Follow-on Forces Attack is a NATO doctrine that dates to the early 1980s and brought the Alliance to exploit the microchip revolution. The eight-point programme was proposed by SACEUR General Bernard W. Rogers.[1] [2] It played a key role in NATO's Conceptual Military Framework and in the conventional leg of NATO's triad of deterrent forces.[3]
SACEUR Rogers was troubled by NATO's inadequate conventional military forces when faced with a Warsaw Pact that dominated his on a numeric basis, and ceteris paribus, he would need to resort to the nuclear option. To improve NATO's conventional defence capability, Rogers proposed a novel idea he labelled the "Follow-on Forces Attack" (FOFA) Concept, which theorized to counter a Warsaw Pact invasion by making deep conventional attacks the enemy's second and third echelon forces to prevent them from reaching NATO's defensive positions.[4]
FOFA was adopted by NATO in November 1984. The defects which were identified for remedy were:[5]
Rogers saw the technological basis for change lying in the microchip, which created new possibilities for high-speed, real-time data processing, as well as in micro-electronic sensor technology, notable for important applications in reconnaissance and target acquisition.[6]
Operationally, the FOFA concept was simply to interdict Soviet follow-on-forces located 24, 48, and 72 hours removed from NATO defensive positions. The problem was: to coordinate deep battle and air interdiction efforts out to 150 kilometers behind the line of contact, or roughly 72 hours away from it; and to plan for airborne deep strike missions 300 kilometers into the enemy's rear; and developing technology and doctrine to enable commanders quickly to adapt air strikes and fire missions. FOFA was the first "systems-of-systems" architecture. As of 2015 nearly 100 FOFA systems were integrated into the mix available to battle commanders.[5]