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The Air Force on Friday detailed plans to cut the service by nearly 10,000 active, National Guard and Reserve airmen next year, as part of a broad move to downsize and shift capabilities around the country to be better prepared for wars of the future.

They're not doing any such thing.

They're slashing ~~their~~ our force structure to cut the DoD budget -- to "save money" so they can throw it away on tax-eaters, for votes.

It's just as Hackett et al. described in The Third World War, a Carter-era warning about what British and U.S. defense cuts were doing to the defensibility of Europe, and especially to deterrence.

As Hackett pointed out, the British played this "reorganization" game for 20 years and more, until the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR) became almost a paper force without a real core. In the authors' war-gamed exposition, the Red Army sliced through the BAOR as if it were hot butter. It took an arc-light raid finally to stop the Red Army short of the Rhine.

Unknown to Hackett et al, at the time, was nothing would stop the Russians. The Russian army, once passed through the Fulda Gap, would continue its advance until it reached the English Channel 72 hours later.

(Arc light raids using nuclear weapons would not have worked, assuming the B52s survived long enough to get there in the first place.)

At some point in the Russian advance, tactical nuclear weapons would have been used by both sides. That use would have slowed the advance somewhat but not halted it.

At the time, the combined Russian armies would have been in around 4-500,000 motorized troops and 30,000 tanks.

The Russsian coms used encrypted one-day throwaway pads for inter-unit locations, the US used plain descriptions passed in the clear ... AFCVE DEFGT (4- channel PPM encrypted) as opposed to “take a right off the HWY and we are under the big tree in the field”.

Our position, 4 klicks from the German border and opposite the Fulda Gap, would have been overrun in the first hours, with the first rest stop 30 klicks behind us. But then, it would not have mattered to us, since we were a tactical nuclear target for the Russians and a strategic nuclear target for the US ...

An interesting side note: the Russians (as told to me by a KGB guy) used the word ‘Mir’ differently than we did. To us it meant both World or Peace depending on usage. He told me they used it with a clenched fist meaning Conquer the World. Same as the ragheads say ‘Daresalem’ meaning Peace of the World to us, but meaning Peace of the World Under Islam to them.