History of the First Division

Late Cold War: 1970-1991

From 1970 to 1991, the 1st Infantry Division remained at Ft. Riley as a mechanized infantry division. Its third brigade was stationed in West Germany as the 1st Infantry Division (Forward). These components participated in an incredibly demanding transformation of the Army—from a draft to a volunteer army, and then through several evolutions of doctrinal, training and equipment modernization. The Big Red One was first to send a brigade to train at the new National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California. The division and division (Forward) participated annually in REFORGER, the biggest deployment and maneuver exercise in Europe. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, and the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, Fighting First soldiers knew that they had played a critical role in ending the gravest sustained threat to American security in its history.

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