Pereh
"Israel must always have the ability to defend itself, against any threat."
- – Benjamin Netanyahu
One of the stranger inventions by the Israeli's, the Pereh is an ATGM missile carrier tacked on an M48 Patton chassis and disguised as a Merkava with a turret that unfurls to open up a boxy, loudspeaker looking launcher that fires anti-tank missiles up to 25km away.
In Team Yankee[edit]
The Pereh fills the anti-tank role of the Israeli Army, alongside the Cobra.
Toting 12 Peri Peri NLOS missiles, the Pereh can fire through buildings, hills and vehicles to hit literally any vehicle on the ground within its range of 64".
The NLOS rule treats all targets as concealed, but can hit them whether they're hiding behind 20 city blocks or posing in an open field for the next rulebook. While this may seem like a terrible unit since you'll be hitting Soviet artillery spotters and NATO tanks on a 5+, the Pereh gives you the reach of a helicopter without the vulnerability of such units.
Unsurprisingly, the Pereh performs better as a sniper rather than a real tank hunter. With only 4 Milan equivalent missiles that should be hitting the front armour of most tanks, it is a passable choice to combat low-end NATO tanks or most Soviet vehicles while doing little to nothing against the latest NATO tanks. Against targets that are not gone to ground Perehs can reach out and touch them with an AT21 missile.
This Pereh is an auto-include for almost all Israeli lists, considering the utility of a unit that can pop ANY unit on the field without needing line of sight. It can be effective in the hands of a decent player and absolutely broken in the hands of a good one. Want to clear enemy air defence so your bombers and choppers can swoop in? The Pereh does that. Want to pop your enemy's M109s? The Pereh does that. Want to pop command vehicles? The Pereh does that with overkill.
While dangerous, the Pereh is virtually worthless at supporting units directly in combat. You might have lost a command tank or two, but that doesn't stop a tank horde from running over an Israeli list in the right conditions: these are 5-7 points which are not going into artillery, infantry or an additional tank. Think of the Pereh as a sniper: it kills key units with surgical efficiency but it's worthless in direct combat.
Israeli lists may take these as a support unit, at 7 points for three Perehs or 5 points for two.
IRL[edit]
The Pereh was officially developed in the 1980s in response to the threat of being overrun by Egyptian tanks during the Yom Kippur war, but was only seen in active deployment after the 2000s. Unlike the typical missile carrier, the Pereh was a 'precision artillery missile launcher', meaning that it fired missiles specialized to beat tanks and heavily armored units beyond visual range against targets designated by forward observers: for an idea of how this would work, see the Copperhead and 2S3 Acacia Krasnopol rounds of the Soviets and Americans.
The most notable feature about this vehicle is that the designers took great pains to disguise it as a standard Merkava tank; Israeli censors even went so far as to keep the vehicle a secret until about 2014. As for why bother with the charade when ATGM carriers are commonplace, it was due to the understanding that such vehicles were far more dangerous and vulnerable than tanks. Disguised as a tank, a hypothetical enemy would probably underestimate its range as 2-3km and not 25km. Disguising them as tanks also increases the apparent size of a tank force to aerial observers or satellite observations. The only ones who’d know the difference were the crews themselves, Even those on the receiving end of its missiles might not know where the frak they were coming from.
| Israeli Forces in Team Yankee | |
|---|---|
| Tanks: | Merkava - M60 Patton |
| Transports: | M113 Armored Personnel Carrier |
| Troops: | IDF Infantry Platoon |
| Artillery: | M109 Howitzer -M106 Heavy Mortar Carrier -M125 Mortar Carrier |
| Anti-Aircraft: | M163 VADS - ZSU 23-4 Shilka - M48 Chaparral - Redeye SAM Platoon |
| Tank Hunters: | Pereh - M150 TOW - Jeep TOW |
| Recon: | M113 Recce - Jeep Recce |
| Aircraft: | AH-1 Cobra Attack Helicopter - A4 Skyhawk |