American Military History, Volume 2 by Richard W. Stewart

The new volunteer Total Army needed more than mere numbers. It needed a mission; it needed to focus on what type of war it might need to fight. As a result, the Army began developing a new doctrine to regain its perspective and focus on its new missions after Vietnam. A reassessment of how the Army would fight began in essence with President Nixon's 1969 Guam Doctrine, in which he stated that the United States would maintain a smaller defense establishment to fight a "1 1/2 war" contingency. This was generally interpreted to mean that the Army would prepare to engage in a general war, probably in the European or Northeast Asian theaters, and at the same time fight a minor conflict, presumably a Third World counterinsurgency.

Nixon's smaller Army vision faced growing challenges, however. American intelligence agencies in the early 1970s noted an increase of five Soviet armored divisions in Europe, the continued restationing of Soviet Army divisions farther to the west, and a major improvement in equipment, with T–62 and T–72 tanks replacing older models and with a corresponding modernization of other classes of weapons. If gen- eral war had come to Europe during the 1970s, the U.S. Army and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies would have con- fronted Warsaw Pact armies that were both numerically and qualita- tively superior. With the Army mired down in Vietnam and with modernization postponed, this was a very sobering prospect.