Title: The Cold War U.S. Army: Building Deterrence for Limited War
Abstract: Ingo Trauschweizer, a young scholar and a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute, has written the most comprehensive, in-depth study available of the U.S. Army during the Cold War. Focusing on the national-strategy level, Trauschweizer argues that the army's role in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (nato) to deter both Soviet conventional and limited nuclear attacks constituted its primary Cold War mission. It was also an unprecedented mission. Never before had the U.S. Army maintained in peacetime a battle-ready force of field army size, but that is what it did with the U.S. Seventh Army in Germany from 1951 to 1991. The army began this endeavor with a buildup in Europe that coincided with the Korean War. Senior leaders had a mobilization mentality; that is, their plan was to hold the line (at the Rhine River or more likely the Pyrenees Mountains) while the United States mobilized. The army's defensive doctrines were largely derived from the French and were undervalued in an American officer corps that emphasized the war-winning potential of the offensive—a position completely at odds with the correlation of forces in nato's central region. No one understood how the use of atomic weapons might influence the Seventh Army's success or failure. Over the next forty years a transformation, or rather—given the time involved—an evolution, occurred in the army.
Publication Year: 2009
Publication Date: 2009-06-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 18
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