The standing of the tank among American pundits and politicians has taken a pounding in recent years because of the number of them that have fallen victim to improvised explosive devices used by Sunni Muslim guerrillas in central Iraq over the past five years.

Ironically, the most important pioneer of developing and using IEDs against tanks in the Middle East was Imad Mughniyeh, the veteran, dedicated and ruthless chief of operations for Hezbollah, the Shiite Party of God, in Lebanon. Mughniyeh was killed by a car bomb explosion in the Syrian capital Damascus that Arab and Israeli news reports have both attributed to the elite Israeli special forces.

In the July 2006 mini-war in southern Lebanon, Hezbollah's longstanding expertise with IEDs inflicted a surprising number of losses and serious damage on Israeli Merkava MBTs, which used to lead the world in their reactive armor. After that conflict, the Israel Defense Forces moved rapidly to upgrade the quality of armor on their Merkavas.

The fashion in U.S. punditry and even to some degree in the military has swung from one extreme to the other. There is no doubt that in the nearly two decades since the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War, the U.S. Army continued to woefully neglect problems of counterinsurgency and the wider challenge of the erosion and subversion of the state, which experts have dubbed Fourth Generation War. This neglect took a heavy toll in the lives of U.S. soldiers in Iraq since the Sunni Muslim rebellion began there in May 2003, less than two months after U.S. tanks rumbled in the heart of Baghdad and toppled longtime Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

Only with the appointment just over a year ago of Gen. David Petraeus as the top U.S. ground forces general in Iraq did the Pentagon finally choose a commander for the conflict with the expertise in counterinsurgency tactics and strategy that the conflict required. At a tactical level the results since then have been rewarding and impressive. U.S. casualties in Iraq are now running at less than one-third of previous levels.

Like Vietnam before it, Iraq forced the U.S. military to come to grips with the complex realities of counterinsurgency war. However, this new fashion and the formidable effectiveness of IEDs against Main Battle Tanks and other Iraqi vehicles in the streets of Baghdad and other Iraqi cities do not mean, as some have argued, that the tank is now irrelevant or obsolete in the conflicts of the modern world.

U.S. military planners have been increasingly criticized in the specialist media for their continued commitment to maintaining a large -- and expensive --- force of Abrams M1A2 Main Battle Tanks. But they are by no means alone in this commitment. The military planners of India, China and Russia -- as we have previously noted in these columns -- remain committed to the strategic doctrine that their armies may have to fight large-scale land wars in the foreseeable future. And in each case they are still trusting in tanks to be the backbone of their main land forces.

Next: Why tanks still matter

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