Early in the morning on Feb. 11, 1974, U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command headquarters is abuzz with activity. Gen. Creighton Abrams, Army chief of staff since October, is coming to Fort Monroe for a meeting with all the Army’s three- and four-star generals. The focus of the session is on the initial lessons learned from what the press is calling the “Yom Kippur War.” This latest round between Israel and the Arab states was an unexpectedly close-run thing.
Lt. Gen. Todd Land, director of the Future Concepts Division, led the team that went to Israel for a month to study the war. He and his team have lots to tell the chief. Indeed, what they had learned fully validated the path the Army was on in fielding its new active defense doctrine, itself crafted after an exhaustive analysis of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, more popularly known as the “Six Day War.” Indeed, the Army had created U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command and U.S. Army Forces Command in 1970 to get the Army on track. The lessons learned from that war showed the importance of the Army in big wars. It was also a great surrogate for — as his boss, Gen. Bill DePuy, loved to frame NATO’s challenges against the Warsaw Pact — “winning the first battle of the next war while fighting outnumbered.”
