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It will be a tank of problem for pakistani army not indian army,
Is the rajasthan deserts where the first operational ARJUN regiment is inducted in the indo-pak border or in indo-china border?
Main Battle Tanks and Armour Technology
- Thread starter Rage
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Is the rajasthan deserts where the first operational ARJUN regiment is inducted in the indo-pak border or in indo-china border?
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ARJUN has met all Indian army specifications for protection , firepower, mobility and reliable operations in the most demanding indian hot desert climates without any need for Ac and adjudged to be the best tank in IA stables according to official MOD report to standing parliamentary committe set up to scrutinize defence projects,
It will be among the top 10 MBTs in the world once it is inducted in huge numbers with folowing abilities separating it from many also ran MBTs.
1.with higher penetration APFSDS rounds in development,
2. Higher powered APU to operate it's electronics in standby modes without running the engine, theerby avoiding detection by heat seeking sensors, and increasing it's range
3.network centric warfare capability (means it can shoot a missile on target that is not even within visible range with data supplied by airborne assets,)
4. Lowest ground pressure per square inch(meaning that it can operate better in a slushy and marshy environment )
5.completely separated safe ammo storage in mk-2 version with blast proof doors,
6. One of the best power to weight ratios and gun FCS accuracy, with better muzzle velocity for rounds
7. APS and other camouflage techniques in development
8. composite armor protection similar to LOS armor thickness for LEO-2
The view that positioning of the main sight under the roof of the turret gives raise to a weak spot is one of the most ill informed opinions peddled by people to simply score points,
just imagine a tank with main sight on the roof of the tank. It will be gone the moment a simple fragment from surrounding explosion hits the exposed sight on the roof.
But if the main sight is placed under the turret roof it is heavily protected from all three sides and exposed only in the front and that too when an opponent tank stands directly in front of the main gun and co axial machine guns, and has the time to take the aim and shoot accurately at the sight.
A very rare occurance in battle.
What will the Tc and the gunner in the target tank (with main sight below the roof of the turret) do till this rare incident happens. Sleep tight perhaps.
And even if the gunner and the Tc snooze around the round from the enemy tank should hit the main sight taking the straight line path of the bullet on the bottom half of the main sight. Because the top part of the main sight is protected by more than 2000 mm thick roof plate behind it.
because any round other than the enemy tank round won't get through even the lesser LOS armor behind the main sight.
It means that the enemy tank must accurately hit the 10 cm X 25 cm rectangle of the bottom portion of the main sight from a distance of close to 2 kms or 1km. What are the chances?
The same as the tank with main sight below roof level can hit the gun mantlet plate of the enemy tank with sights on the roof.
So no difference in survival possiblity.
And most people who say that ARJUN has this flaw and that flaw haven't even seen a proper photograph of production model let alone the tank in reality.
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bose
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I have been arguing earlier that we should induct at least 500 Arjun Mark – II, it will not only make the Tank development initiative economically viable, but we should also go for next up gradation into Arjun Mark – III. This is the only way out for us from dependence from outside hardware supply and stop kick backs"¦
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For a parabolic hit on the area behind the main sight , the chances are better for the tank with main sight below the roof level as there is every possibility that there will be some extra armor protection , like the longer turret composite armor length on ARJUN or extra armor block behind the main sight on LEO.
So the placement of main sight below the roof level as a major point of weakness is mostly a theory debate with no grounds in reality of battle field.
No enemy tank gunner will focus his aim on the tiny 10 X 20 cm bottom portion of the main sight of the tank , located at the top left corner of the tank,
Because the chances of his rounds missing this small choclate wrapper size target from 2 kms is 10 times more than hitting it.
If he does such a foolhardy job of firing 10 rounds on the same 10 x 20 cm sized target on the top left corner of the tank to get a kill, He will be hit 10 times by the enemy tank with main sight below the roof level tank and will be dead dog long before.
because the chances of one of those 10 rounds taking out his main gun and the mantle plate or the weakly protected turret side simply relying on turret geometry are 10 times greater.
So arguments that tanks like LEO and ARJUN can be taken out by bullet like straight line shots on the bottom 10 cm x 20 cm bottom portion of the main sight is a wet dream that can only happen when the gunner and Tc of LEO or ARJUN is sleeping soundly,
even then the sound of the missing round will wake them up is my very very humble opinion.
