ASSOCIATION OF THE UNITED STATES ARMY
You may have heard this story before: Fifty years ago, the Yom Kippur War displayed the lethality of new weapons and seemed to reveal a change to the character of war. The commander of the then-new U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), General William DePuy, sent the commandant of the U.S. Army’s Armor School, Major General Donn Starry, to study that war. His goal was to extract lessons for countering and, if necessary, fighting the countries that were aligned through the Warsaw Pact in Europe.[1] From the detailed analysis of the effectiveness of new technologies in that war, TRADOC published the doctrine of Active Defense in 1976.[2]
You may not have heard the end of this story. After leading the study of Yom Kippur, Starry took command of V Corps in Germany and began testing concepts in Active Defense against an attack by the Warsaw Pact forces arrayed in front of him. Once put into practice, he discovered that the doctrine which he himself had helped to craft was, in fact, lacking.[3] And he was not the only critic of Active Defense.
Between 1977 and 1981, Military Review published 80 articles criticizing the doctrine.[4] Critics pointed out that the lethality of antitank guided missiles in the open desert of the Sinai did not translate to the restrictive forests and hills of central Europe;[5] additionally, they noted that the Soviets had transitioned from the concentrated breakthrough described in Active Defense to a dispersed attack focused on creating opportunities for second echelons to exploit.[6] Furthermore, Active Defense did not meet the strategic requirements of the U.S. Army to threaten an offense that could liberate Warsaw Pact countries and so deter the Soviet Union from contemplating war. Active Defense focused too much on the technology displayed in Yom Kippur and not enough on the operational and strategic context of a war with the Soviet Union.
