Rollback

Rollback is the strategy to win a war by destroying the enemy country or replacing it with a favorable regime. It has sometimes been effective and other times led to disastrous results.

The U.S. practiced rollback against the Confederate States of America (1865) and Germany and Japan in World War II. The Normandy Invasion is an example of a successful rollback of occupied territories in France and the Low Countries.

Rollback became an important policy advocated by John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles in the immediate post-World War II era - to rollback the "captive nations" absorbed into the Soviet bloc as a result of Red Army gains in the destruction of the Third Reich. Those nations were East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and the Baltic States.

The U.S. tried and failed rollback against North Korea in 1950 during the Korean War, and against Cuba in the Bay of Pigs in 1961.

Rollback was said to be the basis of fighting the People's Republic of China and Soviet proxies in the Vietnam war.

It succeeded with Noriega in Panama (1989), Grenada (1983), the Taliban in Afghanistan (2001), Saddam Hussein in Iraq (2003)--and most importantly, against the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

Rollback is the basis of NATO aggression in the Donbas war after the Crimean Annexation by the Russian Federation in 2014.

See also[edit]

• List of military strategies and concepts