In the winter of 2001, as a trainee at the Army’s combat engineer school at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., I learned how to stop a tank dead in its tracks. I learned how to use tubular 40-pound cratering charges wrapped in blocks of C-4 to blow a ditch as deep and wide as a school bus. I learned to lay mines capable of blowing the tracks off a tank. The collapse of the Soviet Union a decade earlier made it improbable that American troops would ever have to defend Western Europe against tanks. Primarily designed to roll over fences and trenches and to knock out other tanks in World War I-type and World War II-type battles, tanks have been reduced to serving, in effect, as heavy, expensive bunkers.

Source: International New York Times July 04, 2019 09:56 UTC