Follow-on Forces Attack is a NATO doctrine that dates to the early 1980s and brought the Alliance to exploit the microchip revolution.
[3] SACEUR Rogers was troubled by NATO's inadequate conventional military forces when faced with a Warsaw Pact that dominated his on a numeric basis, and ceteris paribus, he would need to resort to the nuclear option.
To improve NATO's conventional defence capability, Rogers proposed a novel idea he labelled the "Follow-on Forces Attack" (FOFA) Concept, which theorized to counter a Warsaw Pact invasion by making deep conventional attacks the enemy's second and third echelon forces to prevent them from reaching NATO's defensive positions.
[6] Operationally, the FOFA concept was simply to interdict Soviet follow-on-forces located 24, 48, and 72 hours removed from NATO defensive positions.
The problem was: to coordinate deep battle and air interdiction efforts out to 150 kilometers behind the line of contact, or roughly 72 hours away from it; and to plan for airborne deep strike missions 300 kilometers into the enemy's rear; and developing technology and doctrine to enable commanders quickly to adapt air strikes and fire missions.