Ingo Trauschweizer, a scholar educated in the United States and Europe, has written an institutional history of the U.S. Army in the context of its role in European defense from the 1950s to the end of the Cold War. This is an important story. Although America has maintained a standing army since the Revolutionary War, the army's history is one of cyclic swelling and starvation until the Cold War, when it faced an unprecedented challenge: to maintain robust, combat-ready forces overseas in an era when nuclear weapons called into question the nature of war and, indeed, the need for an army. The author rises to the task. Deep research into U.S. and European national security archives along with memoirs and reminiscences of principal figures underpin a solid if often disjointed narrative that finally comes together in a coherent, satisfactory concluding chapter.
Trauschweizer discusses how the strategic doctrine of the North...