I was in a worldwide command post exercise (war game) where we gamed defending against a conventional attack through Fulda. We stopped them a little over halfway across W. Germany, sustaining heavy casualties. There was a Clancy novel about a conventional Warsaw Pact attack that had the same result. I always wondered if he was privy to those results. :-))
Clancy may have talked to and read the books and writings of
Sir John Hackett who wrote
The Third World War: August 1985 (as well as a companion/sequel,
The Third World War: The Untold Story).
This book was written during our "hollow" years, and I remember attending a lecture he gave several years after it came out, and he was very blunt in admitting why he wrote it - he firmly believed that if we didn't beef up our conventional forces in Western Europe as well as our naval and aerial resupply assets, that we would be facing a World War III if the Soviets thought we could be defeated on the ground or if they felt they had no choice, and that if we weren't decisive, that it would go nuclear. He said it was meant to send a signal to the civilian leadership of the countries in NATO that things could go bad rapidly and that you can't pretend that the Soviets would always remain on their side of Europe.
It's kind of interesting how he predicted the Soviet Union might break up if it went nuclear - some people scoffed at the notion back when it came out that the Soviet Union could fall apart so rapidly, but I bet those types were surprised when the Berlin Wall came down and when the Soviet Union did collapse.
We were very concerned about a possible Sov conventional attack. Many were very quietly convinced the feckless Carter would never defend against a Sov conventional attack with nuclear weapons, even though that had been policy since the Eisenhower administration. So, we had to figure out how to get the job done ourselves, despite being badly outnumbered in Europe.
Thank God for Ronald Reagan.