I know basically nothing about tanks. Is the Merkava a good tank? What do you think of these comments?
The Merkava does not seem like a well built tank. It looks like they made it entirely of the exhaust port from the Death Star. Every Hamas video involving the Merkava is just a completely unescorted tank getting reverse 360 windmilled dunked. How many of these things have they lost?
If you tandem fire rpgs you can get a mobility kill on almost any tank. The US Army isn’t stupid enough to fight like this.
It seems like a really basic strategy to not do this exact thing
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Ninja edit
I just had an obvious realization considering who the account belongs to. I don’t know if either of them know anything about tanks either. Maybe they don’t and their “knowledge” comes from video games. It’s not criticism. It’s just funny.
I feel like the main point of discussion here isn’t whether the Merkava is a good tank, but about the way the IOF is using them, rolling slowly around in ones and twos with no infantry around so people can just run up and
themIOF conscripts so afraid of being outside the tanks that it’s making being in the tank a death trap
My (admittedly very armchair, probably learned from other comments on this site) understanding of the Merkava not having infantry support is due to how its Trophy countermeasure system uses shotgun-like blasts to counter missiles. They would shred any infantry standing around the tank.
The system utilizes small EFPs which are projected towards the incoming threat, energy, debris and explosive pressure waves disintegrate the incoming projectile. As such, the system has a risk to dismounted infantry, and this system impact traditional infantry supported mechanized warfare tactics.
This is also why resistance fighters will fire 2 missiles in quick succession; the first one to activate the Trophy, and then second to actually hit the tank once the Trophy is spent. Or yeah they just run up to it with the
I’m no tactical genius, but it sure seems like the incapability to have infantry support is not worth the tradeoff of having a countermeasure that is so easily worked around
countermeasure that is so easily worked around
Participation Trophy
The tank itself is probably as well built as any country’s Main Battle Tank (MBT), however the Israeli military likes to claim it has much better survivability than other MBTs which is false and is just propaganda for the domestic audience.
The main thing is, like the tweet thread says, the IOF just sends their MBTs into urban combat with literally no infantry support. Like typically in urban combat you surround your tank with infantry so the enemy can’t sneak up to you on foot and blast your MBT, like the Hamas guys are doing. Like no tank, no matter how well build can survive that. However the IOF knows it can’t take a lot of casualties or else the Israelis will start to revolt, so it isn’t willing to risk sending a bunch of infantry becuase they will get sniped by Hamas. As a result you get daily videos of Hamas guys in cargo shorts running up to tanks and physically planting explosives on them.
Of course, when they hit a tank its not garenteed that everyone inside is dead, but I don’t think anyone is walking away uninjured, plus the vehicle is inoperable and will need to be dragged back from the front lines (or abandon it).
Tanks in general excel at projecting power across a big area without a lot of cover, not rolling through an urban environment. There’s a lot of hack armchair general video game ideas out there but this one has been figured out since World War 2, when everybody started out with a bunch of specialized tanks for different roles, but by the end of the war they all figured out that making one good medium tank was the best way to go because everything else they were trying to do with them was a waste of time.
