Joint Forces Quarterly Article "Everybody Wanted Tanks"

[Sgt Joch]

I have a question about the web page I posted earlier:

However, it is designed and optimized primarily for employment in small-scale contingency operations in complex and urban terrain, confronting low-end and midrange threats that may employ both conventional and asymmetric capabilities.

The is the first scenario, which is what the Stryker Brigade was designed for.

The IBCT participates in war (with augmentation) as a subordinate maneuver component within a division or a corps and in a variety of possible roles.

This is the second scenario, war with Syria. Does anyone know what...with augmentation...mean. Is it bureaucratese for.. we are going to give you some tanks so you don't get your behind shot up? .. and does anyone have any idea what the possible other roles would be?

[Michael Emrys]

I take "with augmentation" to mean "with tanks, artillery, air support, showgirls in skimpy thongs..."

Michael

[Renaud]

and beer, don't forget beer.

[Sgt Joch]

Originally posted by Michael Emrys:

I take "with augmentation" to mean "with tanks, artillery, air support, showgirls in skimpy thongs..."

Michael

I wonder if the showgirls will be modeled or are they considered to be civilians.

[M Hofbauer]

Originally posted by JC_Hare:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Michael Emrys:

I take "with augmentation" to mean "with tanks, artillery, air support, showgirls in skimpy thongs..."

Michael

I wonder if the showgirls will be modeled or are they considered to be civilians. </font>

[Michael Emrys]

Front to back, very assymetrical.

Michael

[aka_tom_w]

Re: the showgirls.... I guess NOT Everybody Wanted Tanks.

-tom w

[Dirtweasle]

Originally posted by aka_tom_w:

Re: the showgirls.... I guess NOT Everybody Wanted Tanks.

-tom w

Including Col.Brown commanding the 1st of the 25th. wher he states in the article I linked earlier -

The Stryker's fantastic. It has incredible mobility, incredible speed. It has saved hundreds of my soldiers' lives. I'm telling you hundreds of their lives...

[...]

We were hit by 115 RPGs hit Strykers over the year we had here, not one penetrated a Stryker, not one. Not any -- no machine gun fire penetrated a Stryker inside. We did have a soldier that was killed in a hatch by an RPG -- standing up in a hatch, and they fired from a building on top, but not one RPG penetrated a Stryker; 115 hits, it's a fantastic vehicle. ...Does it need improvements? I don't know of any vehicle that doesn't. I'd put a laser range-finder on it. I'd stabilize the gun, maybe put a larger gun on it. The Army's working all that. Is it a fantastic vehicle? Yes."

[MikeyD]

"...not one penetrated a Stryker, not one."

Well... one did. The first RPG fired at it. It penetrated the bow at a seam (between ceramic tiles) and cut engine cooling lines. The rattled crew didn't even realize it til 90 minutes later when the engine started overheating. I think it had to get towed back to base. The first hastily released army press release that day said the RPG didn't penetrate, but follow up info revealed that it had.

Considering Stryker's cage is 'supposed' to dent the RPG round's outer case and short-out the connection from the nose fuse to the body (Army reports on the RPG dating back to the 70s have mentioned this flaw in the round), the fact that the cage still manages to stop penetration even when a round detonates is impressive! My own pet theory is that a RPG round bashing into the sharp edge of a Slat bar at high velocity crushes the round's copper HEAT cone, negating the formation of the piercing jet even if it does explode

[flamingknives]

Originally posted by MikeyD:

My own pet theory is that a RPG round bashing into the sharp edge of a Slat bar at high velocity crushes the round's copper HEAT cone, negating the formation of the piercing jet even if it does explode

Err, nope.

The copper cone lines the hollow in the explosive, so its base faces the target.

The cone at the front is hollow and simply acts as a standoff.

The separation from the cage to the hull is sufficient that the often poorly-made RPG round (to extrapolate from other examples of Soviet/Iraqi military equipment) cannot generate a coherent jet over the distance. The high-velocity jet is thus spread out over a wide area and the penetrating power of any one section is not sufficient to defeat even the Strykers armour

[MikeyD]

RPG's not THAT poorly designed, after all it can penetrate more than a foot of steel (Stryker armor's about 56mm RHA equivalent, i think), not much less than a 1st generation TOW! I'll grant that RPG's workmanship's usually shoddy and God knows how the rounds have been stored. I hear its something like a 50% failure rate regardless of cage protection.

Of course the shaped charge is at the back of the warhead. The slat bars seem to be about 3" spacing. RPG is 3.3 in diameter. It can't pass through the bars without hitting something. But it's unlikely the pointy nose fuse will hit the thin cage blades. That means the body of the round slams into a slat blade at about 150ms . The blade should cut through the round's sheetmetal body like cheese. My assumption was that some deformation of the warhead would take place before it spontaneously exploded (without the fuse's help). How dented does a HEAT cone liner have to get before a focused jet of plasma becomes a spray of molten copper?

[ October 20, 2005, 12:46 PM: Message edited by: MikeyD ]

[Tarquelne]

[QB] RPG's not THAT poorly designed, after all it can penetrate more than a foot of steel

Field conditions?

, not much less than a 1st generation TOW!

So... you think the Stryker's would have a decent chance against 1st generation TOWs?

[MikeyD]

Word is that Stryker has problems with the (recently designed?) anti-personnel RPG round. They're based-fused and have a narrow body that can snake though the bars. Happily, they're not armor piercing but they do tend to mess up stowage items! I honestly can't say how the Slat cage would do against a HEAT round that doesn't have HEAT RPG's fusing peculiarities.