So IM very very HO the weak armor behind the main sight can be used to beat a tank in troll wars in open forums not in real wars on the battle field.
That's why designers choose a trade off of losing some armor behind the main sight to keep it safe from surrounding explosions that can cripple exposed main sights sitting like soap boxes above the roof top ,
that can be taken out by simple armor piercing bullets making the tank effectively blind in real war.
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Damian
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Belly is hull bottom plate, yeah this on these drawings.
I am correct that BM "Oplot" also have reinforced belly?
As for that nonsence written on previous page. Main sight placed in a "window" cut in front armor is always a weak zone, even if there is some armor placed behind, such armor is always thinner than in other configuration.
Main sight should be always placed through the roof and behind front armor to reduce frontal weak zone of turret to the nececary gun mantled only.
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Damian
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This is a fact. Another fact is that tanks which had main sight placed in front armor cut out, during modernization, were redesigned to eliminate this, and there is not many modern design that have such configuration, which are Leopard 2's, Leclerc, Merkava Mk1/2/3 and Arjun only. All other modern designs do not have such configuration of main sight, even Israelis new that it was a weak zone and in Merkava Mk4 main sight goes through turret roof, not front/side armor creating a weak zone.
The Last Stand
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High explosive AT mine?? With a HE warhead? This has HEAT.
@Damian
Recently ,Thailand has ordered 49 BM oplot . After read this topics for a long time ,I decided to be a member .
I heard you have some test video of Nozh/Duplet ERA . Could you share it to me ?
I doubt the Nozh/Duplet efficiency against APFSDS and tandem shaped charge ,it's too good to be true .
Thanks in advance !
Recently ,Thailand has ordered 49 BM oplot . After read this topics for a long time ,I decided to be a member .
I heard you have some test video of Nozh/Duplet ERA . Could you share it to me ?
I doubt the Nozh/Duplet efficiency against APFSDS and tandem shaped charge ,it's too good to be true .
Thanks in advance !
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Damian
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Well the problem is that Chieftain and Challenger 1 do not have conventional mantled with armored mask. It is more sort of a gun port or gun slot.
And yes there is stabilization both in Chieftain and Challenger 1, however both stabilization and FCS of these tanks, were not really designed to fire on the move, it was there more to improve accuracy during short stops for engagement, so gunner can more quickly point gun on target, use FCS for calculation and fire.
As for coax, in both tanks, coax use the same gun port/slot as the main gun, it is not visible but coax is place just above the gun.
Well the problem is that this video seems to not be avaiable anymore on YouTube. But ask Andrei_bt, he might help you.
But I will say one thing to you. I also doubted in efficency of Knife/Duplet, untill I saw video from these tests.
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It has no add-onn belly armor as seen on A-stan upgraded tanks.
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this is not for general public wiev. But hope very soon some information will be availible.
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Would you please send me the answer of the Different of 478DU1-478DU10?You have PM on milits.pl - there is answer
Thank you
russia allegedly used the TOS-1 buratino to rain fire on grozny in 1999.
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Sorry for the Cross Post
Armored officers say ground forces win wars, not the air force or navy. Is the Defense Ministry, slashing the Merkava tank budget, forgetting this lesson?
The final exercise of the IDF officers' course drill, conducted under a desert sun and the steady gaze of the chief of the General Staff last month this month, did not include the classic uphill battle against an entrenched enemy. Nor did it feature the sort of mass tank battles that decided the 1956, 1967, and 1973 wars. Instead, infantry soldiers, operating in pairs and with the support of precise rocket fire and a platoon of tanks, made their way into a mock Lebanese town, charging past the lovely red-and-green cedar flag of Lebanon and the far less lovely yellow-and-green Hezbollah one (which features a male hand clasping a Kalashnikov above a globe), and into the loose concentric circles of the town, where, presumably, Hezbollah fighters and civilians mingled.
The soldiers scurried to the appropriate "houses," darted in, fired when necessary, and coordinated their actions with both the Merkava tanks, which commanded the town's two main junctions, and the guided MLRS rocket launchers, positioned outside the urban area and able to respond to threats on the distant ridge lines around the town. Machine gunners, perched on either side of the advancing soldiers, produced happy showers of support fire, and the snipers clanged their rhythmic rounds against the steel targets.
After the drill, IDF Chief of the General Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz warned the soon-to-be officers that what they had just witnessed was a very anemic version of Israel's future wars. "You'll beg to receive this sort of assignment," he said. "It'll be a gift. E-v-e-r-y-thing will be more complicated and more lethal than what we just saw here with our eyes."
