Commander: Not many tanks harmed during war-

Commander of 401 Armored Corps Brigade, Colonel Moti Kidor: 'During war hundreds of antitank missiles fired, 18 damaged'

As the war continued in the north, more and more tanks were damaged. Many voices were heard in the past declaring the Merkava MK 4 model as "the safest in the world," but it turned out that many of these tanks were damaged by Hizbullah antitank missiles, causing the IDF a significant number of losses.

Colonel Moti Kidor, Commander of the 401 Armored Corps Brigade, however, says that "those who ask these questions simply don't understand the field, and unfortunately these include senior IDF officers. When you look at the full picture, one understands that during the war hundreds of antitank missiles were fired, and in total 18 tanks were damaged. Of those, missiles penetrated only five or six. To my sorrow, eight soldiers were killed in these incidents."

He added: "Like every tank in the past and in the future, the Merkava MK 4 is vulnerable. It's basically like asking why a chopper fell. If you strike it, it falls. I don't think there is any surprise here, and whoever is surprised simply doesn't understand. It's true that eight soldiers were killed in tanks, and that every soldier is a world in himself, but in relation to the number of missiles fired at us – it's not a lot."

In total dozens of Armored Corps soldiers were hurt and dozens of tanks hit, all from the Merkava MK 2, 3, and 4, some from tanks sent from the war reserves store unit shortly before entering in Lebanon. Among those injured were many reserves.

"Only a small number of tanks were seriously damaged, most of them have already been returned to units after the recovery," said a senior IDF officer.

"The Armored Corpse played in this war, like in previous war of the State of Israel, a central role in the fighting, and absorbed many casualties. We'll have to take away lessons from this to be ready for the next war," the source added.

That would be because you haven't downloaded the Microsoft-supported tool to view WMV on Mac - Flip4Mac:

(There used to be a Windows Media Player for Mac, but someone did it better, so Microsoft bought them.)

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/wmcomponents.mspx

Some of the Windows codecs (some AVI encoding) doesn't work out of the box, but there's a DIVX codec available from DIVX, and VLC helps play others:

http://www.divx.com/divx/mac/
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-macosx.html

Of course, I've had to download similar things for my work PC to get it to play videos, so that's nothing new.

Good point about the old Soviet Union possibly having the sealift capacity, though I think they'd have thought twice with China sitting on their border.

As for being in charge of NATO, I'm surprised the Warsaw Pact didn't invade in 1977 with Carter in the White House. In fact, for his entire term, I'd have been sweating it out. Finally, after Vietnam, we were scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of morale, manpower, and materiel.

Flash forward 10 years, and the situation is reversed. Amazing what Ronald Reagan did in 8 short years, and how fast the Soviets fell apart.

I did some quick online research about the Cajone Eh hull loss. Here's what I can surmise.

The tank was not a hull loss at first. It was disabled by a well-aimed RPG that hit the tank in the power plant. Cajone Eh took an RPG-7 in its exhaust grill and was not operable. The crew evacuated, afterwhich the tank was ordered to be destroyed by the attacking force's commander so that it would not fall into enemy hands. They chucked an incidiary grenade into the hatch, then hit the tank with 2 M830A1 MPAT rounds and later 1 Maverick missile.

also --

Assume for argument's sake that the RPG-7 can reliably pierce M1's hull side. By definition, we'd expect most hits on the flanks penetrate. Yet, that isn't the case according to THUNDER RUN by D. Zucchino, where numerous RPGs were fired, many tanks hit, but only 1 (Cajone Eh) disabled by a shot to the egine from the rear. Plenty of hits at turret and hull side were recorded, but none penetrated. For example:

"Every single vehcile in the column (M1's and Bradley's) had been blistered by RPGs or recoiless rifle rounds and thousands of rounds of small arms, but everybody was intact and still moving. SOme of the RPGs had detonated on the gear and rucksacks stored on the tracks' external bustle racks, and now the stuff was on fire. Most of the crew just let it burn." This is briefly before Cajone Eh was hit. (17)

At another instance, the tank commaded by Sgt. R. Gaines was hit five times, at least one in the turret side: "Each grenade had rocked the big tank before bouncing off and exploding in the dirt along Highway 8. . . Somewhere just west of the spaghetti junction, Gaines heard a tremendous whump on the right side of the tank. The crew in the tank behind him saw an oratgne fireball erupt, and then a sray of gray smoke. An RPG had bounced off the tank's external smoke grenade storage box, then ripped into the smoke grenade launcher. The whole sid eof the tank was on fire . . . He grabbed a handheld fire extinguisher from inside the turret, leaned out of the commander's hatch, and sprayed the flames with a burst of white foam. To his amazement, the fire sputtered and died. The smoke grenades and some of the gear in the bustle racks had burned, but there was no damage to the tank itself." (46-47)

On page 49, Sgt. Booker's tank was hit twice by RPG's on the right side.

That's just three instances out of many in the book. Either the laws of physics didn't apply to the Rogue Column, or the RPG-7's weren't very effective at killing Abrams.

take a look here -- (source) http://www.tank-net.org/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t16310.html

This source says the USAF put two Mavericks intot he hull and the turret still stayed on. Cajone Eh was a hull loss becasue the US Army ordered it so.

http://63.99.108.76/forums/index.php?s=0853a96f085da08a688ffc4ba9ad9dda&showtopic=14679&st=20&p=284565&#entry284565

here is a pic of Cajone Eh AFTER the US tried to 'destroy' it ;-)

Compare this to pics we have all seen of t-72s with the turret blown off etc etc.

http://www.defense-update.com/images/M-1A1-destroyed.jpg

Enjoy

The Israeli tanks appear to have been KO'd by newer generation MANPAD/ TOW-like Russian Kornets (and similar) with dual/tandem warheads. That tanks were defeated repeatedly by FIXED infantry assets points to a lack of proper infantry and mounted Cav support from the remainder of IDF. The USARMY method of supporting tanks with Bradlys, Air-Cav and dismounted infantry was far more successful at (1) killing the enemy (2) destroying their stuff (3) securing territory occupied (4) advancing rapidly to objectives (5) disrupting enemy operations and capabilities (6) surprising the enemy / controlling the order of battle (7) surviving the firefights and (8) protecting human assets.

Aside from that, the Israelis and their tactics did just fine.

The Merkava was 'defeated' by bad battlefield tactics on the IDF side. The tank is not a 'bad' tank, but it ain't invulnerable, and neither is the Abrams.

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