and over again until they said go." Black was Brigadier Commander John Abizaid's fire support officer (FSO) at the time. Abizaid recently stepped down as the commander in charge of the Iraq War effort. At the time, Black was Abizaid's right hand man to effect the invasion of Haiti. "He was a colonel and I was a major," Black said. "I controlled all of his assets when he would hit the ground. So I had immediate contact with the ships off the shore. I had immediate contact with the air force. I had contact with all of those things to bring fire on to the ground prior to us getting into the air head sort of to speak. When I hit the ground, I controlled all of the assets to prep the ground prior to us going in to seize any objective. That's what I did for the most part. For instance, if you take "Black Hawk Down" as a good example where you see the two guys up in the ship and they're talking to each other about what is going on down on the ground. Well that would have been Abizaid and myself in the ship up above." A diplomatic mission had been sent to Haiti as a last resort to the military intrusion. Colin Powell and Jimmy Carter led a delegation that negotiated with General Raoul Cedras, the leader of the military junta. Abizaid's force was launched and airborne while Powell and Carter were on the ground negotiating. " If you read Carter's book, he'll tell you that an aide came in and said they had just launched the 82nd Airborne Division," Black recalled. "That's when the general capitulated." The 82nd Airborne Division returned to base, the leaders of the junta left the country in exile, and Aristide was returned to power. Black has a lot of admiration for Abizaid. "He's a fighter and he cares for his people," Black said. "He's extremely smart, easy to work for and a no nonsense kind of guy. He says 'Here's what I want to do. Are there any questions? Do you think we can get this done right?' He gets all the input from all of his people, figures out how he's going to go about doing it, and he does it. He's probably the best military leader that I've ever run into." Black also served with Tommy Franks who oversaw the invasion of Iraq. "I would say Franks is second [behind Abizaid] because I also worked for Franks," Black said. "I was Franks' division FSO in Korea prior to coming here. I worked directly with him as well. He was a two-star and I was a colonel at the time. Both of those senior officers ... were extremely good officers. I know Franks from back in 1984 and 1988 because he was in artillery as well." Next issue: A look at some of the factors influencing the progression of the Iraq War. |
| Military dayz By Jonathan Gramling Part 1 of 2 |
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| Ken Black transitioned out of the military by managing the UW-Madison's ROTC program |
| It's hard to think about Ken Black as an army brat or a career military person. We banter back and forth in his office overlooking the State Capitol and share more than the occasional laugh. Black also likes to have a good time on the golf course. However, he does always get down to business, on or off the course. Some of that intensity is still there since Black retired from the military in 2001 when he was a professor of military strategy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and in charge of the ROTC programs at the UW's Madison and Whitewater campuses. |
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