He explained that while the nature of war has remained unchanged since the dawn of human history — the constants being: a dearth of information, surges of fear, an ever-shifting battlefield, and a gnawing sense of uncertainty — "the characteristics have changed."
For Israel, in the near future, Gantz said, that means fighting in mountainous territory, amid thick foliage (an indication that Lebanon is the most likely site of Israel's next war?) and against an enemy deeply embedded within a civilian population. That force is armed with first rate anti-tank missiles and the ability to simultaneously use three curved trajectory weapons — mortars against advancing soldiers, rockets against the army's rear echelon, and more rockets against the civilian population in Israel.
To some, this reality of guerrilla warfare — a reflection of the Arab states' utter failure to defeat Israel on the conventional field of battle — is an opportunity to cut costs as the state navigates through economic straits and the Defense Ministry grapples with a three-billion-shekel (some $825 million) budget cut for 2013. After all, they say, the fact that there could be a guerrilla war along the Golan Heights or a scenario in which the IAF will have to act deep in Syria or Iran, is just another way of saying that the threat of a large-scale war — a simultaneous attack from several standing armies — has subsided. This will translate into less casualties, less potential for disaster, and less of a need for a large hulking army.
For tank crews, this is especially problematic. Serving in the West Bank or along the Egyptian border, manning a post, infantry soldiers remain in their natural environment — on the ground with a rifle in their hands. Tank crews do not. Additionally, parts of the Merkava tank project are on the chopping block, with 150 workers from Merkava-part-producing factories facing termination in light of budget cuts and a reduction in demand from the IDF .
To some, this makes sense. Not only has the chance of conventional war subsided, but the tank itself, they say, is an ancient and obsolete tool — a war horse meant to fight in the open country. In the alleys of Gaza and along the steep slopes of Lebanon, against an enemy keen to exploit any sort of civilian casualty, it is more liability than asset.
To a large extent, this reporter, having witnessed the futility of the armor during the Second Lebanon War — the helplessness and fear so apparent on the faces of the timid tank crews — shared those feelings. Several conversations with current and former armored officers, and the observation of two small scale drills, however, cast the issue in a new light.
Tanks during and after the war
There are, according to foreign sources, some 2,000-3,000 tanks in the IDF. The corps' motto has long been "The man in the tank will win." But ever since the First Intifada in 1987, the army has cut back drastically in tank training, and tank soldiers have slipped to the very bottom of the IDF combat food chain. Nowhere was the corps' lack of readiness more crudely exposed than during the Second Lebanon War. One example, which took place on August 10, 2006, some four days before the end of the war, is particularly illustrative.
Brig. Gen. Erez Zuckerman, the commander of an IDF armored brigade, ordered one of his battalion commanders into Lebanon to join the fighting around Marj Ayoun. Zuckerman was a former Special Forces and infantry officer with no command experience whatsoever with tanks, itself an appointment that would have been unthinkable one decade earlier or in any other branch of the armed service. The officer, Lt. Col. Benny — whose story was revealed in now-MK Ofer Shelah and Yoav Limor's book "Captives of Lebanon" — refused to go in as the commander of his troops. Zuckerman reminded him that the country was at war, and that his decision would have enormous significance. But Benny maintained his refusal: he was not scared to go into Lebanon; he simply did not trust himself to go in as the commander of the untrained battalion. He told Zuckerman that when the former battalion commander arrived at the front, he would get into his tank and proceed.
"Had he told me that he was flat out refusing, I wouldn't have said a word to him," Zuckerman told the authors. "Straight to the Military Police. But what I saw was not a coward. I saw a battalion commander who had been in his post for a year, had not done any training, and did not believe in his own capabilities. I also knew that Motti was on the way and that soon the battalion would have a commander that believed in himself and one that they believed in. I decided not to punish him at that moment and to settle the account with him after the war."
What followed, during the final surge of the war, after weeks in which the ground troops were deemed unnecessary and then hastily called up and poorly deployed, was a tragic display of buffoonery. IDF tanks, traveling along exposed routes, either waiting for a concrete assignment or driving back and forth to help rescue injured infantrymen, fell prey to Hezbollah anti-tank crews, drove into ditches, and generally proved ineffective. A total of 48 tanks were incapacitated during the 34-day war, and Hezbollah managed, despite the presence of four IDF divisions in south Lebanon, to fire some 120 rockets a day at Israel.
