Tank Battles of the Mid-East Wars (2): The Wars Of 1973 To The Present

This book is the second volume in a series on armored warfare in the Mid-East over the past several decades. The central focus of these books are the wars involving Israel. Other major conflicts in the region, notably the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, are outside the scope of this series. The coverage of this volume is somewhat different than the preceding volume. The first volume covered four major wars, fought in the ideal tank country of the Sinai desert. During the period covered in this book, Israel has been involved in only one major war involving its armored force, the invasion of Lebanon in 1982. All of its fighting during this period has been in the hilly regions of the Levant which are not as suitable for large scale tank operations, and tanks did not play as central a role as in previous wars. Much of the fighting in Lebanon has taken place between various Lebanese militias, and this book provides a unique record of the unusual assortment of equipment used in the civil war fighting. Since the 1982 war, the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) has been involved in many small scale actions in southern Lebanon. These have been anti-guerrilla operations rather than conventional war. Nevertheless they have usually involved the employment of armored vehicles. This book examines the shift from the IDF's tank-heavy force prior to 1973 to the more balanced mechanized force which continues to evolve to this day.