Israel’s tank commanders are studying Russia’s mistakes

LIKE EVERY modern army, Israel’s generals have been watching the battles in Ukraine over the past year and a half closely and taking notes. Now that the tank battalions of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) are poised to enter Gaza in force, following the terror attack on Israeli communities on October 7th in which more than 1,400 were murdered, those lessons are particularly relevant. Tanks, though increasingly vulnerable to drones, loitering munitions and modern anti-tank guided missiles, which strike from the top, remain the only platform on the battlefield combining mobility, protection and serious firepower. They will form the vanguard of Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza, blasting a path for the infantry units behind them.

“We saw how the Russians fought in Ukraine and the mistakes they made,” says Brigadier General Hisham Ibrahim, commander of the IDF’s Armoured Corps, who has the job of preparing Israel’s tanks and their crews for war. “They fought there in a single-corps fashion, instead of using combined arms tactics,” he explains. In other words, Russia’s armoured regiments operated as separate tank units instead of working in integrated formations with infantry, combat-engineering and artillery units, and without co-ordination with intelligence and air power. In some cases, tank columns were sent single-file down a road without any support, leaving them to be picked off by Ukrainians. Russian tank crews were poorly trained and showed little sign of following their own doctrine.

“Israel’s armoured corps has a different shape than it used to,” says General Ibrahim. “We have been training in a combined-arms fashion at all levels for some years now. We no longer see the tank as being capable of doing everything. The battlefield has changed; it’s much more crowded and built-up. There are many challenges to these big platforms and I expect the infantry and engineers to make up for my disadvantages. Our soldiers in all the courses and exercises are now accustomed to fighting in a combined-arms environment.”

Many of these ideas were originally learned from Israel’s large-scale tank battles during the Yom Kippur war, 50 years ago. During that conflict the IDF’s armoured battalions, sometimes operating on their own, took major losses from Egypt’s then-novel Sagger anti-tank missiles, supplied by the Soviet Union, as well as from opposing tanks. The IDF quickly adapted, and its tactics were widely studied and adopted by the US Army in the 1970s and 1980s. Today, Israeli tank crews are widely seen as being among the best trained and prepared in the world.

But the IDF is not alone in having learned from Ukraine. At the start of Hamas’s assault on the Israeli border, the attackers used drones carrying large grenades to take out observation posts. In one case at least, there is footage of such a grenade hitting an Israeli Merkava tank. Similar tactics have been used by the Ukrainians against Russian tanks. General Ibrahim insists that while some of the tanks on the border were hit “two or three times”, none was destroyed and all will be back in action shortly.

Nevertheless, in some of the staging areas, Merkava tanks have been seen with “cope cages”, slatted metal barriers fixed over the turret, the most exposed part of the vehicle, to block such attacks from above. Russia’s resort to such improvised devices provoked sniggering last year, but Israel’s adoption suggests that armour professionals take the threat from drones increasingly seriously. The more advanced version of the Merkava used by the IDF’s regular armoured brigades, as opposed to those crewed by reservists, is equipped with the TROPHY, an extremely sophisticated Israeli-designed “active protection system” system which has proven effective at defeating incoming anti-tank missiles with explosive panels that blow outwards. Not all of the tank units have the system, however. And every tank, including earlier versions of the Merkava, in Israel’s storage depots is now being deployed, suggesting the large scale of the operation to come and the need to guard Israel’s northern border with Lebanon.

Within two hours of the start of the Hamas attack, General Ibrahim had notified all the IDF’s armoured-brigade commanders that they should start mobilising, even before the official order had arrived from the army bosses. Now, for the first time in over four decades, since the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the entire armoured corps has been called up.

This is a massive force, and although the IDF, keen to protect its operational security, is not giving out numbers, it is understood to include over 1,000 main battle tanks. Many of these are not intended for the ground offensive in Gaza, but are being positioned in northern Israel for the possibility of war flaring up also with Hizbullah, the Iranian-backed Lebanese movement, which has been provoking an Israeli response with daily rocket and mortar shelling since the Hamas attack on October 7th.

If a second front does erupt, Israeli tank-crews will be fighting two types of war. While both Hamas and Hizbullah have used similar tactics and weaponry in previous encounters with Israeli tanks—small ambush teams firing Russian-made (and Iranian-supplied) anti-tank missiles—the terrain will make a lot of difference. Facing Hizbullah in the hilly, woodland areas of the Galilee and southern Lebanon is a very different prospect from fighting in densely built-up urban areas of Gaza City, where attacks can come from close quarters.

For many years, the consensus among military experts was that fighting with lumbering tanks in narrow city streets was a liability. But the more informed view is that if used properly, and in conjunction with other ground forces, nothing can replace the tank’s firepower and breaching capabilities when fighting in an urban environment defended by heavily armed opponents. American commanders say that tanks proved vital in key urban battles in the Iraq war, including situations where lighter armoured vehicles proved inadequate. In Sadr City, a hostile suburb of Baghdad, American tanks and other armour formed what one study calls “roving, armoured boxes” which could move slowly, steadily and safely without exposing dismounted troops to danger.

Israel’s tank corps has at least two advantages over many other tank operators. One is that Hamas is not thought to possess “top-attack” anti-tank missiles like the American Javelin and Anglo-Swedish NLAW, supplied to Ukraine, which strike a tank at the weakest part of its armour—the top of the hull. The other is that Israeli tanks are designed to fight on the country’s borders, rather than far from home, and to give high levels of protection. That makes them relatively bulky and heavy, and potentially less mobile, but capable of withstanding serious hits.

In addition to their “active” protection, the more advanced Israeli tanks and infantry fighting vehicles also have sophisticated communications systems. These connect them to a network which supplies troops, on screens in the tank, with all the information being collected by sensors on other Israeli platforms, including footage from drones hovering overhead. “Today’s tank can use information collected from other sources to fire on its targets and collect information itself which will be used by other sources of fire,” says General Ibrahim. That overcomes the traditional problem of urban warfare: short lines of sight, in which one tank platoon may have little idea of what is going on around the next block.

Like tank generals the world around, he deeply disagrees with those who inferred from Russia’s failures that the day of the tank was over, and cites the events of October 7th as proof. As thousands of fighters were charging into Israel through 29 breaches along the border fence, he argues that at some points, the small number of tanks stationed that morning on the border “were the only remaining layer of protection, and they were using all their weapons, cannon, machineguns and simply running over, to try and stop hundreds of terrorists around them who were trying to get into the communities.” With most of the observation and cameras on the border knocked out, the tanks were often carrying the only surveillance systems still operating to pass along vital information.

Ultimately the IDF’s failure that morning was one of intelligence assessment and a lack of forces within quick reach of the border. But of the few tanks which were there and made it to the kibbutzim, General Ibrahim insists “they were the key element in restoring control to those communities and ending the bloodshed. Nothing could have done that like a tank.” ■