The first great desert tank confrontation was in North Africa during World War II, pitting Britain against German and Italian armor under the command of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. While some German tanks were better, the British outnumbered them two to one. But Rommel was a far superior tactician: his Afrika Korps excelled at swift, unexpected thrusts. His men were resilient: they learned to survive on as little as one canteen of water a day.
Rommel discovered that in the desert, the most formidable enemy was logistics. In the summer of 1942, he made a last-ditch drive to take the Egyptian port city of Alexandria–the pathway to the Suez Canal. But he outran his supply lines. His tanks, deprived of fuel, were exposed to British air power. “Tanks are very heavy consumers of supplies,” notes Texas A&M military analyst Art Blair. “You must always have a logistical tail vulnerable to bombing. The way we beat Rommel was through air superiority.”
Another lesson gleaned at what armor experts call the “college of Rommel” was that tank units reveal their movements by their dust plumes. Rommel turned this to his advantage, using dust-stirring truck columns as decoys. Today, however, the United States’ high-resolution satellite photos would expose such tricks. (Iraq lacks such a capability.)
In the 1967 Six Day War, the Israelis routed the Egyptians with fast-moving wedges of tanks. Yet when they tried the same gambit during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, they absorbed horrendous losses from their dug-in opponent’s Soviet-made antitank missiles (1,500 tanks were demolished in just two weeks). The Israelis–and, presumably, American armor tacticians–took away two lessons: the need for infantry, artillery and aerial support and for a tank design with a heavy emphasis on crew protection.
The U.S. M-1A1 tank that will engage the Iraqis in Kuwait is, at least on paper, a devastating high-tech killer. But while it can outrace and outshoot Iraq’s best, its turbine engine guzzles inordinate amounts of fuel and its electronics system may be overly vulnerable to shrapel. M-1A1 crews have been so plagued by maintenance problems that some have written home requesting pantyhose to protect the tank’s filters from sand.
In any case, few are expecting a replay of traditional tank-against-tank frontal assaults. If the Iraqis learned anything from their eight-year war with Iran, it’s the wisdom of ensconcing their tanks behind mounds of sand so they become, in effect, artillery pieces on treads. Currently, some have only their turrets–their metal eyes and ears–exposed. That could mean that U.S. armored forces will advance across the desert until aircraft detect an Iraqi tank emplacement, then take cover behind dunes and try–along with missile-firing helicopters and jets–to pick off the enemy. Or to put it in movie terms, the mother of all tank battles may resemble not so much an outtake from “Patton” as the climax of “High Noon.”
