OT} Look at op/art in 1980
Stuart Mackey
excerpt and, a look at the state of the US army's operational doctrine in
Europe in 1980:
http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/aureview/1985/mar-apr/showa
lter.html
Anxieties are often best alleviated by consulting experts. The U.S. Army had
at hand a significant number of prospective advisors with extensive
experience in the problem of fighting Russians on a shoestring. The fact
that these advisors' experience had ultimately been a losing one seemed less
important to an army humbled by its own recent history. Taking military cues
from ex-Nazis did offer certain public relations risks. However, World War
II had been over for thirty years. National Socialism showed no serious
signs of reviving. Eisenhower's refusal to receive his defeated opponent at
the end of the Tunisian campaign seemed an increasingly quaint gesture in a
world that could no longer afford crusades of any kind for the noblest of
motives. Increasingly, Schörner's and Model's campaigns and the battles of
von Senger und Etterlin and Hermann Balck were refought in war games and at
cocktail parties from Carlisle to Leavenworth. The results were often
impressive. Thus in May 1980, the Director of Net Assessment, Office of the
Secretary of Defense, sponsored a war game in which Balck and his one-time
chief of staff F. W. von Mellenthin defended a division sector of a U.S.
corps against a Warsaw Pact attack. The old Wehrmacht hands made it look
easy as they crippled two enemy tank divisions and then successfully
counterattacked toward the German border against seemingly overwhelming
odds.24
While no one was confusing a map room with a battlefield, Balck, Mellenthin,
and their counterparts did much to establish a concrete case for initiative,
flexibility, and mobility as vital elements of a successful forward defense
of the NATO central front. Their points were reinforced by the publication
of memoirs and biographies of several of the eastern front's most successful
operational commanders, until now relatively unknown outside of Germany,
whose careers seemed to prove the overriding importance of spirit and
confidence in fighting the Russians.25