The "Jedi Knights" -- the transformation of the military

Saw a nice analytical piece from Slate by Fred Kaplan that explored the revolution that took place in military tactics.
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Excerpts:

So when and how did the U.S. military get this good? The elements of swift victory in Gulf War II have been well laid-out: the agility and flexibility of our forces, the pinpoint accuracy of the bombs, the commanders' real-time view of the battlefield, the remarkable coordination among all branches of the armed services (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines) and special operations. But these elements, and this degree of success, have not been seen in previous wars, not even in the first Gulf War 12 years ago. Three major changes have taken hold within the military since then a new war-fighting doctrine, advanced digital technology, and a less parochial culture.

The new doctrine was put in motion in 1983, a decade before Operation Desert Storm, when the U.S. Army's Command and General Staff College, at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., created an elite, one-year post-grad program called the School for Advanced Military Studies. The school's founder was a colonel soon promoted to brigadier general named Huba Wass de Czege (pronounced VOSS-de-say-ga). He was in the forefront of officers who had served in Vietnam, witnessed the disaster firsthand, and were eager to change the way the Army thought about combat.

In 1982, Wass de Czege had written a major revision of the Army's war-fighting manual, FM 100-5, the official expression of Army doctrine and the foundation for all decisions about strategy, tactics, and training.
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Wass de Czege's rewrite outlined a strategy emphasizing agility, speed, maneuver, and deep strikes well behind enemy lines.

The advanced-studies school at Fort Leavenworth was set up explicitly to weave this new strategy into the fabric of the Army establishment.

By the time of Desert Storm, a small group of Wass de Czege's students had been promoted to high-level posts on the staff of Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf's Central Command. This group of officers, who self-consciously referred to themselves as the "Jedi Knights," designed the ground-war strategy of the first Gulf War, and it was straight out of Wass de Czege's book the feinted assault up the middle, the simultaneous sweep of armored forces up to the Iraqi army's western flank, the multiple thrusts that surrounded the Iraqis from all sides, hurling them into disarray before their final envelopment and destruction.
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Written doctrines are one thing, actual operations another. However, the new structures and doctrines did breed, in the words of one Joint Forces Command publication, "a common joint culture." The institutional barriers of inter-service rivalry, even hatred, were gradually broken down. Once new technologies made joint coordination possible, and once the war in Afghanistan showed that coordination could reap tremendous advantages, resistance seemed futile.