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Slide 13 of 24
For a detailed account of how the IDF defeated the enemy's Surveillance Strike Complex (SSC):
For a detailed look at IDF tanks:
IDF Armor: victory through superior protection, firepower and mobility
Post-Vietnam and the "land battleship" mentality
In the mid-1970s the "Hollow" Army rather than fix itself tried to write-off an unpopular closed-terrain war (Vietnam) as an aberration and focus instead on the Cold war confrontation in Europe and to "HEAVY" itself up with 33-ton infantry carrying tanks and 70-ton jet-engined tanks. The Army was already in place in Europe ready to fight to the last man, and weight constraints to enable AIR deployment was not a major consideration. Following Vietnam, the Army in an almost pathological reverse did away with anything and everything that had to do with infantry intensive closed-terrain combat using LIGHT mobility air/ground vehicles in favor of the more appealing Cold war confrontation in Europe. Lost was the operational mobility to cut across country Light AFV ACAV-style and defeat the enemy or simply operate without a huge convoy of fuel tankers following in your wake. It was a WWII-style battle that would be fought against a Western set of military minds in the familiar WWII style that the Army had grown accustomed to. When in doubt, fall back to reliving WWII.
In the years after Vietnam, the Army targeted for destruction all the combat-experienced M113 ACAV officers to rid itself of all memories of "Vietnam" good and bad in favor of slugging it out with the Russian armored hordes at Fulda Gap. Armor branch is now wedded to the "land battleship" (70-ton M-1s which they are gold-plating with digital electronics, missile rounds etc.) and has resisted any light effort. Even the AGS did not have wide support among the Fort Knox community. The money they are spending now to paper "STUDY" a 20-ton "Future Combat Vehicle/System" or a 8-km "wonder 120mm round" is the money that could have FIELDED THE M8 AGS in the 3/73d Armor at Fort Bragg, NC or the 2d ACR at Ft. Polk, LA. But that would have helped the Light Infantry divisions, and we can't have that! When 2 decades have passed, and all the money is wasted (no actual weapons or vehicles FIELDED) will the Army buy a 20-ton FCS (light tank) and supply it to the Light/Airborne/Air Assault Divisions? Will they assign some to support the 82d Airborne Division-airdrop mission if the FCSs are kept in heavy units? Its too "expensive" to airdrop" and other excuses will surely surface. And this is the crux of the issue, and why we have an ultra light and ultra heavy schism in our Army: the Army has been traditionally run by a "Heavy Mafia" of General officers who want to fight centralized WWII style war in the open and do not want to decentralize and power share/empower HOOAH! young junior officers/enlistedmen that a closed terrain fight would require. They did not come up with a satisfactory answer to the closed terrain enemy in Vietnam, it wasn't the kind of war they wanted to fight so they just say "We won't do Vietnams".
This is NOT an option. The Cold War confrontation in Europe is over. We live in a multi-polar world. Conflicts that the U.S. is going to have to participate in are going to be in closed and urbanized terrain of underdeveloped countries and the Light HOOAH! Airborne/Air Assault infantry troops are going to be needed to win these fights and keep the peace. We can and we MUST solve the Vietnam war closed-terrain riddle, and do it very quickly since we have worldwide urbanization and ecological/weather disturbances as added challenges.
The days of Army light forces seizing and holding terrain just to wait for follow on forces are over. The forces that get there first AIRMECH have to STRIKE the enemy first and defeat him while we still have surprise, shock action and the initiative in our grasp.
The real reason may be that during the time period of "R&D" reinventing a "new" light AFV when we could buy one off the shelf, a major war will take place, the light divisions will somehow get "egg on their faces" (Usually dozens of Americans in body bags), and the heavy-ists will have what they really want: which is the destruction of all light forces from the U.S. Army order-of-battle so they can fight wars with heavy armored vehicles, with all-the-Battlefield-Operating-System (BOS) centralized control means in place with complete Force Provider logistical comfort. Kosovo proved this bureaucracy can't get itself to the battlefield in time. The first "Battlefield Operating System" is DEPLOYABILITY. If you can't get there, your BOSs are ZERO, ZILCH, NADDA. The problem with this besides being unethical, immoral and devoid of ANY Army values is that the rest of the world isn't going to sit and wait for the heavy Army and boastful-but-without-substance marines leisurely deploy themselves to the battlefield by ships. They are going to use asymmetric warfare and gobble up their neighbor in a matter of hours and days in a world that moves by AIR, not sea. Its already happened to us twice: in Kurdistan and now Kosovo. We wouldn't be digging up mass graves today if we could have gotten there in decisive force sooner. "Saving Private Ryan" and D-day/Tarawa/Iwo Jima is over. It was a mistake in the 1940s when the Branch of Cavalry was disbanded and the Armor branch born. It would have been better to have simply reoriented the old horse cavalry branch to the "mounted warfare branch" and retained the name Cavalry. This might have prevented the slide towards the "land battleship" mentality that exists at Fort Knox and too many other places in the Army.
