Defense Focus: Tanks still rock

Defense Focus: Tanks still rock (NSI News Source Info) Washington - September 5, 2008: The striking success of even relatively small forces of Russian Main Battle Tanks in the five-day conflict with Georgia proves once again how crucial tanks remain to the conduct of modern war. Russia used a concentration of its state-of-the-art T-90 Main Battle Tanks, which also have been sold in large numbers -- 657 in all -- to India, backed up by significant numbers of older, supposedly obsolete but still highly effective models, especially the more than a quarter-century-old T-72. The Georgian army, which had been significantly strengthened over the past two years by an influx of U.S. military equipment augmented by training from American military advisers, fell apart and offered no significant resistance whatsoever. The failure of the Georgians to provide any fight worthy of the name to the Russian ground forces contrasted with the effectiveness of Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Party of God in southern Lebanon, in standing fast against an Israeli ground forces offensive in July 2006. The two wars, of course, were very different. The Russians massed 10,000 troops. The Georgians did not expect an attack, were not dug in to ground positions at all, and offered no significant resistance even when they commanded key locations like the Roki Tunnel and the Kodori Gorge, or the city of Gori, where local conditions were extremely favorable for prolonged resistance such as the Palestinians put up against the Israeli army in Jenin in 2002, or the Chechens did in their capital, Grozny, against the Russian army in the first and second Chechen wars. By contrast, the Israeli political leadership led by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz foolishly scrapped a general staff plan to assault Hezbollah with a major ground force of 50,000 troops and relied on the confidence of ex-Israeli air force commander and Israeli Defense Forces Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz that air power without ground support could do the job. The Israeli Merkava tanks, state-of-the-art a quarter-century ago, proved extremely vulnerable to mines and improvised explosive devices used by Hezbollah. The quality of Israel's main, non-elite ground forces' infantry units proved poor, and therefore the integration of infantry and tank forces on the ground proved extremely weak. The Israeli failure in 2006 strengthened the fashionable impression in the United States that counterinsurgency was now the cutting edge of war and that therefore investment in expensive ground forces, primarily main battle tanks and artillery, could be drastically curtailed. However, the success of the Russian tank forces in conquering one-third of the mountainous and forested territory of Georgia in only five days revived the lesson, which should have been taught by the U.S. armor-mobile infantry drive to Baghdad in March-April 2003, that the Main Battle Tank does indeed remain the master of large-scale ground war. It is, in fact, 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 therefore should be noted that neither side made the mistake of thinking it could just rattle its 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.