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- The Joint Attack Helicopter Instrumented Evaluation was a series of military exercises that tested the use of attack helicopters against simulated Warsaw Pact formations. They were carried out near Ansbach, Germany, between March and May 1972, primarily by units of the US 7th Army and the German Army, with active participation from the Canadian Army. In historical works, they are often known as the Ansbach Tests. Blue Force was equipped primarily with TOW-firing AH-1 Cobras supported by OH-58 Kiowa scout helicopters, while Red Force combined German Leopard tanks and US Vulcan air defense vehicles representing a typical Warsaw Pact (WTO) armored brigade. Blue Force lost 10 helicopters while destroying 167 tanks and 29 Vulcans. In the 1950s, the NATO response to an attack by the WTO would be "massive retaliation" with tactical nuclear weapons, and conventional forces were seen as secondary and often ignored. By the early 1970s, this had resulted in a huge disparity in tank numbers, with the WTO having about 14,000 tanks to NATOs 5,500. The 1969 Nixon Doctrine's flexible response strategy required a non-nuclear answer to this disparity. The Ansbach Tests suggested this could be a force of a few hundred attack helicopters, which could be purchased and deployed for a fraction of the cost of an equivalent tank fleet. This sparked off one of the most intense debates in the long history of tank-versus-antitank arguments. US Army doctrine to that point was that "the best defense against a tank is another tank," but proponents of the helicopter claimed that "the attack helicopter represents the final resolution of the tank-antitank debate". In the years following the tests, the Army began converting their Cobras to the eight-TOW AH-1S model and changing their role to be primarily anti-tank vehicles. (en)
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