Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
Q:
Well, much of this planning went on in the context of the post-ArabIsraeli 1973 war, I
think. It was expected there were going to be violent encounters that would cost a lot of
equipment, a lot of manpower, in the first few days of the war. So, the whole idea of
reinforcements from the United States, how quickly that would get there and how much
destruction there would be in this initial confrontation between Soviet and U.S. forces, put a
lot of pressure on the troops that were there planning to hold out for the first few days, I
guess.
I mean, there are a lot of changes in thinking going on during this period, aren't there, like
forward defense?
A:
Oh, there was considerable thinking. It was at this time that the administration was, because
of the agreed-upon strategy of forward defense, thinking about how they could, would meet
the U.S. commitment. The echelons higher than us at VII Corps, that is at USAREUR and
EUCOM or at SHAPE and NATO, were thinking about how to improve our capability more
rapidly. The administration adopted the strategy of rapid reinforcement of NATO. This
became a State Department, Defense Department item to take to NATO. The Carter
administration pushed for each country within NATO to increase by 3 percent its defense
budget over the next several years to improve NATO's capability to fight. Out of that came
the American initiative to provide NATO more rapid deployment of three more divisions.
This became a requirement to build warehouses of equipment for those three extra divisions
in Europe. This is what I became so involved in after I left 7th Brigade.
So, there was considerable activity being addressed because of recognition of what you
mentioned, the '73 ArabIsraeli war. It's going to be violent, it's going to be sudden, we're
now fighting forward, and what's all that mean in terms of improving our capability to fight
and win. We're no longer going to trade space for time. We better reduce the time it takes
reinforcing folks over there so they can be part of the fight. That's been every year an issue
for the U.S. Army in Europe, I guess, since we started NATO and thinking about those kinds
of things.
For us in the field it meant recognition that we were on the margin and we needed to figure
out how we were going to take care of those kinds of things.
When you talk about the ArabIsraeli war, you prompted another thought, and that was we
were at that time reading the books on the lessons from that war. I remember carrying around
a super book that described the violence of the fight of the Israeli 7th Brigade, an armor
brigade, and the Barak Brigade in the Golan Heights. It was violent, and their tanks were just
destroyed one after another. Also, we were getting interested again in the antitank ditch as an
obstacle because of its success in the Golan Heights, where the Israelis had used an antitank
ditch quite successfully in spoiling Syrian attacks. I remember pictures of Syrian vehicles in
the ditch and their AVLBs rolled over in the ditch. So, we stepped up our interest in trying to
figure out how we could do antitank ditches more quickly and how we could effectively use
them. As in the Golan Heights, you're talking about something dug prior to battle because it
is an equipment-intensive thing to build an antitank ditch.
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