During the Cold War, the armies of NATO and the Warsaw Pact stood poised to wage devastating, large-scale mechanized warfare using a bewildering arsenal of modern weapons including main battle tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, helicopter gunships, jet fighters, short-range ballistic missile launchers, supersonic bombers, surface-to-air missile systems, and tactical nuclear artillery.
Yet fortunately for humanity, that conflict never took place. Despite numerous bloody proxy and civil wars, there were few interstate clashes between large mechanized armies. The handful of exceptions notably include the 1965 and 1971 Indo-Pakistani conflicts and the Iran-Iraq war. However, the most intense mechanized battles since World War II took place in October 1973 when Egypt and Syria launched a surprise assault on the Israeli border fortifications during the Jewish Yom Kippur holiday.
