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Abstract
Recent historiography tends to overstate the impact of the Yom Kippur War (1973) on the tactical reforms initiated by General William E. DePuy, the first commander of the U.S. Army's TRADOC (1973-77), while paying insufficient attention to the ways that DePuy used the war's lessons to leverage his legendary effort to rehabilitate the Army. The war's influence on General Donn A. Starry's operational reforms was equally profound, but came by a different route: the reconstructions of the Golan Heights defense and the discussions with his close friends Major General Israel ("Talik") Tal and Major General Moshe ("Musa") Peled provided vital inspiration for the AirLand Battle doctrine.
IN the 1970s the United States Army began to undergo major changes. A very important milestone in this process was its establishment of the Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOG) on 1 July 1973. Three months later the Yom Kippur War erupted when Egypt and Syria made a surprise attack on Israel. After the fighting ended on 24 October, numerous delegations of American officers and analysts made their way to Israel to confer with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF); their goal was to try to understand the implications of the war and implement its lessons.
This article examines the influence of the Yom Kippur War on the doctrine and training of the U.S. Army between the years 1973 and 1982. It focuses, more specifically, on the war's impact on the two officers who led the changes: General William E. DePuy, the first commander of TRADOC, and General Donn A. Starry, his successor there.
In the 1970s it was difficult to find literature that dealt with any aspect of U.S. national defense policy in which the lessons of the Yom Kippur War were not cited. That conflict was perceived to have had serious implications for the doctrines of the U.S. Army and the U.S. Air Force's Tactical Air Command (TAC), which were designed to enable the outnumbered conventional forces of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to prevail over the Warsaw Pact armies in a European conflict. The war also had implications for the future of the tank, training methods, the role of the reserve forces, and many other subjects. Some of the wartime IDF commanders, such as Major...