Defense Focus: Betting on tanks -- Part 2

WASHINGTON, Feb. 26 (UPI) -- It is extraordinary how often the obituary of the Main Battle Tank has been written in modern war over the past 60 years -- and how often it has been proven wrong.

The United States and the Soviet Union both maintained enormous land fleets of MBTs facing each other across the heart of Europe during the long decades of the Cold War for an apocalyptic showdown that never came. It should even here, though, be noted that neither side made the mistake of thinking they could just rattle their thermonuclear-armed arsenals of intercontinental ballistic missiles and expect the other side to either fold or be deterred. Defense planners in the Pentagon and the Soviet Defense Ministry alike realized that in the event of any major war, you need strong land forces to conquer, hold and defend territory and that those forces would need tanks -- lots of them.

Tanks proved pretty irrelevant -- though not totally so -- to most of the anti-colonial conflicts of the 1950s and 1960s. An exception was the Vietnam War. The U.S. Army effectively destroyed the Viet Cong as a combatant guerrilla force in its successful response to the Tet Offensive of 1968 -- a brilliant tactical military success for the United States that was transformed by poor reporting and analysis and loss of nerve by President Lyndon Johnson into a major strategic defeat.

But when the North Vietnamese army -- which took up the burden of the war from the shattered Viet Cong after Tet -- finally conquered South Vietnam in 1975, it did so thanks to its overwhelming armored ground superiority in Main Battle Tanks supplied by the Soviet Union. It was on tank treads that the NVA rolled into Saigon.

Two other conflicts of the 1970s confirmed the continuing crucial supremacy of tanks to ground conflict and the survival or utter conquest of nations. The Israelis at the beginning of 1973 the Yom Kippur War or War of Ramadan suffered very heavy casualties at the hands of handheld anti-tank rockets used in large numbers by Egyptian infantry.

In fact this was not the revolution in tactics it was widely trumpeted as being at the time. In contrast to their 1956 and 1967 wars against Egypt, the most senior Israeli commanders at first used their tank forces recklessly and without protection from adequate numbers of infantry forces operating with them: It was the same mistake the British 8th Army had repeatedly committed in the Western Desert against Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and his Afrika Korps until Gen. Bernard Montgomery taught them the right way of doing things in the late summer and fall of 1942.

The Israelis too learned their lessons thanks to the adaptations of their best combat commander, Maj. Gen. Ariel Sharon. But it was Sharon's skillful use of tanks in the tradition of Rommel and George S. Patton that enabled him to win the 1973 war in the south by exploiting the gap in the desert between the formations of the two main Egyptian armies, drive across the Suez Canal and cut one of them off.

Tanks were also crucial in the Red Army's extraordinary rapid conquest of Afghanistan in December 1979. This bears some comparison with the tactically extremely unimpressive victory of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps over Iraq in the 2003 Gulf War when a relatively small U.S. force drove to Baghdad and won the tactical campaign in less than three weeks against significant resistance. However, in both cases, the rapidly victorious superpower rapidly found itself stymied against a widespread popular grassroots Islamist guerrilla campaign against which its tanks, while still useful, could not prevail.

Nor is the effectiveness of IEDs against tanks in Iraq proof that they have become obsolescent. For more than 70 years, there have been specific battles or types of conflict that tanks were not suited for -- but none of that ever detracted from their continuing importance in their primary task.

--

Next: From Stalingrad to Baghdad