Content area
Full text
The Cold War U.S. Army: Building Deterrence for Limited War. By Ingo Trauschweizer. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008. xviii, 366 pp. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-7006-1578-0.)
Ingo Trauschweizer, a young scholar and a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute, has written the most comprehensive, in-depth study available of the U.S. Army during the Cold War. Focusing on the national-strategy level, Trauschweizer argues that the army's role in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (nato) to deter both Soviet conventional and limited nuclear attacks constituted its primary Cold War mission. It was also an unprecedented mission. Never before had the U.S. Army maintained in peacetime a battle-ready force of field army size, but that is what it did with the U.S. Seventh Army in Germany from 1951 to 1991.
The army began this endeavor with a buildup in Europe that coincided with the Korean War. Senior leaders had a...