Gantz, the newly appointed commander of the ground forces at the time, summoned Emanuel Sakal back into the army in an advisory role. Sakal, a former general, had been awarded the Medal of Courage for his actions as an armored battalion commander on the southern front during the Yom Kippur War and had gone on to command the ground forces in the early '90s.
The Times of Israel met up with Sakal at the Tanks Memorial at Latrun, where he seethed at the notion of yet again cutting the armored budget and training time. "In May 2006 [two months before the war], Gantz spoke at a forum about the need to cut entire units from the ground corps. Out of respect to him, I didn't say anything. I just got up and left," he said.
After the war, he reminded the man who now heads the army of what he sees as an unassailable truth: "Wars are won on the ground."
It doesn't matter if the battle is fought in Tora Bora or Vietnam, the Casbah of Nablus, or along the dense brush on the slopes of southern Lebanon, he said. The portrait of a battle that has been decided is always the same — "the panting infantryman alongside the canon of the tank."
The problem, Sakal said, is that this truth is slippery. "It's forgotten between wars and remembered only during wars."
In times such as now, during what the commander of the IAF Maj. Gen. Amir Eshel called the war between wars, Sakal said, leaders swoon before the sleek "profiles of the silvery birds" of the air force and the intoxicating intelligence of their operators; somehow they manage to forget, each time they sit before a budget decision, that tanks and ground forces will decide the next war.
Sakal suggested a scenario whereby al-Qaeda-like groups assert control over large swaths of Syria in the coming months and, having reached some sort of agreement with their internal enemies, turn their fire toward Israel. "Then what?" he asked. "Who will stop the artillery and the surface-to-surface missiles, the air force?"
This did not happen in Lebanon or Gaza, he said, and it will not happen in Syria either.
In 2010, Sakal, who has a doctorate from Bar Ilan University and is affiliated with the Begin Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, wrote a book about the Yom Kippur War. The book, "Hasadir Yivlom?" ("The Standing Army Will Hold Them") is a rare document in Israel: it is critical of the air force. He wrote that the IAF's contribution on the southern front during the Yom Kippur War was "nil" and accused it of pursuing its own objectives — striking enemy airfields and surface-to-air missile batteries — rather than stopping the Egyptian army from swarming across the canal into Israel.
In a BESA paper about the Second Lebanon War, Sakal acknowledged the "strategic importance of the air force." After all, the reason the missile threat against Israel is so prominent is precisely because the IAF has ruled the skies for so long. During the Lebanon War, Israel downed 90 Syrian aircraft and lost none. Ever since, Syria and other enemies of the state have been arming themselves with missiles, rockets, and mortars. His contention is not that the IAF is not stellar. It's that the air force's contribution in a war is not proportional to its budget. Sakal quoted the much maligned commander of the Southern Command during the Yom Kippur War, Maj. Gen. Shmuel Gonen, who said after the war: "Where was the air force, which was given 52 percent of the defense budget?"
Today, Sakal said, the distribution is "roughly the same." The IDF Spokesperson's Office, in reply to a query about the IAF's share of the defense budget in 2013, said that such information is "very confidential."
Sakal accused the IAF of "cutting a giant coupon" on account of the Iran threat, acquiring an ever-growing arsenal — including a projected three squadrons of F-35As, to the tune of $15 billion — despite what he called the near certainty that "there won't be anything" done by the IAF against Iran.
The discussion about priorities, which extend to the acquisition of a sixth Dolphin-class submarine as well as other expensive weapons purchases, obscures the question of whether the armored corps, even if it's well-trained and equipped, is capable of adequately addressing the threats lurking in Lebanon and Syria.
Reuven Pedatzur, a former fighter pilot and the director of the Center for Strategic Dialogue at the Netanya Academic College, said the armored corps was "not useful" in Lebanon and contended that, even if the army had learnt an array of lessons and adapted its fighting style to meet the guerrilla threats, "only the first three tanks are useful. All the rest are just waiting in line."
He said that hundreds of tanks, some nearing 50 years old, should be retired from service and the units should be shut down.
