Cold War
In the Cold War era, HEAT became an almost universal choice outside of artillery and tank units. The British had developed the High explosive squash head (HESH) warhead as a weapon for attacking fortifications during the war, and found it surprisingly effective against tanks. Although these systems allowed infantry to take on even the largest tanks, and, like HEAT, its effectiveness was independent of range, infantry typically operated at short range. A major influence in anti-tank warfare came with the development and evolution of anti-tank guided missiles (ATGW) that could be fired by infantry operators, from ground vehicles and by aircraft. Increasing use of combined arms tactics allowed the attacking infantry to suppress the anti-tank crews effectively, meaning that they could typically get off only one or two shots before being countered or forced to move.
Read more about this topic: Anti-tank Warfare
Famous quotes containing the words cold and/or war:
“Mrs. Van Daan’s grizzling is absolutely unbearable; now she can’t any longer drive us crazy over the invasion, she nags us the whole day long about the bad weather. It really would be nice to dump her in a bucket of cold water and put her up in the loft.”
—Anne Frank (1929–1945)
“War and culture, those are the two poles of Europe, her heaven and hell, her glory and shame, and they cannot be separated from one another. When one comes to an end, the other will end also and one cannot end without the other. The fact that no war has broken out in Europe for fifty years is connected in some mysterious way with the fact that for fifty years no new Picasso has appeared either.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)