We must not forget that the tank was not developed to defeat the tank. It was developed in World War I to defeat the machine-gun and to penetrate layered defenses in torn terrain. The ultimate goal was to to restore mobility to the infantry, punch holes in the defense, and unleash cavalry to exploit those holes. The chore remains virtually unchanged since the British deployed tanks at Cambrai in 1917. The tank enables maneuver. But as the British learned in the mud of the Western Front, the tank restores maneuver to the battlefield only when coupled with all arms—fires and aviation—including that which air forces bring.
COL Donahoe's article is correct. You have to have heavy forces to win the heavy fight.
Unfortunately, he does gloss over a critical strategic issue here, particularly in light of how the article leans heavily on a Baltic scenario.
The threat of US heavy armor weeks in the future in the Baltic is far less a deterrence than US Infantry in the Baltic right now.
That is, let us look to, say, Crimea. Let's argue for the sake of argument that the US was willing to guarantee the territorial integrity of Ukraine, including Crimea. Russia was able to mobilize and deploy its forces in about 48 hours, executing a coup de main.
Had US light forces been there, those forces might not have been able to do more than fight a delaying action, and that at high cost.
But the strategic calculation of actually engaging US forces is different that the US threatening to deploy forces later. And there simply is no way the US can move an ABCT to points in Eastern Europe anywhere near as fast as Russia can move its forces.
So if we wish our forces in Europe to have any real deterrent effect, they must either be forward deployed into critical strategic areas, or so more deployable (and thus light, and thus vulnerable) as to be more agile than Russian forces.
XBradTC 
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