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By Ingo Trauschweizer
Release date: June 2008 (see Amazon.com
& others)
416 pages, 29 photographs, 2 maps, 6 x 9
Cloth, ISBN 978-0-7006-1578-0, $39.95
Press Release below by University Press of Kansas:
The Cold War marked a new era for America's military, one dominated
by nuclear weapons and air power that seemed to diminish the
need for conventional forces. Ingo Trauschweizer chronicles the
U.S. Army's struggles with its identity, structure, and mission
in the face of those challenges, showing how it evolved, redefined
its mission more than once, and ultimately transformed itself.
(CONTINUED below)
Trauschweizer describes how, beginning in
the 1950s, the army faced an unprecedented problem: how to maintain
a combat-ready fighting force that could operate on both conventional
and nuclear battlefields. Faced with shifting threats to national
security, budgetary battles, and unstable political developments
around the globe, the army also had to keep abreast of new weaponry
while navigating changes in its own top brass and the presidency.
Trauschweizer particularly considers the army's organizational
and doctrinal response to problems posed by deterrence in Europe,
focusing on the evolving role of the Seventh Army in West
Germany - the largest and best-prepared field army the U.S.
had ever deployed in peacetime. He explores the roles of Generals
Matthew Ridgway, Maxwell Taylor, and others, as well as the use
role of tactical nuclear weapons, as he traces the army's transformation
through the New Look policy, pentomic reorganization, and the
adoption of the ROAD concept.
Ultimately, Trauschweizer contends, the army found it impossible
to prepare for limited war in the Third World while pursuing
its primary mission of deterrence in Europe. His revisionist
argument about the army's objectives in the 1960s and early 1970s
places the Vietnam War in the context of the wider Cold War,
offering new lines of inquiry into both. He also shows how, after
the debacle of Vietnam, the army's sense of mission, technological
evolution, organizational structure, and operational doctrine
matured to produce the AirLand Battle doctrine of 1982, the cornerstone
of our defense of Europe until the Cold War finally ended.
"An exceptional, in-depth analysis of the role played by
the U.S. Army in American strategy during and immediately after
the Cold War. . . . Indispensable for anyone attempting to understand
that period or the Army's thinking in its current efforts to
develop Future Combat Systems." - Dale R. Herspring,
author of Rumsfeld's Wars: The Arrogance of Power.
"Few authors illuminate the details and interactions
of strategy, organization, doctrine, and technology as well as
Trauschweizer has done here."- Dave Hogan, author
of Centuries of Service: The U.S. Army, 1775 - 2004.
"Fills a significant gap in the military history of the
twentieth century and deserves the attention of soldiers,
historians, and the general public."- Jonathan M. House,
author of Combined Arms Warfare in the Twentieth Century.
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