Friday, June 17, 2011

Thanks for the Tanks

I am working on a paper about Canadian military adaptation while in Afghanistan.  A key example is below:




Why?  Because the Canadians had been working to eliminate tanks from their armed forces until August 2006 or so changed people's minds.  The idea of using tanks for counter-insurgency might seem very strange.  The Macedonians were using tanks against snipers in 2001--not a good idea.  But the terrain in Afghanistan where grape-drying huts served as ubiquitous fortified positions for the Taliban and where IEDs challenged most vehicles gave some room for tanks on this battlefield.  There is still a debate about their added value here, but neither RPGs nor IEDs have dented them much. Something to think about, as tough tradeoffs lay ahead for most militaries.

1 comment:

Robert McClelland said...

Now that the combat mission in Afghanistan is over the tanks will rust on a base in Edmonton. The $1.3 billion could have been used for something that we'd get decades of use out of.