War in the Desert, 21st-Century Style
By Seth J. Frantzman
September 27, 2020 6:30 AM
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How Israel hopes to achieve a knock-out blow in its next conflict
The explosive sound of an Israeli Merkava IV tank firing reverberated from behind a hillside, a cloud of dust marking where the shell had been fired from. The shell flew across a field of shrubs and landed in the distance. Then another tank targeted the same location. The symphony of firing continued for ten minutes before the tanks, followed by Namer armored personnel carriers and a menagerie of vehicles from Israel’s 7th Armored Brigade’s engineers, proceeded towards where they had been firing.
The tank fire had been the closing salvos of a multi-day drill to keep Israel’s armored units and infantry at their highest level of readiness for the next conflict. That conflict could come in the Gaza Strip against Hamas, or against the Iranian-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon. As the exercise was taking place in the Golan Heights, not far from the border with Syria and Lebanon, the terrain looked like what Israel would confront in a battle with Hezbollah. The mock “village†that the tanks and infantry from Israel’s storied Golani brigade assaulted this month also looked like the kind of challenge Israel would face against Hezbollah. The village, a series of metal sea containers, included mock Katyusha rocket launchers and cutouts of enemy fighters hiding amid the rocks and trees.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/war-in-the-desert-21st-century-style/
