While I acknowledge the cathartic value of Air-Land Battle doctrine, we should not forget that it also allowed the Army to justify a lot of very big spending initiatives--things like the Abrams and the Bradley and a huge investment in attack aircraft for dep strikes against the enemy's follow-on echelons. Performing effective transformation includes the need to heed Eisenhower's admonition about the military-industrial complex.
I agree with most of what you say with a caveat in the above. The author saw Airland Battle as a cathartic to rid the Army of the stigma of Vietnam. You seem to say that Airland battle was all about justifying the Big 5 as they were called: Abrams tank, Bradley, Apache, MLRS, and Sgt York DIVAADS (which failed miserably).

My caution in both your's and the author's use of history in this case is that neither of you considered the threat at the time. The USSR and Warsaw Pact were still very formidable. Secondly Airland Battle was more a rejection of Active Defense than it was either a rejection of VN (which is really what Depuy intended when Active Defense turned 100-5's focus on the European theater) or a promotion for the Big 5 (4 of which have done very well).

BG(ret) Huba Wass de Czege was lead author on the 1986 version of 100-5; his blog on here relates somewhat to the discussion. See also his essay on doctrine.Lessons From the Past: Making the Army's Doctrine "Right Enough" Today I like that essay because he quotes Certain Victory in its discussion of doctrine with:
History all too often reinforces the familiar maxim that armies tend to fight the next war as they did the last. However, the Gulf War proved to be a dramatic exception. AirLand Battle, the warfighting doctrine applied by the American Army in Desert Storm, not only survived the initial clash of arms but, in fact, continues as a viable foundation for the development of future warfighting doctrine. The durability of the AirLand Battle concept is owed to three factors. First, unlike past instructions for the conduct of war, the 1986 version of AirLand Battle was a vision of what was possible rather than an owner’s manual for the equipment and force structures available at the time. In fact, if the 1986 edition of FM 100-5 possessed a fault, it was that some concepts were so far ahead of capabilities that many balked at their full implementation with the tools then at hand. Second, the conditions of combat and the dynamics of Desert Storm battlefields proved to be modeled with remarkable fidelity to FM 100-5. Third, and perhaps most notable, is that AirLand Battle represented a way of thinking about war and a mental conditioning rather than a rigid set of rules and lists to be done in lock-step fashion. Its four tenets, initiative, agility, depth and synchronization, are timeless, immutable precepts for present and future wars.
I believe that COL Foresman was absolutley correct in what he wrote concerning the drift of AirLand battle thought toward science (process as in MDMP) at the cost of art (thinking).

One of the pat phrases of Air-Land Battle was the imperative of agility, initiative, depth and synchronization. They were given equal weight, but over time, the ability to change (agility) and the ability to think outside the box (initiative) were increasingly de-emphasized, and the art of war took a back seat to the science of war. An outcome of the Air-Land Battle was the development of the military decision-making process (MDMP). Originally developed to provide a means for a commander and staff officers to organize their thoughts in conducting their analysis, it has become the be all and end all for thinking in the military. Rather than serving as an aid to analysis, analysis has become paralyzed by adherence to the MDMP.

Finally there is an excellent analysis of the 1976 edition of 100-5 is at Leavenworth Paper #16

Best

Tom