ABERDEEN PROVING GROUND, Md. – On Apr. 25, 2025, the CECOM Headquarters staff, led by Acting Chief of Staff Eric Feustel, participated in a staff ride to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. Focusing on imparting the lessons from General Washington's encampment in the winter of 1777-1778, the group toured the site with Joseph Seymour and Steven Elliot, historians from the U.S. Army Center of Military History.
Staff rides are experiential learning exercises that facilitate the study of war and associated historic events. Through staff rides, participants understand that war is the highly complex and chaotic interaction of human beings and their machines, clashing in a dynamic environment. The Valley Forge staff ride focused not on a battlefield but rather on an encampment, allowing the CECOM Staff to draw similarities between the retooling of the Continental Army under General George Washington's command and CECOM's current transformation efforts. The six months that the Army spent at Valley Forge set the stage for the Army's eventual victory in the Revolutionary War.
The approximately 12,000 Soldiers that marched into the new encampment at Valley Forge in December 1777, just 18 miles away from the British-occupied city of Philadelphia, were battle-tested but lacking in several areas, including supplies, training, unity, and Congressional trust in the military leadership. General Washington did not directly engage with the British over the winter but instead built cohesion and discipline within the ranks while addressing systemic issues within the newly created army.
Lessons from an Army in Transformation
The lessons CECOM staff gained from the staff ride included the importance of getting supplies and logistics right. Washington's troops were ill-equipped and suffering, however the appointment of Nathanael Greene as the new Quartermaster General in March 1778 put in place a high-level official aware of the necessity of keeping the troops fed and supplied after a winter's experience in scouring the countryside around Valley Forge to find foodstuffs and other necessities. Washington did his part by hosting and showing a congressional delegation the current state of the Army and making the case for more funding and supplies to increase troop readiness.
Also highlighted was the importance of building coalitions and getting high-level buy-in to advance the mission. Fighting against a small group of dissenters who felt he was not the correct leader after the loss of Philadelphia to the British, Washington, rather than arguing, sought input from his generals, gained the trust of Congress, and implemented a new training regime under Baron von Steuben that molded a diverse group of militias into the Continental Army, capable of taking on the British troops at a peer-to-peer level. With the help of a young Marquis de Lafayette, the United States was recognized by France in May 1778 as a sovereign power, gaining access to French arms and assistance. Washington consolidated weak infantry units into fewer but stronger regiments (104 down to 84) by the time the army marched out of Valley Forge in June 1778.
The final lesson CECOM employees gleaned from Valley Forge was the importance of self-education and embracing new technologies. Henry Knox, who rose from being a Boston bookseller to Chief of Continental artillery based on his self-taught skills as an artillerist, famously orchestrated the delivery of cannons from Fort Ticonderoga, New York to Washington's army in Massachusetts in January 1776. Knox established armories and repair shops for his guns at Valley Forge and supervised the training of the gunners. He used imported French guns and those captured at Saratoga to retool and reorganize the artillery arm into a more modern and lethal fighting force.
The lessons from that six-month transformative experience can be applied to CECOM's current need to meet the dynamic demands of an Army Life Cycle Management Command (LCMC) capable of transforming in contact. Staff interested in learning more can access resources related to Valley Forge at the U.S. Army Center of Military History at https://history.army.mil/Publications/Publications-Catalog-Sub/Publications-By-Title/Valley-Forge-to-Monmouth/.
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