It was the Army's failure in Vietnam that led to a renewed emphasis on truth-telling and powered its adoption of group self-criticism from Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution. In After Action Reviews (AARs) that Army companies, battalions and brigades routinely held after combat exercises in the 1980s and 1990s -- the period when Shinseki was rising through the ranks -- every action would be scrutinized to find out what went wrong, what went right and what needed fixing. Junior officers, and even junior enlisted soldiers, stood to tell Shinseki and other senior leaders to their faces that their plans were flawed, or that their logistics guys didn't deliver fuel on time, or that they hadn't allowed enough time to move to the objective.