Sakal scoffed at the notion that tanks were ill-suited to the Lebanese landscape and the guerrilla enemy therein. During the Lebanon War, the IDF's first campaign against a terrorist force, he led an armored division through south Lebanon, he said. They reached their 40 kilometer objective within 48 hours. Within a week, by June 12, IDF tanks were on the outskirts of Beirut and, despite all that later went awry, by the end of August, Yasser Arafat had been forced from Lebanon to Tunisia. "All you need is to operate the tanks properly and with some brains," he said.
What he meant by brains was the ability to operate in tandem with the infantry, engineering corps, artillery, and air force. This inter-connectivity was a total failure during the Second Lebanon War. IDF armored officers claim this and other failures have been rectified in the interim.
The first problem to be fixed, said one mid-level armored corps officer, was training. The Times of Israel met up with this officer at the gate of a settlement just outside Nablus, where his troops were stationed. He conceded that his soldiers were at the tail-end of a six-month stint in the West Bank, but said he had parked a Merkava tank at the entrance to the settlement to keep the soldiers in touch with the tank during the long hiatus and that they would soon have 17 straight weeks in the field. He acknowledged that this was quite different from the four-months-operational-duty / four-months-training that he recalled from his earlier days in the military, but maintained that it was sufficient.
The second shift was in the nature of the training. "The army is in a different place today," said Lt. Col. Isham Ibrahim, a battalion commander in the armored corps, who spoke to the Times of Israel after a combined infantry and armor drill in the Negev. "Today, you won't find a drill that isn't combined."
The more senior officer, not cleared to speak for attribution, said that the cooperation today between infantry and armor is so close that one will not proceed without the other. "Go ask the Golani Brigade commander and he'll tell you. They won't go into a village without tanks," he said.
The army has also shifted technologically to address the threat that Hezbollah and other terror groups represent. Tank ammunition today is geared toward the concrete of urban areas and the open country rather than the penetration of armor, the officer said. The wi-fi target acquisition technology means that, as opposed to previous wars, once military intelligence has acquired a target, whether by UAV or other means, the knowledge is transferred immediately to the screen of each tank — and, in fact, to the entire army, according to a recent Walla! news interview with Col Boaz Kavina, the head of weapons technology in the IDF's computerized wing. If, say, the IAF takes out a target, it's deleted in real time.
"The armor has adapted itself to the developing battlefield and to guerrilla warfare," said Lt. Col. German Giltman, a deputy brigade commander in the armored corps.
The officer who was not cleared to speak for attribution elaborated: The primary threat to tanks, he said, is on the road. "That's where the anti-tank ambushes are sprung."
During the Second Lebanon War, he maintained, not a single tank was hit within an urban area. "It was all out in the open. And not a single tank was hit while in motion."
This was why he had convened his platoon and company commanders and, even before the 17 weeks of training began, asked them to plan a navigational route through the deep ravines of the terrain, which he said were quite similar to Lebanon, based on an analysis of the possible vulnerable points along the way. "For my soldiers today, the possibility of tank vs. tank warfare is a wet dream," he said.
Instead they train to control and conquer urban areas — densely populated centers that were once perceived as off limits to the military, and today, due to the nature of Israel's sub-state enemy actors, are grimly recognized as focal points for any future Israeli conflict. But the officers contended that contrary to popular perception, the urban environment, which has seemed like a trap for an armored unit that takes civilian casualties into account, is today a sort of haven.
One said the density of a city was like a concrete shield against anti-tank weapons, which must be fired from some distance, and that the height, firepower, and maneuverability of today's tanks mean that they can hold down large swaths of city as the infantry advances.
"Without a doubt there's been a fundamental shift in our thinking," said the other officer, Lt. Col. Ibrahim. "Today, as an armored battalion commander, I'm looking to get into the city. I want to be in the urban area."
Thanks to Mitch Ginsburg
Armored officers say ground forces win wars, not the air force or navy. Is the Defense Ministry, slashing the Merkava tank budget, forgetting this lesson?
The final exercise of the IDF officers' course drill, conducted under a desert sun and the steady gaze of the chief of the General Staff last month this month, did not include the classic uphill battle against an entrenched enemy. Nor did it feature the sort of mass tank battles that decided the 1956, 1967, and 1973 wars. Instead, infantry soldiers, operating in pairs and with the support of precise rocket fire and a platoon of tanks, made their way into a mock Lebanese town, charging past the lovely red-and-green cedar flag of Lebanon and the far less lovely yellow-and-green Hezbollah one (which features a male hand clasping a Kalashnikov above a globe), and into the loose concentric circles of the town, where, presumably, Hezbollah fighters and civilians mingled.
