Lessons Learned from the Cold War

Deterrence Factors Ignored over the Last 35 Years

• Heistuman, Tom J., "Dusting off the Defensive Playbook: Analyzing Cold War Defensive Strategies for Modern Threat Environments," SAASS thesis, 2024, 116 pgs.
  • Heistuman answers this by pointing out that following the collapse of the Soviet threat, the US military grew accustomed to operating from relative sanctuaries and gradually forgot the importance of air base defense. By analyzing Cold War bomber operations across the early atomic age, the missile age, and the age of détente, he extracts three historical defensive strategies that the Air Force must revive: hardening, dispersal, and escalation control. He answers the topic by demonstrating that these historical concepts are highly transferable to the modern era, providing a framework for the US Air Force to manipulate an adversary's cost-benefit calculus to deter attacks by making them appear prohibitively costly or too risky.