THE TOP-SECRET TANK

To this day, the Merkava tank is one of Israel’s most top-secret projects. It is said to be one of the most lethal and protected tanks in the world, and its construction started out of pure necessity — the United Kingdom and other countries refused to sell Israel tanks. So in the 1970s it started to build its own.

The newest model — known as the Merkava Mk-4 (right) — is the most impressive. It can reach speeds of 40 mph and comes with a new modular armor kit, meaning that the tank can be fitted with the armor it needs based on the specific mission it is heading into.

An area, for example, known to be full of antitank missile squads requires heavy armor, while an operation without the threat of anti-tank missiles means less. This also allows tank crews to replace damaged pieces of armor on the battlefield without having to bring the full tank back to a repair shop inside Israel.

In 2012, the Merkava underwent its biggest change yet when a new system — called Trophy — was installed on the tank. Trophy is an active-protection system, basically a personal missile defense system for an individual tank.

Trophy uses a miniature radar to detect incoming anti-tank missiles and then fires a cloud of countermeasures — basically metal pellets — to intercept them. The radar also interfaces with the tank’s battle management system. This means that once a missile launch is detected, the coordinates of the enemy squad that fired the missile are immediately obtained, allowing the tank to retaliate quickly and accurately.