The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR rendered irrelevant a half-century of planning between two significantly different military systems to fight a war that never took place. The U.S. Armed Forces and the German Bundeswehr have gone predictably separate ways. The U.S. Army and the Bundeswehr were separate entities. The policy demands of their respective governments required significantly different force structures and doctrines. Yet parallel evolution in a common environment eventually produced a deterrent no less effective in its way than the nuclear missiles of America's strategic triad, or the growing economic interaction between the Federal Republic and the states of the Warsaw Pact. That the NATO central front could hold and counterattack without exhausting itself, without becoming pinned in place, and without resorting immediately to nuclear weapons, contributed significantly to shaping Soviet strategy and deterring Soviet adventurism.