Barry R. Posen
in Keith A. Dunn and William O. Staudenmaier, eds., Alternative Mlitary Strategies For the Future (Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania: US Army War College, 1985)
This chapter deals with North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) ability to prevent breakthroughs from happening. It focuses on the relative ability of NATO and the Warsaw Pact to cope with the demands imposed by multiple breakthrough battles. The NATO bureaucracy has come forward with a battery of proposals simply to buy a lot more of what we have been buying - to partially close the quantitative gap between the Alliance and the Pact. A survey of the history of armored warfare also suggests that the place to begin any assessment of the NATO-Warsaw Pact military doctrines that determine how each alliance builds and organizes its miltary forces. In effect, then, NATO tends to buy military forces according to its own theory of victory, or military doctrine. NATO has made a substantial financial effort to produce aircraft and weapons devoted specifically to close air support.