Meanwhile, foot-mobile infantry was also still required, as World War II in the Pacific, Korea, and Vietnam clearly demonstrated. (To restore maneuver in Vietnam to foot-mobile infantry, U.S. Army thinkers, most notably Generals Howze and Kinnard, introduced the air cavalry and air assault formations mentioned earlier.) Even so, where mounted formations could be employed, they ruled the battle areas. It was, however, proving to be a perilous rule, for close combat of every kind had become increasingly lethal. The firepower invented to offset the mobility advantages seen in World War II — principally the antitank guided missile, attack helicopters, and tactical air with precision munitions — saw to that. Mobility and hence maneuver were once again threatened by increasingly lethal firepower.
Faced with this challenge, maneuver theorists were still able to employ all arms and depth, but with the added realization that mounted formations now had to become the principal destructive agents on the battlefield. To fill this expanded role, mounted units now required considerable firepower of their own to be able to sustain themselves in increasingly high-tempo, high-lethality battles. This increase came mainly in the following areas: air defense, deep fires (the ability to strike far into the enemy rear), some redundancy of capabilities (the ability to absorb casualties and still go on), and the ability to sustain themselves with supplies such as fuel and ammunition in those high-tempo, high-lethality battles.
U.S. ARMY AIRLAND BATTLE DOCTRINE
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, U.S. Army theorists, notably General Donn Starry, returned depth to the battlefield, but added to it.
From his studies of the '73 war, Starry had seen that the only way to counteract the density of both Syrian and Egyptian mounted attacks was to fight them close and deep at the same time. In order to defend against the echelonment doctrine of Soviet and Soviet-style forces (such as Syria and Egypt), Starry considered it necessary to bring depth back to U.S. Army doctrine. Like Syria and Egypt in '73, Soviet forces used waves of attacking echelons to ultimately overwhelm a defender by attrition at the point of attack. If the defender did not attack follow-on echelons at the same time he defended against attacking echelons, he would soon be overwhelmed. By separating the echelons and stopping the momentum of the attack, while destroying valuable or irreplaceable battle assets deep in the enemy rear, the combination of close and deep attacks would first slow down and then defeat echeloned attacks.
In Starry's view, depth meant both delivery of firepower from aerial platforms and artillery and ability of maneuver forces to occupy and control key areas by attacking vital enemy capabilities in deep ground assaults. In other words, mounted forces needed to be able to move quickly into the enemy rear (like the Israelis in their crossing of the Suez and in their armored counterattack out of the Golan toward Damascus). But in addition, they also needed to be able to target and attack deep in the enemy's rear with fires and their own attack aviation. In consequence, a mounted commander now had to see in much greater depth the battle space assigned to him to accomplish his mission.
In this effort to rethink depth, Starry was assisted by Colonels Huba Wass de Czege and Don Holder, who, as mentioned before, not only developed more fully than ever before the concept of depth, but also expanded on the important tenet of initiative, so vital to an American army, and especially to one that anticipated fighting outnumbered.
Starry and others to follow him at TRADOC, notably General Glen Otis and General Bill Richardson, gave these thoughts life in U.S. Army doctrine and capabilities. The name they gave these theories was AirLand Battle. Though the concepts included under the AirLand Battle rubric were first introduced by Starry in the U.S. Army's doctrine FM 100-5 in 1982, they were the product of study and analysis he and others had been doing since 1973.
One other idea resurrected from the past the U.S. Army called 'operational art.' In essence, successful battles and engagements had to be linked together in both time and space in the design of a campaign to achieve a larger operational objective. Achievement of that operational objective would lead to gaining the overall theater strategic objective and victory. Such theory had been routinely practiced in World War II. In other words, to achieve the theater result in Western Europe in 1944-45 of unconditional surrender, it was necessary to secure the lodgment in Normandy, conduct a breakout from there, cross the Rhine, and then finally defeat remaining German forces in their homeland from the west as Russian forces advanced from the east. Those series of major battles would together achieve the overall theater objective of German defeat.
U.S. Army writers began writing about operational art at the U.S. Army War College at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in the early 1980s. Brigadier General Don Morelli, then chief of doctrine at TRADOC, and General Glen Otis, TRADOC commander, included the idea in the 1982 version of FM 100-5. Building on that beginning, General Bill Richardson and Lieutenant General Carl Vuono, and later Lieutenant General Bob RisCassi, expanded on those thoughts, making 'operational art' a major change to the revised FM 100-5 in 1986.
After some debate on the level of command that could best handle this new doctrine on the tactical battlefields anticipated, the U.S. Army settled on the corps. The corps was selected because it was the Army's largest tactical formation that was self-contained; it had the necessary all-arms and support requirements to operate independently, and the redundancy to sustain longer-duration campaigns. Therefore, the U.S. Army corps would be self-contained and have two to five divisions in it for maneuver. It was to be different from World War II corps in that it would have its own logistics organization. Where it was necessary in NATO to employ multiple corps, NATO army groups would also practice the operational art. In that arena, corps would design a series of battles and engagements necessary to be won to achieve the operational objective assigned by the army group.
During the Cold War, it was not anticipated that the U.S. Army would fight in multicorps campaigns outside NATO. Hence there were no provisions for U.S.-only headquarters capable of commanding two or more U.S. corps. These decisions to abandon the field army were made by Army leadership well before AirLand Battle doctrine, and were driven by NATO considerations, yet were essentially revalidated in the 1982 and 1986 versions of the U.S. Army's doctrine. Thus, in the fall of 1990, there were no provisions for a U.S.-only field army or army group headquarters.
Though the Army ran into initial problems in theater because of these last issues, AirLand Battle and operational art dominated the thinking and organization of U.S. mounted forces in Desert Storm: all arms, destructive effects on the enemy, battles in depth both by fires and maneuver, and the linkage of these battles to achieve the campaign result.
ORGANIZATION
The corps bridges the strategic and the tactical levels of war. Using land, sea, and air forces, strategy decides the overall campaign objective. The operational level then devises a campaign plan of a linked series of battles and engagements that, when fought and won, will together achieve the strategic objective. The tactical level fights these battles and engagements successfully to achieve the operational results that in turn achieve the strategic objective. The corps participates in the design of the campaign and directly conducts the tactical operations to gain the campaign objectives.
The corps is the largest land formation in the U.S. Army. It is built with a mix of units that provides the commander a wide range of options. These options derive from the variety of combinations of units that he can put together to accomplish a given mission against a given enemy on a particular piece of terrain.
A mounted corps is a team of teams. The U.S. Army calls these teams echelons of command. They begin with the smallest entity, normally an individual vehicle and its crew, then build into echelons of command such as platoons (four to six vehicles), companies (four to six platoons), battalions (four to six companies), brigades (four to six battalions), divisions (six or more brigades), and a corps (two to five divisions, with up to eight to ten non-
