Posted on 08/11/2006 6:05:24 AM PDT by APRPEH
(IsraelNN.com) IDF officials admit that the biggest surprise of the ongoing war against Hizbullah is the ease by which terrorists have destroyed IDF tanks.
At least 30 tanks have been totally destroyed or seriously damaged in bomb and anti-tank rocket attacks involving state-of-the-art Russian anti-tank rockets.
About one-half of the military personnel killed in southern Lebanon were inside tanks.
"state-of-the-art Russian anti-tank rockets."
That's all the farther anyone needs to read; that says it all, doesn't it?
Just for the record, (and the kl00-less), "Katushka" is NOT an Arabic diminutive name, it's Russian. There are so many copies and variants on the original Russian design the term is used to cover a wide range of Russian designed and built artillery rockets.
The bottom line here is that these weapons are being provided to the terrorists by the Russians, via the Syrians. The Soviet Union is long gone, but it was, at it's heart all along, Russian; and the Russians are whores for anyone's hard cash. They long supported the Stalinists/Baathists in the Middle East, and nothing has changed in that.
So all of that just begs the question: Just what the hell are we waiting for?? Must we wait until Hezbollah gets it's hands on a nuke, or enough chemical weapons to wipe out Tel Aviv, and actually uses either one, before we stop dicking around in the UN, and do what has to be done? And by that I mean unilaterally disarming the Syrians by wiping out every military target in their country.
My pet theory has been that Iran is using Israel as a feint, and one day we're going to wake up with Iran storming across the UAE and taking the Saudi oil fields... Talk about becoming an economic superpower overnight! Could Israel respond? Maybe. Could we? We'd have to - but then Baghdad would fall if we had to divert sizable forces to Saudi Arabia. The oil market would go berzerk and our economy would be crippled. If Iran has a delivarable nuclear weapon, the perfect blackmail would ensue - "move us off these oil fields and London gets it. You want to nuke us? GO AHEAD, we'll martyr the entire nation and take you with us."
The beauty of having a decreasing commodity is that the price will just go up as it peeters out. They'll have ungodly wealth to the end.
When will we ever learn. Fear of us is the only thing that will contain them. To win this war they and all who support them have to be destroyed. There is no other solution.
Quote: "But since the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, with tanks in daily combat against the unexpectedly fierce insurgency, the Army says 80 of the 69-ton behemoths have been damaged so badly they had to be shipped back to the United States. "
I have to snicker at the MSM's lack of understanding. Of course armor is going to be damaged. There is NO armor out there that can withstand a well designed charge. The real measure of the effectiveness of armor, however, is not how damaged the vehicle is, but crew survivability. I think the Army would trade a tank for the crew everytime.
there is a simple solution to this
continueing garbage.
give every Israeli in the North half
of the country,
fifty, free flight artillery rockets
WOW look how big that sucker is? I love that weapon!
USE more, don't delay,
bomb them back to the stone age!
I'm not a military expert, but after just reading The Killer Angels about the battle of Gettysburg...frontal assault on a well entrenched enemy holding the high ground...sounds like Pickett's Charge to me.
The halmark of the Israeli military has always been its mobility and firepower. What I cannot understand is why they haven't tried to outflank the Hezbollah positions by an aerial or seaborne assault and attack the Hezzie rear.
Democrats want it that way. It won't change.
That would be one vision. The other is that our children convert to Islam or die.
It's a surprise at first sight but when you remember that Hezbollah is financed by Iran..........
The Hezbollah has Kornets (AT-14), the latest missile from the Sov, er, Russians. It can knock out a Merkava through its frontal armor.
You may be right. I think their strategy is to take Lebanon, then the Sunni and Shiite sections of Iraq (Syria gets the Sunni section), then turn to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, riding the supreme elation of the Arab street to victory there, and the prize of the oil fields and infrastructure in both places. As you say, the nuclear capability will be the immunity elixir keeping the west out it.
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Dare we say it? Without proper tactics, tanks are a diminishing asset.
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