(Who chooses these names? AirLand is much cooler sounding.)
Damfino, I suspect there is a marketing department somewhere in the bowels of DCSOPS in the five-sided funhouse.
AirLand didn't depart from the basic mission-order idea so much as to adopt a different operational/theater-strategic approach, i.e. going over from a defensive war of movement to blunt and then destroy Warsaw Pact offensive by trading space for time and inflicting massive damage, to an offensive deep-ranging joint and combined approach.
AirLand wouldn't have been feasible without Reagan's force build-up and the fielding of high-mobility operational forces, the previous retrograde plan was really the best suited approach for the available resources we had under Ford, Carter, and the early Reagan years. Nor was AirLand quite as bold and original as we wanted to think, it owed a lot to and was roughly comparable to a concept the Soviets had in the 80s called the Operational Maneuver Groups (OMG,
) which involved something more or less like a German offensive
Kampfgruppe of corps-sized armor/mech-heavy forces breaking through and maneuvering independently out of contact with their own main force, deep in our rear. One of the functions of Spetznaz was to aid the OMGs, by grabbing key bridges or terrain ahead of them (like our SOF or German WW2 Brandenburgers).