Word: fulda
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...included the Persian Gulf War. And while the Army is not at the peak of readiness, the relevant question is not why not, but rather, why should it be? After all, the Soviet army, with its swarms of T72 tanks, is no longer poised at the German frontier's Fulda Gap, ready to pour into Western Europe in the next 30 minutes. Instead, today's U.S. military is deployed, in relatively small numbers, to regional hot spots that Washington wants to keep from becoming global conflagrations. So the Army's admission that the 10th Mountain Division and the First Infantry...
...different; for 45 years they have prepared for a Soviet version of the blitzkrieg. Panama, Grenada, Libya, even Korea and Viet Nam were all essentially sideshows. The Big One, if it ever came, would begin with the Warsaw Pact's tank and armored columns charging across the Fulda Gap into West Germany, starting a conflict that could escalate to a nuclear Armageddon. The effort to deter or defeat a Soviet invasion of Western Europe shaped almost everything about the U.S. military establishment: manpower requirements, weapons design, budget requests, the works...
...meanwhile, is left with a military strategy that was designed for a different world, and a force structure that must be not only reduced but also reshaped to avoid -- or at worst, fight -- the wars that America might actually get into in areas far from the Fulda Gap. How much and how fast are hotly contested subjects. Asked what he expected the U.S. military to look like in 20 years, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell referred to the dizzying pace of current events. "Twenty years?" he quipped. "I'm having trouble staying 20 days ahead right...
Such thinking seems curiously out of tune with the world as it looks in 1990. The Warsaw Pact, for all practical purposes, is dead as a military alliance. Soviet troops might have to fight their way through Warsaw, Prague and even Berlin before getting anywhere near the Fulda Gap, much less Bonn, Rotterdam or Paris. And while the Soviets were long considered capable of mobilizing for a strike at Western Europe in as little as 14 days, Pentagon analysts say that NATO could now detect preparations a month in advance. Some outside experts argue that signs of war would...