New APS for US Army

[Ivanov]

http://breakingdefense.com/2016/03/missile-defense-for-tanks-raytheon-quick-kill-vs-israeli-trophy/

 

"After two decades of dithering and delay, the Army wants to give its armored vehicles the ability to shoot down incoming anti-tank missiles. What’s more, while the service will continue its own long-term, in-house research program, the Army is now willing to accept something “not invented here” so it can get an interim Active Protection System (APS) fielded in two years".

 

"American officers “were shocked at how far Russians had come with close-in protection,” said retired Maj. Gen Robert Scales former commandant of the Army War College and one of the intellectual fathers of the Future Combat System. “Ukrainians who were using anti-tank guided missiles — which sadly they did not buy from the United States [because we refuse to provide ‘lethal aid’] — found them virtually unable to penetrate a T-90 without firing multiple shots.”

 

[panzersaurkrautwerfer]

Anyone who could be called the intellectual father of the FCS should be slapped with a semi-frozen herring.

Just saying. Also some of the article smells strongly of...like it's not very good.  There's plenty of non-state actors that can fire massed ATGMs, like the 2006 Lebanon war should be taken as the example in regards to what a non-state group does with a lot of ATGMs.  It also mixed Ukrainian gunner's reports of missiles losing track (which would be a jammer's effects) and then attributes them to an APS strike instead.  Also while T-90s have shown up in the Ukraine, they certainly are not the primary armor platform for the Russian forces there, and really at least time I checked most of what they do offer in anti-missile equipment is jammers not what we would describe as APS.

Sharp shooting the article aside it does present the sort of situation that makes for having APS equipped vehicles in CMBS.  

 

[Vanir Ausf B]

Yeah, saying that Trophy was a "great killer" of accompanying infantry is a stretch. AFAIK, there has been only one ISF death attributed to Trophy.

Most of what they do offer in anti-missile equipment is jammers not what we would describe as APS.

This comes up periodically. Most sources I can Google up do refer to Shtora as a soft-kill APS. If this is incorrect we need to find out what the correct term is or invent one.

[Kinophile]

Hezbollah had kornets,  no? Markedly better than the primary UKR ATGM,  as I understand it? 

How prevalent  is Corsar in UKR service? 

[panzersaurkrautwerfer]

Yeah, saying that Trophy was a "great killer" of accompanying infantry is a stretch. AFAIK, there has been only one ISF death attributed to Trophy.

This comes up periodically. Most sources I can Google up do refer to Shtora as a soft-kill APS. If this is incorrect we need to find out what the correct term is or invent one.

I think it's better to call it a "jammer" because it's more descriptive of what it's accomplishing.  It also qualifies as a soft kill APS in that indeed, it is a soft-killing active protection system, but it's very out of place when talking about hard-kill systems, and in any event the article infers it's Drozd stopping the missile which is a hard kill system, and also not widely fielded and deployed (especially not on T-90s as far as anyone can tell).  

Again the article is a bit of a mess.  

Hezbollah had kornets,  no? Markedly better than the primary UKR ATGM,  as I understand it? 

How prevalent  is Corsar in UKR service? 

Hezbollah had pretty much everything but Javelin and late model TOW missiles.  But yes, they had some AT-14s.  

[Ivanov]

How prevalent  is Corsar in UKR service? 

They have none in the actual service. They wouldn't need to beg US for the Javelins.

[panzersaurkrautwerfer]

Somewhat fresh from the AUSA, the US Army's "Big Eight" priorities:

http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense/show-daily/ausa-global-force/2016/03/16/us-army-unveils-its-big-8-initiatives/81882852/

Some summary:

It's a pretty big grab bag of the usual vague milspeak for fancy stuff.  Some of it is very unhelpful like "Combat Vehicles" which could be taken in a few different ways* but active protection is certainly in there.  

I'm not sure about Quickkill.  Quickkill was supposed to be just around the corner when I left Armor school and we'd all hop aboard our awesome amazing FCSes that could dodge bullets and do everything.  Every now and then you catch some reference to it still being funded, or as part of products being developed...but very little has actually emerged.  The rosey trust your contractor perspective might be after the amount of leaking that has effected other high profile DoD projects, this one is being kept buried super-deep under lock and key.  If it does what it's supposed to do then it could be a major leap forward in what active defense can do.

On the other hand, this is a DoD project by the usual suspects.  I'm more inclined to believe that it's more likely that it doesn't do what it's supposed to do, there's some giant pile of problems we can't quite get over, and someone is making too much money on it as a trouble program for us to cut sling load, reopen the contract and see if we can't have a Trophy/Trophy-like system today, while waiting for the troubled program to mature.

At the very least having a few BCTs worth of Trophy/Trophy-like as bolt on kits (much the same way TUSK/BUSK exists) available would be a good interim step, and it's the sort of thing that can get straight across the board transferred to National Guard units if it never gets used/get transferred with less ease if someone takes it out of the original wrapping.  

*Like, Tracked Vehicle funding is remaining steady, there's increased funding for Stryker upgrades and Paladins, but does that mean that we're keeping with M1A2 SEP v2s and M2A3s, and new Strykers/Paladins, or does it mean that the funding remains the same but we're changing the output from Lima Ohio to the SEP v3 for less tanks, and we're never buying another Bradley, all the money is going to keeping the type functional until someone figures out how to make a GCV that isn't crap.