Word: armorers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Should the ground war start, the biggest technological question mark may be the Army's M1 and M1A1 Abrams tanks, the most advanced armored vehicles ever built. The M1 features a 120-mm gun that can fire accurately even while the tank is running over rough terrain, thanks to a built-in ballistic computer and sophisticated stabilizers. Both models carry a chemical fire-suppression system that can put out a flame in a quarter of a second and are shielded by armor plates containing nonradioactive uranium 2 1/2 times as dense as steel. But some specialists fear that the tanks...
...stuff of the world -- the shimmer and exact texture of fabrics (he was, after all, the son of a silk merchant in Antwerp), the brightness of flesh or the passing melancholy that settles on a face, the layering of vapor and light in the sky, the sheen of armor. In this sense of lavishness he was, of course, very much Titian's heir, and it is wonderful to see how much pictorial interest he could discover in inert substances -- particularly the brocades and velvets worn by his sitters -- in the course of translating them into patches and trails of pigment...
...side, there would be laser-guided bombs, heat-seeking missiles, devices to lay down an "electronic blanket" suffocating all communications between enemy headquarters and troops in the field, infrared devices supposed to turn night into day for soldiers drawing a bead on hostile troops and armor. The Iraqi forces in Kuwait would rely on an extensive network of minefields, earth berms, razor wire and trenches designed to make an enemy frontal assault as fruitlessly bloody as the British Somme offensive...
...unless the Iraqi troops collapsed quickly and began surrendering en ( masse, allied infantry and armor would have to go on the attack. On paper the ratios seem extremely unfavorable. Conventional military wisdom is that attackers should have a 3-to-1 superiority in numbers to blast defenders out of well-entrenched positions; in Kuwait and Iraq the numbers would be only equal. American tanks would actually be outnumbered 3-to-1 by Iraqi armor, though the numbers of heavy tanks would be approximately even, and the American M1 Abrams is thought to be superior in speed, maneuverability and firepower...
...whom are we kidding? What's one more sexist image in the current climate of meanspirited misogyny -- Sam Kinison and Andrew Dice Clay, Jason and Freddy, 2 Live Crew -- to which the woman-affirming alternative is supposed to be, of all people, Madonna, who dresses in armor-plated underwear and sings about liking to be spanked...