The Steel Tigers is a history of the 77th Armor Regiment that was created as an independent tank battalion in 1940 that would be assigned to US Army infantry divisions during World War II, the Cold War with the Warsaw Pact, Korea, Vietnam, the former Yugoslavia and the Middle East.

This volume begins during buildup before Pearl Harbor and ends when the Warsaw Pact broke apart in 1992. Using national security and strategy from the White House through the military chain of command down to the individual unit level, the story of the Steel Tigers is a snapshot of one Army battalion’s role in the history of the United States at home and abroad for most of the 20th Century.

Donald L. Cummings served in the 1st Battalion 77th Armor in 1968 when it deployed to South Vietnam. He was the battalion’s intelligence officer and then a tank company commander. He served overseas in the 1st Battalion 72nd Armor, 2nd Infantry Division in South Korea and 3rd Brigade, 1st Armored Division in West Germany.

Assignments in the United States included company command at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, membership on an interagency team where he coauthored the methodology that led to the production of the US Intelligence Community’s first coordinated study of the Warsaw Pact’s current and projected combat arms force structure. Cummings served as a senior analyst in the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Africa Branch where he was responsible for seven former French and Portuguese colonies and later for Ethiopia.

He joined a major defense contractor as a senior analyst and program manager. He was an adjunct faculty member in George Mason University’s Department of Public Affairs where he presented an upper division course in Latin American government and politics and a lower division comparative politics survey course. He later joined the doctoral program at National American University’s Henley-Putnam School of Strategic Studies.