The soldiers scurried to the appropriate "houses," darted in, fired when necessary, and coordinated their actions with both the Merkava tanks, which commanded the town's two main junctions, and the guided MLRS rocket launchers, positioned outside the urban area and able to respond to threats on the distant ridge lines around the town. Machine gunners, perched on either side of the advancing soldiers, produced happy showers of support fire, and the snipers clanged their rhythmic rounds against the steel targets.
After the drill, IDF Chief of the General Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz warned the soon-to-be officers that what they had just witnessed was a very anemic version of Israel's future wars. "You'll beg to receive this sort of assignment," he said. "It'll be a gift. E-v-e-r-y-thing will be more complicated and more lethal than what we just saw here with our eyes."
He explained that while the nature of war has remained unchanged since the dawn of human history — the constants being: a dearth of information, surges of fear, an ever-shifting battlefield, and a gnawing sense of uncertainty — "the characteristics have changed."
For Israel, in the near future, Gantz said, that means fighting in mountainous territory, amid thick foliage (an indication that Lebanon is the most likely site of Israel's next war?) and against an enemy deeply embedded within a civilian population. That force is armed with first rate anti-tank missiles and the ability to simultaneously use three curved trajectory weapons — mortars against advancing soldiers, rockets against the army's rear echelon, and more rockets against the civilian population in Israel.
To some, this reality of guerrilla warfare — a reflection of the Arab states' utter failure to defeat Israel on the conventional field of battle — is an opportunity to cut costs as the state navigates through economic straits and the Defense Ministry grapples with a three-billion-shekel (some $825 million) budget cut for 2013. After all, they say, the fact that there could be a guerrilla war along the Golan Heights or a scenario in which the IAF will have to act deep in Syria or Iran, is just another way of saying that the threat of a large-scale war — a simultaneous attack from several standing armies — has subsided. This will translate into less casualties, less potential for disaster, and less of a need for a large hulking army.
For tank crews, this is especially problematic. Serving in the West Bank or along the Egyptian border, manning a post, infantry soldiers remain in their natural environment — on the ground with a rifle in their hands. Tank crews do not. Additionally, parts of the Merkava tank project are on the chopping block, with 150 workers from Merkava-part-producing factories facing termination in light of budget cuts and a reduction in demand from the IDF .
To some, this makes sense. Not only has the chance of conventional war subsided, but the tank itself, they say, is an ancient and obsolete tool — a war horse meant to fight in the open country. In the alleys of Gaza and along the steep slopes of Lebanon, against an enemy keen to exploit any sort of civilian casualty, it is more liability than asset.
To a large extent, this reporter, having witnessed the futility of the armor during the Second Lebanon War — the helplessness and fear so apparent on the faces of the timid tank crews — shared those feelings. Several conversations with current and former armored officers, and the observation of two small scale drills, however, cast the issue in a new light.
Tanks during and after the war
There are, according to foreign sources, some 2,000-3,000 tanks in the IDF. The corps' motto has long been "The man in the tank will win." But ever since the First Intifada in 1987, the army has cut back drastically in tank training, and tank soldiers have slipped to the very bottom of the IDF combat food chain. Nowhere was the corps' lack of readiness more crudely exposed than during the Second Lebanon War. One example, which took place on August 10, 2006, some four days before the end of the war, is particularly illustrative.
Brig. Gen. Erez Zuckerman, the commander of an IDF armored brigade, ordered one of his battalion commanders into Lebanon to join the fighting around Marj Ayoun. Zuckerman was a former Special Forces and infantry officer with no command experience whatsoever with tanks, itself an appointment that would have been unthinkable one decade earlier or in any other branch of the armed service. The officer, Lt. Col. Benny — whose story was revealed in now-MK Ofer Shelah and Yoav Limor's book "Captives of Lebanon" — refused to go in as the commander of his troops. Zuckerman reminded him that the country was at war, and that his decision would have enormous significance. But Benny maintained his refusal: he was not scared to go into Lebanon; he simply did not trust himself to go in as the commander of the untrained battalion. He told Zuckerman that when the former battalion commander arrived at the front, he would get into his tank and proceed.
"Had he told me that he was flat out refusing, I wouldn't have said a word to him," Zuckerman told the authors. "Straight to the Military Police. But what I saw was not a coward. I saw a battalion commander who had been in his post for a year, had not done any training, and did not believe in his own capabilities. I also knew that Motti was on the way and that soon the battalion would have a commander that believed in himself and one that they believed in. I decided not to punish him at that moment and to settle the account with him after the war."
