AirLand Battle

From Freepedia

AirLand Battle was first adopted by the US Army in 1982 as Field Manual 100-5, and drove military doctrine until the late 1990s. Today, the Pentagon embraces a new doctrine: Network-centric warfare, made possible by the Digital Revolution. The AirLand Battle doctrine describes a combined Air and Land force, with emphasis on inter-service cooperation. The emphasis of the AirLand Battle warfare was to counter the Warsaw Pact's numerical superiority with better tactics, with the Central European theater in mind.

The point of AirLand doctrine is to stop second-echelon forces from reinforcing the enemy, by attacking these forces at choke points. The land components fight the first-echelon enemies, and the air units attack the second-echelon forces behind the lines. The enemy is attacked at chokepoints, because its location is otherwise unpredictable due to his maneuvers. Natural choke points would be bridges and tunnels.

During the Gulf War, the road to Basra was turned into a chokepoint by bombing boths sides of the convoys first (thus creating the Highway of Death).