The grinding Ukraine war, and meanwhile Iran's swarm against Israel, has led to questions about how good the Patriot system be. That's the missile-defense missile-battery, which in Israel led to "Iron Dome", which can stop incoming enemy aircraft, manned or not. Or at least make it more expensive to attack than to defend; because even SCUDs don't grow on trees.
The Patriot was conceived during the later, Ford-Carter / Brezhnev days of Cold War. You know... when NATO was losing, rather thought we were. Warsaw Pact had its own issues, meanwhile. Sir John Hackett suspected that these issues were more-serious than the member states were letting on. Hackett predicted that the 'Pact might, by the early 1980s, see their window for a conventional strike. So: how to defend against a conventional attack?
Ignoring Hoyt's actual poast (which isn't good): "Fuzzy Lemon" reminisces over the Patriot development circa 1980. "Lemon" recalls the primary vector was manned aeroplanes, like the MiG.
One question which interns like "Fuzzy Lemon" raised (or, now claim they raised), is... what if the attacker can afford to swamp the Patriot. It's actually... worse, than "Lemon" imagines. The USSR didn't even need MiGs; they already had the SCUD, for decades. The 'Pact can just let the DDR and Bulgarians massproduce outdated SCUDlikes, ship them over to the Fulda Gap, and drain NATO's batteries. Then, launch the real stuff. What isn't modern braggadocio, is that such questions were probably raised elsewhere. But I think they had answers: namely, as soon as a sudden move of SCUD would be seen - yo, DEFCON. Or maybe the SCUDs get fired off: DEFCON 1, and now the commies got to worry about incoming ICBM.
NATO's refusal to abandon first-strike (Hackett aside) meant that the Patriot wasn't that much deterrent, compared to the whole DEFCON thing. I recall it wasn't as accurate as the West liked to pretend it was; "Lemon" blames the software (pdf). The Patriot did show that the US was serious about homeland defense; a doctrine perhaps-better envisioned in "Star Wars" SDI. The Patriot also had some direct use - selling to US allies concerned with those Third-Worldies... allies like Israel. In 1991, Israel was able to stop most of Saddam's SCUD (I keep wanting to spell out "SCUM", kek). It proved accurate enough that, well, Israel lived and Saddam's force-projection was crippled throughout the 1990s.
Anyway Iron-Dome may or may not work all that well anymore. And NATO may have figured out that a cheaper swarm might come eventually. But in 1980, or even 2010, the cheaper swarm wasn't there. Patriot, in short, had a run; a good run. Like /√ had a good run.
It occurs to me that in the early 1910s, the Germans like Moltke likewise thought - in an age of automobiles and aeroplanes - that wars would be fast. Blitzkrieg was, indeed, coming. And that is why they tinkered with the Schlieffen Plan of hitting France.
Some advisor should have told the Germans' Staff that they needs prepare for a preBlitzkrieg state of affairs on the part of France. As of 1910, France was in no position to roll into densely-populated German-speaking Elsass (France might still have sympathisers in Metz and northwest "Lorraine"). Germany could just set up a slew of pillboxes from Metz to Switzerland. Maybe even sweetening the deal by withdrawing from Metz: perhaps as another Luxembourg, perhaps just giving it to Belgium.
When the Black Hand is shown in the Balkans, Germany is then able to sweettalk France into not bothering with all that Slavonia in the East. If France attacks, it is France invading Belgium, such that Britain (and the Netherlands!) might even attack France. Either way it is still a nasty hairball, but not WW1.
To sum up, NATO 1980 was smarter in the short term than was Zweibund 1910. Germany made several other blunders in the leadup, as made the Habsburgs, and - less studied - the Hungarians made. But not digging Elsass for defence was, I think, the dumbest of these. A military must plan for the most-likely war coming up to the next year; leaving any wars for the next generation, to the likes of Jerry Pournelle.
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