katlaughing:

You quote a reporter stating that:

"The ground attack began with plows mounted on tanks and earthmovers to bulldoze live Iraqi soldiers into trenches in the desert, an "unprecedented tactic" that was "hidden from public view," Patrick Sloyan reported."

Watching the news yesterday I saw one of these "plows", I also noted that they are not fitted to all the tanks. The "plows" are arrow shaped (pointed) with teeth arranged along the leading edge of the blade, like those fitted to the blades or buckets of most earth breaking equipment. The blades appear to be only about 50-75 cm in height. The design and number of these plows would suggest that their function was to allow the tank to cut its way through a sand "berm" in such a way as to allow other tanks to follow. The spoil from a trench is naturally piled up in front of the trench, that such plows were used to flatten paths through a trench would be considered sensible, as a tank trying to "climb over" over such an obstruction would momentarily prevent the tanks main armament from being used and expose the underside of the tank to enemy fire. Tank crews are understandably "sensitive" to this sort of thing - 75-80% of everything that has been specifically designed to go bang on a battle-field has been designed to kill tanks and armour. To claim that this was an "unprecedented tactic" is a more than slight exaggeration.

The combat earth movers are assigned to combat engineer units - the ones mentioned in a similar article posted by KarlMarx are crewed by one man, are not heavily armoured and have no self-defence capability - unlikely that such machinery would be used in the middle of a battle - normal useage would be to repair bomb or blast damage to roads and for clearing rubble to allow support elements to move forward.