Military Affairs

I’ve been a fan of the Army’s M1 Abrams tank since I was a kid. Most kids were reading comic books or baseball magazines; I was reading about U.S. and Soviet tank designs (I was a strange kid). Here’s an interesting site with pictures titled “M1A1 Abrams Lessons Learned During Iraq War 2003”. Here is the original powerpoint. One interesting outtake was the destruction of an abandoned M1 to not compromise the vehicle and/or technology. According to them it:

“Took one thermite grenade, one sabot in turret ammunition compartment, and two Maverick missiles to finally destroy the tank”.

Strong tank.

Update: The armor on the M1 is Chobham armor. Here is a brief description of it from Wikipedia.org:

“Chobham armour is a composite armour developed at the British tank research centre on Chobham Common. Although the exact composition of Chobham armour remains a secret, it appears to be a combination of ceramic layered between armour steel plating, a combination that is excellent at defeating high explosive anti-tank (HEAT) rounds. Possible ceramics for such armours are: Boron carbide, Silicon carbide, Aluminium oxide (Sapphire), or Titanium boride.

The exact nature of the protection offered by this layering remained a mystery for some time, but it was eventually revealed that Chobham armour works in a manner somewhat similar to reactive armour. When the armour is hit by a HEAT round the ceramic layer shatters under the impact point, forming a dust under high pressure. When the HEAT round “burns through” the outer layers of armour and reaches the ceramic, the dust comes flying back out the hole, slowing the jet of metal.

Modern tanks also have to face KE-penetrator rounds of various sorts, which the ceramic layer is not particularly effective against. For this reason many modern designs include additional layers of heavy metals to add more density to the overall armor package. The metal used appears to be either tungsten or, in the case of later M1 Abrams tanks, depleted uranium.

The effectiveness of Chobham armour was demonstrated in the first Gulf War, where no Coalition tank was destroyed by the obsolete Iraqi armor. In some cases the tanks in question were subject to multiple point-blank hits by both KE-penetrators and HEAT rounds, but the old Russian ammunition used by the Iraqis, in their Polish licence built T-72’s, their old T-55’s bought from Russia and upgraded with “enigma” type armour, and T-62 tanks left them completely incapable of penetrating coalition armour. It’s also worth noting that the Iraqis rarely actually hit the coalition tanks, because of lack of training and inferior optics. To date, only 5-10 Chobham-protected tanks have been defeated by enemy fire in combat, including an M1 that was hit by an RPG-7 in the Second Gulf War; no crewmembers of either the M1 or Britain’s Challenger II have been killed as a result of armour penetration.

The latest version of Chobham armour is used on the Challenger II (called Dorchester armour), and (though the composition most probably differs) the M1 Abrams series of tanks. Though it is often claimed to be otherwise, the Leopard II does not in fact use Chobham armour.”

StrategyPage.com is reporting that Israel has developed a recon rifle grenade. (Post from November 4, 2004.)

It would appear that Israel Military Industries, Ltd. has developed a rifle grenade with a webcam and radio transmitter. Fire the grenade in a high arc and it’ll transmit still pictures of what’s below to a laptop on the way back down. Neato idea.

There’s been a proliferation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in the military, some of them so small that they can be carried and operated by one man in the field. This means that they can provide real-time intelligence to the guys at the point of the spear, fast enough that it can actually be used in the sharp and intense environment of a firefight.

This list of UAV’s worldwide shows that Israel has put a great deal of effort into developing this new technology. (In hindsight I suppose it was inevitable that they’d eventually try to find new applications.)

But these little model airplanes are expensive, and they are complicated enough so that they sometimes don’t work. The Recon Rifle Grenade (RRG, for want of anything better) would eventually be more expensive, since any UAV is reusable but one of these nifty little devices aren’t. But the initial cost is less, and if one grenade doesn’t work due to a failed component then you just load up another and try again. With UAV’s you don’t have that option.

Anyone else remember reading military sci-fi where stuff like this was wow-neato gear? Now if they’d only develop a flying car I’d be happy.

This is troubling.

Via Richard Heddleson and the BLACKFIVE blog comes this Chicago Sun-Times series about a Chicago-based Illinois Army National Guard unit in Iraq. Worth checking out.

They just don’t quit, do they?

Apparently the new line is that Bush’s secret plan for the war on terror requires expanding the military, and there is no possible way to expand the military without a draft. Notice that these guys refuse to even discuss the possibility of recruiting extra soldiers. (Not that Democrats were ever big on recruiting soldiers as opposed to conscripting them…)

(All this talk is making me wonder if we will have a draft – through the refusal of Congressional Democrats to raise the military’s authorized strength without one… while pushing the line that Bush is endangering us by resisting this obviously needed move.)

I wish we had expanded our forces two years ago, to give us more of a reserve for dealing with contingencies (like mullahs getting uncomfortably close to posessing nuclear weapons) and to finally kill, once and for all, the odious practice that Jefferson Davis introduced to these shores by showing it to be completely superfluous (at best). I’m pretty sure an expansion is going to have to happen within the next few months, and I’m confident that when that time comes, we’ll all get to see just how full of it these scare-mongerers are about George W. Bush.