Ingo Trauschweizer, The Cold War U.S. Army: Building Deterrence for Limited War (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2008)
Culminating with the development of AirLand Battle doctrine, Ingo Trauschweizer’s The Cold War U.S. Army: Building Deterrence for Limited War presents a comprehensive study of the evolution of the United States Army in Germany during the Cold War. Educated in the United States and Europe, Trauschweizer is currently a Professor of History and Director of the Contemporary History Institute at Ohio University. What began as his dissertation at the University of Maryland, this book earned the Distinguished Book Prize from the Society for Military History in 2009 and has become an integral text for any Cold War scholar. The author also intends for this book to enhance dialogue between scholars and policymakers.
During the Cold War, and for the first time in its history, the United States Army maintained a relatively sizeable combat-ready force overseas. Trauschweizer argues that, ultimately, the Cold War army was created through a protracted and challenging process shaped by internal conflict and external imperatives. Forced to reinvent itself during the Eisenhower Administration and its New Look military, Army leaders found themselves scrambling to define their role in the atomic era. Trauschweizer shows that the prioritization of deterrence in Europe thus gave the U.S. Army a mission while directly influencing its development during the period. As deterrence became a crucial component of preventing nuclear war, the mission in Europe remained the army’s priority in the 1960s despite substantial commitments to Southeast Asia.
Nevertheless, as the author shows, military transformation is a multi-stage challenging process. First, the army had to find and define its new roles, which became deterrence in Europe and fighting limited wars elsewhere. Second, in order to remain functional on a conventional or atomic battlefield, the army needed to reorganize its basic maneuver unit, the division. Its initial attempt at reorganization, the clunky Pentomic division, quickly proved challenging to command while eviscerating unit lineages. By 1960, the army settled on a three brigade Reorganization Objective Army Division (ROAD) that included a flexible command structure based on West German designs. The third and final component of its transformation, doctrinal change, only came about after the Vietnam war delayed its development. After studying lessons from the Yom Kippur War and Soviet and German doctrine from the interwar period and World War II, the U.S. Army introduced Air Land Battle doctrine in 1982.
The army’s transformation was, therefore, a reflection of its understanding of Western European terrain, friendly and enemy capabilities, and available technology. The United States developed an operational art that provided the crucial link between strategy and tactics. A theme throughout Trauschweizer’s book is the priority the U.S. Army placed on its forces forward-deployed in Europe and organizing its units to deter war with the Soviet Union. As the author laments throughout, the preparation for large scale combat operations often came at the expense of preparing for small wars and counterinsurgencies, evidenced by America’s failed efforts in Southeast Asia. He concludes that the Cold War army was thus a process of gradual transformation that culminated in the correct doctrine and equipment to fulfill its primary mission: deterrence in Europe as part of the broader American strategy of containment.
As Trauschweizer admits, with any book on Cold War history involving government archives, many sources remain classified. Regardless, he displays in-depth research into national security archives in the United States and Western Europe, including NATO and U.S. Army Europe headquarters. Due to the contemporaneous nature of this book, Trauschweizer interviewed many of the primary figures in the development of the Cold War U.S. Army. The book is organized into six chronologically crafted chapters that take the reader from the post-World War II period into the 1980s. The first half of the book describes the U.S. Army’s fight to maintain relevance in Eisenhower’s New Look defense policy, while the second half describes how Flexible Response doctrine shaped further reorganization. The book culminates in a final chapter detailing the U.S. Army’s arrival at AirLand Battle doctrine, finally accomplishing what it envisioned thirty years prior: an army capable of deterring the Soviet threat to Western Europe.One of the essential aspects of this book is its detailed exploration of units and unit structure. Because of its readability, this book is ideal for those with an interest in the Cold War or modern US military history.