ABSTRACT
To understand the development of the Army’s strategic thinking after the Vietnam War, it is necessary to examine the nature of the rebuilding it undertook. Essentially, the Army was not able to go on as before because it was now all-volunteer and decimated by the war. The strategic assumption provided by its mobilisation identity was gone, and it had to go back and rebuild from the bottom up. It learnt many lessons from the Vietnam War, but it is essential to recognise how it as an institution actually absorbed and acted upon them. The innovation, and the thinking behind it, was undertaken not simply due to the loss of the war, or technological changes, or changes in the strategic environment; it was shaped by the specific case of the changed identity and nature of the US Army, as that was the aspect which had undergone the greatest change. It was to build itself as an AllVolunteer Force, a standing army that was exclusively professional and it was aware of the strategic implications. The mobilisation Army that had only been partly mobilised had been decimated and this problem lay at the heart of the innovative changes through the period after the Vietnam War.