[Sgt Joch]

I found this in the U.S. army's internal evaluation report on RPG performance against Stykers deployed in Iraq:

Topic A: Slat Armor Performance

(ART 5.3.1.1 Protect Individuals and Systems Indicators)

Observation: The majority of attacks faced from RPG systems can be defeated. Slat armor performance, however, is less then expected against certain types of Rocket Propelled Grenades (RPG).

Discussion: Soldiers were briefed that slat armor would protect them against eight out of eleven strikes against Rocket Propelled Grenade (RPG) attacks. In the field, Soldiers say the slat armor is effective against half of the RPG attacks. There are three types of RPG attacks that have been encountered, Anti-Personnel (AP), High Explosive Anti-Tank (HEAT), and Anti-Tank (AT). The AP RPG attacks were not reduced by slat armor because the rocket explodes with shrapnel and is dangerous to the Stryker Vehicle Commander (VC) and air guards that are exposed outside the vehicle regardless of where it hits the vehicle or the slat armor. HEAT RPG attacks can be successfully defeated if the rocket hits between the slats because the slat armor affects the shaped charge and prevents it from working properly. AT RPG attacks are not be defeated, in most cases, because the penetrator is not affected by the slat armor. In one case a Stryker VC was struck by the penetrator after it went through the slat armor, Stryker vehicle armor, kevlar lining, and the Soldier’s body armor lodged into the Soldier’s chest. In one mission, a Stryker vehicle, with slat armor, was attacked and hit with nine RPGs. The locations of the hits on the vehicle were sporadic. The crew escaped with minor injuries and the vehicle moved under its own power to the nearest operating base for assessment and repair. The RPG attacks were thought to be AP RPG. The crew escaped injuries because of their personal body armor and reduced exposure to the outside of the vehicle.

If I read this correctly, the Anti-Tank RPG can penetrate a Stryker.

http://www.pogo.org/m/dp/dp-StrykerBrigade-12212004.pdf (at page 48 of the report)

[Kurtz]

Old RPG rounds were defeated with screens because the round was damaged. The firing circuit from the nose fuse to the base detonator was shorted, making the round a dud.

US Army study on the RPG-7 (from 1975) - [PDF]

Check pp 21-22 for countermeasures and stand-off distances.

If the stand-off distance is 2 ft, penetration drops to 5 inches of RHA. (down from a maximum of 11 inches)

[YankeeDog]

OK, I'll bite. . .

They list 3 different kinds of RPG rounds, Anti-Personnel (AP), High Explosive Anti-Tank (HEAT), and Anti-Tank (AT).

What kind of warhead are the AT RPG rounds they're talking about, if they're not HEAT? Are there modern RPGs out there that actually have the velocity at impact for a KE penetration? Or are they HESH? Or some other kind of warhead I've never heard of?

[John D Salt]

Originally posted by M Hofbauer:

[snips]

I have always wondered why the bad guys don't to pull out the old PTRD from Museums or start to manufacture them anew now with all those merely bulletproof things (LAVs, Fuchs, Luchs, VAB, Strykers) being used by the UN heroes to police all the world's backyard conflicts; PTRDoid weapons would be cheap and easy to manufacture even in a war-torn third world country.

A nice example of "technological undercut" -- if I'm going to rely on improved SA and sophisticated DAS to make up for lack of armour, a sackful of Albanian-army-surplus PTRDs might be just the thing. Although to be modern, we'll call them "anti-materiel rifles".

I suspect, though, that the normal protection level of even the spam-can class of modern APC will be proof against tungsten-cored 14.5mm all round. Angled boron carbide can work wonders, I reckon.

One of the points this brings up is that, whereas in WW2 you could be reasonably sure that armour was steel and projectiles were steel, tungsten or (explosively-formed) copper, games set in the modern period have to consider a wider variety of possible armour materials (aluminium, Kevlar, boron carbine, silicon carbide, possibly in combination as well as singly) and types (add spaced armour, ERA, and soon active armour and electric armour) and projectile materials (add staballoy) and types (add HESH, EFP, thermobaric, tandem and top-attack HEAT).

All the best,

John.

[MikeyD]

Kosovo Liberation Army (I think that's who they were) bought a pile of Barrett(?) .50 cal anti-materiel rifles at gun shows in the U.S. and shipped them to the Balkans, to great effect. I've seen news video of them in use. I hear the IRA used .50 cal rifles too against the British. That might be why Stryker's been armored to stand up to 14.5mm heavy mg fire from point-blank!

RPG-7 has two commmon rounds. One is a standard HEAT round with oversize 85mm warhead, fuse at the pointy end. The other is a more recent development - a He antipersonnel round, fuse at the base. Both have been encountered (and photographed in use) in Iraq.

[YankeeDog]

So. . . I ask again, anybody know what this third round is, the one called "AT" (as distinct from "HEAT") in the Army study referenced above.

I'm really very curious about this.

[Abbott]

Originally posted by YankeeDog:

So. . . I ask again, anybody know what this third round is, the one called "AT" (as distinct from "HEAT") in the Army study referenced above.

I'm really very curious about this.

Go here

http://www.battlefront.com/cgi-bin/bbs/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=52&t=000309#000000

at the end of the first post there is a link covering the new RPG's.

[flamingknives]

Yes, that just covers HEAT-type rounds and Antipersonnel rounds, not a different sort of AT round, which is alluded to in that report.

[John Kettler]

gunnergoz,

Try the Russian 2S9 Anona as an example of what you seek. It even fires a Copperheadskiy!

Regards,

John Kettler