AirLand Battle
[4] The new vulnerability of tanks, combined with the improved defensive power of the infantry, led to a revolution of thought within the US Army—that a war in Europe was winnable with conventional weapons.
"[7] Since forces from the rear could not move forward quickly enough to take part in the titanic battles being envisioned, everyone had to be placed as close to the front lines as possible.
The result was a new battlefield organization that moved the vast majority of US and allied forces much closer to the border between East and West Germany, in what became known as "Forward Defense".
"[12] Military historian Gwynne Dyer also criticized the defence strategy as militarily senseless, used only because an effective defense in depth doctrine was considered politically unacceptable to West Germany since that would mean much of the country would have been overrun by Warsaw Pact forces in an invasion before they could be stopped.
[13] In 1976 Colonel John Boyd presented Patterns of Conflict, a study outlining a number of historical matchups in which the victor was able to disrupt the "observation-orientation-decision-action time cycle or loop" of their enemy.
[14] Blitzkrieg aimed at forcing the enemy into a continuous battle of maneuver instead of an outright fight, bypassing any strongly defended areas and extending into their rear.
The traditional method of dealing with an armored breakthrough was to pick away at its sides, forcing it to maneuver away to find less-defended areas of advance.
The classic example of a successful anti-Blitzkrieg was during the Battle of the Bulge, where US units repeatedly forced the German spearhead inward, eventually pinching it off just short of the Meuse River.
Instead of meeting the Blitzkrieg head-on, Boyd suggested what he called the "counter-blitz", where small groups of equally mobile forces would pick away at the lines of thrust and then move on to the next in a series of hit-and-run attacks.
As illustrated in The Pentagon Wars, Boyd and like-minded up-and-comers formed the "Reform Movement" and sought to overturn existing chains of command and introduce new weapons and tactics across the entire armed forces.
The reason that the time dimension was important was the result of studies in nuclear weapon employment at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in December 1979.
[26] Its roll-out required upgrades to the C3I equipment of all branches of the military, along with similar changes in the command and control structures to take advantage of the massive amounts of information the new C3I assets would be generating.
Attacking these targets with conventional weapons was an expensive process, requiring considerable amounts of ordnance to be expended to guarantee a "hit".
In late 1975, RAND Corporation completed a study that examined the merits of additional crewed aircraft, remotely piloted vehicles, and stand-off munitions for improving air-ground capability in NATO.
[citation needed] Simultaneously, the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Bill Perry was interested in "stealth, precision and speed"; and one of their developments was the Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk, an airplane designed to evade detection by the Soviets and strike ground targets such as tanks, anti-aircraft radar systems and missile complexes.
The Army's effort was collectively called the "Big Five": the M1 Abrams, the Bradley Fighting/Cavalry Vehicle, the AH-64 Apache, the UH-60 Black Hawk, and the MIM-104 PATRIOT missile system.
[29][30] The result would stretch out the Warsaw Pact's advance in time, allowing the smaller NATO forces to continually attrit the enemy all along the battlefield while the reinforcements arrived piecemeal.
In 1992, after the USSR had collapsed, at a friendly dinner of old adversaries an East German general said to an American diplomat that "We had no options left" after the doctrine had been understood across the Iron Curtain.
[18] DTRA chief Jim Tegnelia opines that AirLand Battle was the child of "the marriage of a policy problem, a good strategy and technology.
