In 1897, the American author Mark Twain replied in a letter to a London journalist, “The report of my death was an exaggeration.” The same applies to the recent claims of the death of the tank, and by implication all major armored vehicles.
The overinflated claims of both sides in the recently reignited two-week-long fight between Azerbaijan and Armenia in their long-standing conflict over the Nagorno-Karabakh region have caused a rash of new claims of the tank’s demise. The social media battlefield is hotly disputed between both sides, with each posting videos of the destruction they’ve caused to the other side’s armor. These would indeed be stunning claims—if they were true. As of this week Armenia was claiming that the forces it supports destroyed literally a division’s worth of tanks, while Azerbaijan asserted a more qualified total of a division’s worth of “tanks and amphibious vehicles.”