A survivor of the "Hollow Army" writes:
"The need for an actual Calvary branch is clear thinking. I was a school trained tanker. I selected Armor very carefully because I thought it was the 'wave of the future'. When I got to my first unit I was sent to a Recon Plt. in an Armor Bn ( 4/69th Armor 8th ID) in Mainz Germany. At first, I was disappointed but in a short time I came to love the recon Plt. But in a Bn that only had about eighty percent strength (all the shops and every support unit ran at 100 percent) I went through two Tank Gunnery Cycles at Graf. When the Israelis got their asses kicked in the Yom Kippur war, many changes in doctrine and equipment were supposed to come about. One of my biggest gripes since first coming in AIT was the firing of two rounds at every target. The Israelis agreed (ass whippings focus everybody) and new directives came down about only shooting targets once if you hit but there were no changes in doctrine. We still shot each target twice, even if we missed, as if the fight would be over and we would be sent back to our barracks with low scores if we didn't hit it in two. Very poor training technique.
This was in the early seventies and the M113 ACAV 'Armored Cav' had been very successful in Vietnam which was beginning to be ignored by Armor branch as an "aberration". Within a year of me entering the service they RIFed every Cav officer in my BDE. No exceptions. Only tankers were left and none of them had any combat experience.
I started referring to the crossed Sabers as 'crossed fence posts', and when some specialists got drunk one night and repainted the Bn sign with crossed fence posts I was immediately under suspicion. Fortunately I had gone to Switzerland for the weekend so my alibi was tight. I came to regard the whaled tanker training cycle as a bad joke. The tactical training was non-existent and we were generally unprepared for anything other than challenging the Soviets to tank gunnery duels at Graf. My biggest problem with this is that tanks are not intended to fight tanks (I know, heresy). They are supposed to run around in the enemies rear and make life difficult for their more lineal thinking rivals. You will not find a single incident of Patton organizing tank duels. He fought tanks with TDs and Arty. and organized attacks with the intention of creating a breakthrough and forcing our enemy not to fight but to reorganize on a different line. You will never hear 3rd Army veterans complaining about the Tiger tank but 1st Army veterans use that as an excuse for all their failures. It's interesting to note that 1st Army was literally unable to move in bad weather (no CAS!) while Patton continually organized his attacks to take advantage of cloud cover and darkness. One of Patton's biggest complaints was we needed much more training in night attacks."
The so-called "Army of Excellence" period, which some claim is our guide today after it had a moment of fleeting glory during the Desert Storm against Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Often overlooked is the fact that the Iraqi Army failed to exploit their initial advantages and gave us 6 months to deploy and make ready our heavy AFV forces. Also overlooked is that we could indeed fight another infantry intensive war in the closed terrain of the far east Asia regions, and or in crowded cities and we had rid from our force structure the LIGHT TRACKED AFV equipment and combat tested leadership by RIFs in favor of non-rapidly deployable Fulda Gap systems when we should have retained this know-how and improved upon it by making them AIRMECHSTRIKE.
During the 1980s some experimentation included the permanent assignment of an attack helicopter brigade to the armored and mechanized divisions, the creation of the
9th "high technology light division" (motorized infantry division) and the Light Infantry Division. The air combat brigade concept became institutionalized while the motorized concept died during the late 1980s due to a lack of investment in a light armored vehicle family and hostility from both the Armor and Infantry branches of the Army.
The Post-Cold War, power-projection U.S. Army: Killing the Tank--and FAST!
PART 5
M60 rampage in San Diego, apfsds, heat, atgms, Milan saclos ATGM, love the moving tank billboard!!, TOW ATGM firing from a Bradley, A-10 top attack tank killer, F-16 as tank killer bullshit, who writes this lying shit? Chopper is tank's dealiest foe? How? When it itself is not burning? Eurocopter Tiger mast mounted sight, Apaches, Hellfire ATGMs, Clinton-era 40-ton FCS, height compared to M1, two per c-5