What followed, during the final surge of the war, after weeks in which the ground troops were deemed unnecessary and then hastily called up and poorly deployed, was a tragic display of buffoonery. IDF tanks, traveling along exposed routes, either waiting for a concrete assignment or driving back and forth to help rescue injured infantrymen, fell prey to Hezbollah anti-tank crews, drove into ditches, and generally proved ineffective. A total of 48 tanks were incapacitated during the 34-day war, and Hezbollah managed, despite the presence of four IDF divisions in south Lebanon, to fire some 120 rockets a day at Israel.
Gantz, the newly appointed commander of the ground forces at the time, summoned Emanuel Sakal back into the army in an advisory role. Sakal, a former general, had been awarded the Medal of Courage for his actions as an armored battalion commander on the southern front during the Yom Kippur War and had gone on to command the ground forces in the early '90s.
The Times of Israel met up with Sakal at the Tanks Memorial at Latrun, where he seethed at the notion of yet again cutting the armored budget and training time. "In May 2006 [two months before the war], Gantz spoke at a forum about the need to cut entire units from the ground corps. Out of respect to him, I didn't say anything. I just got up and left," he said.
After the war, he reminded the man who now heads the army of what he sees as an unassailable truth: "Wars are won on the ground."
It doesn't matter if the battle is fought in Tora Bora or Vietnam, the Casbah of Nablus, or along the dense brush on the slopes of southern Lebanon, he said. The portrait of a battle that has been decided is always the same — "the panting infantryman alongside the canon of the tank."
The problem, Sakal said, is that this truth is slippery. "It's forgotten between wars and remembered only during wars."
In times such as now, during what the commander of the IAF Maj. Gen. Amir Eshel called the war between wars, Sakal said, leaders swoon before the sleek "profiles of the silvery birds" of the air force and the intoxicating intelligence of their operators; somehow they manage to forget, each time they sit before a budget decision, that tanks and ground forces will decide the next war.
Sakal suggested a scenario whereby al-Qaeda-like groups assert control over large swaths of Syria in the coming months and, having reached some sort of agreement with their internal enemies, turn their fire toward Israel. "Then what?" he asked. "Who will stop the artillery and the surface-to-surface missiles, the air force?"
This did not happen in Lebanon or Gaza, he said, and it will not happen in Syria either.
In 2010, Sakal, who has a doctorate from Bar Ilan University and is affiliated with the Begin Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, wrote a book about the Yom Kippur War. The book, "Hasadir Yivlom?" ("The Standing Army Will Hold Them") is a rare document in Israel: it is critical of the air force. He wrote that the IAF's contribution on the southern front during the Yom Kippur War was "nil" and accused it of pursuing its own objectives — striking enemy airfields and surface-to-air missile batteries — rather than stopping the Egyptian army from swarming across the canal into Israel.
In a BESA paper about the Second Lebanon War, Sakal acknowledged the "strategic importance of the air force." After all, the reason the missile threat against Israel is so prominent is precisely because the IAF has ruled the skies for so long. During the Lebanon War, Israel downed 90 Syrian aircraft and lost none. Ever since, Syria and other enemies of the state have been arming themselves with missiles, rockets, and mortars. His contention is not that the IAF is not stellar. It's that the air force's contribution in a war is not proportional to its budget. Sakal quoted the much maligned commander of the Southern Command during the Yom Kippur War, Maj. Gen. Shmuel Gonen, who said after the war: "Where was the air force, which was given 52 percent of the defense budget?"
Today, Sakal said, the distribution is "roughly the same." The IDF Spokesperson's Office, in reply to a query about the IAF's share of the defense budget in 2013, said that such information is "very confidential."
Sakal accused the IAF of "cutting a giant coupon" on account of the Iran threat, acquiring an ever-growing arsenal — including a projected three squadrons of F-35As, to the tune of $15 billion — despite what he called the near certainty that "there won't be anything" done by the IAF against Iran.
The discussion about priorities, which extend to the acquisition of a sixth Dolphin-class submarine as well as other expensive weapons purchases, obscures the question of whether the armored corps, even if it's well-trained and equipped, is capable of adequately addressing the threats lurking in Lebanon and Syria.
Reuven Pedatzur, a former fighter pilot and the director of the Center for Strategic Dialogue at the Netanya Academic College, said the armored corps was "not useful" in Lebanon and contended that, even if the army had learnt an array of lessons and adapted its fighting style to meet the guerrilla threats, "only the first three tanks are useful. All the rest are just waiting in line."
He said that hundreds of tanks, some nearing 50 years old, should be retired from service and the units should be shut down.
Sakal scoffed at the notion that tanks were ill-suited to the Lebanese landscape and the guerrilla enemy therein. During the Lebanon War, the IDF's first campaign against a terrorist force, he led an armored division through south Lebanon, he said. They reached their 40 kilometer objective within 48 hours. Within a week, by June 12, IDF tanks were on the outskirts of Beirut and, despite all that later went awry, by the end of August, Yasser Arafat had been forced from Lebanon to Tunisia. "All you need is to operate the tanks properly and with some brains," he said.
What he meant by brains was the ability to operate in tandem with the infantry, engineering corps, artillery, and air force. This inter-connectivity was a total failure during the Second Lebanon War. IDF armored officers claim this and other failures have been rectified in the interim.
The first problem to be fixed, said one mid-level armored corps officer, was training. The Times of Israel met up with this officer at the gate of a settlement just outside Nablus, where his troops were stationed. He conceded that his soldiers were at the tail-end of a six-month stint in the West Bank, but said he had parked a Merkava tank at the entrance to the settlement to keep the soldiers in touch with the tank during the long hiatus and that they would soon have 17 straight weeks in the field. He acknowledged that this was quite different from the four-months-operational-duty / four-months-training that he recalled from his earlier days in the military, but maintained that it was sufficient.
The second shift was in the nature of the training. "The army is in a different place today," said Lt. Col. Isham Ibrahim, a battalion commander in the armored corps, who spoke to the Times of Israel after a combined infantry and armor drill in the Negev. "Today, you won't find a drill that isn't combined."
The more senior officer, not cleared to speak for attribution, said that the cooperation today between infantry and armor is so close that one will not proceed without the other. "Go ask the Golani Brigade commander and he'll tell you. They won't go into a village without tanks," he said.
The army has also shifted technologically to address the threat that Hezbollah and other terror groups represent. Tank ammunition today is geared toward the concrete of urban areas and the open country rather than the penetration of armor, the officer said. The wi-fi target acquisition technology means that, as opposed to previous wars, once military intelligence has acquired a target, whether by UAV or other means, the knowledge is transferred immediately to the screen of each tank — and, in fact, to the entire army, according to a recent Walla! news interview with Col Boaz Kavina, the head of weapons technology in the IDF's computerized wing. If, say, the IAF takes out a target, it's deleted in real time.
"The armor has adapted itself to the developing battlefield and to guerrilla warfare," said Lt. Col. German Giltman, a deputy brigade commander in the armored corps.
The officer who was not cleared to speak for attribution elaborated: The primary threat to tanks, he said, is on the road. "That's where the anti-tank ambushes are sprung."
During the Second Lebanon War, he maintained, not a single tank was hit within an urban area. "It was all out in the open. And not a single tank was hit while in motion."
This was why he had convened his platoon and company commanders and, even before the 17 weeks of training began, asked them to plan a navigational route through the deep ravines of the terrain, which he said were quite similar to Lebanon, based on an analysis of the possible vulnerable points along the way. "For my soldiers today, the possibility of tank vs. tank warfare is a wet dream," he said.
Instead they train to control and conquer urban areas — densely populated centers that were once perceived as off limits to the military, and today, due to the nature of Israel's sub-state enemy actors, are grimly recognized as focal points for any future Israeli conflict. But the officers contended that contrary to popular perception, the urban environment, which has seemed like a trap for an armored unit that takes civilian casualties into account, is today a sort of haven.
One said the density of a city was like a concrete shield against anti-tank weapons, which must be fired from some distance, and that the height, firepower, and maneuverability of today's tanks mean that they can hold down large swaths of city as the infantry advances.
"Without a doubt there's been a fundamental shift in our thinking," said the other officer, Lt. Col. Ibrahim. "Today, as an armored battalion commander, I'm looking to get into the city. I want to be in the urban area."
Thanks to Mitch Ginsburg
The Last Stand
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Can you suggest what the "mess" is, since we people think it is still a clean thread. What do you suggest to us, to "clean" this "mess".
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