Explosives make walking safer than riding in tanks

[RamboLiberal]

Source: LA Times

U.S. soldiers working the streets of the capital fear one Iraqi weapon more than others -- copper-plated explosives that can penetrate armor and have proven devastating to Humvees and are even capable of severely damaging tanks.

The power of what the military calls EFPs, for explosively formed penetrators or projectiles, to spray molten metal balls that punch through the armor on vehicles has some American soldiers rethinking their tactics. Some are asking if the U.S. should to give up its reliance on constant improvements to vehicle defenses.

Instead, some soldiers think, it is time to leave the armor behind and get out and walk.

"In our area, the biggest threat for us is EFPs. When you are in the vehicles, you are a big target," said Staff Sgt. Cavin Moskwa, 33, of Hawaii, who patrols the Zaphraniya neighborhood with the Bravo battery of the 2nd Battalion, 17th Field Artillery. "But when you are dismounted ... you are a lot safer."


Read more: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-walk22jun22,0,952300.story?coll=la-home-center

[Kagemusha]

1. Just the idea being considered is an insurgent victory.

That's the best way I can sum up about 6 different thoughts I'm having right now. One of them is: Yeah, you're safer because the enemy has been ignoring dismounted patrols as an issue because you were successfully thwarting their efforts by going around in armored vehicles. That's why they started going after armored vehicles with a vengeance, to the point of finally making troops consider becoming easier targets outside of vehicles again.

[LeighAnn]

7. Right

Next month's headline:

Snipers Make Riding in Tanks Safer than Walking

[whistle]

2. Why would copper-plated explosives penetrate armor better than

...say DU? Hasn't copper plating explosives been around since WWI? Yet there we are, the primitive technologies are destroying our so called high technology.

[Richard Steele]

3. At high velocities, physics starts to do stuff that defies "common sense".

It's not "copper plated", it's actual liquid copper
melted & accelerated by a shaped charge of explosives.

Molten copper moving faster than a bullet goes right
through armor much better than any solid projectile.

You'll need someone smarter than me to explain why it
does that, but it's a fact that it does.

[davepc]

4. physics

and our amour technology is great...for use against hordes of Soviet tanks rumbling through the Fulda Gap in Germany.

They weren't designed as an anti-insurgency vehicle.

[Kagemusha]

5. Who says it penetrates *better*?

Tanks have less armor on the bottom. Simple fact. If the same IED was hitting the tank's front armor perpendicular to the ground, it wouldn't do *anything*.

[formercia]

18. 16" of WWII Battleship armor

I worked on EFP design and the people that ran the tests were able to penetrate that much armor, perpendicular, at point-blank range.
AS for DU, we didn't test the effectiveness, but I would imagine it would be somewhat less.

[Kagemusha]

20. Okay, those conditions make it make more sense.

I'm not sure the perpendicular part matters for our purposes here but it certainly is how IED's attack tank armor from below. That's perpendicular. But, the point-blank range part, that's where the liquified copper can accelerate to massive speeds and does not have a chance to slow down or divert off target by random factors. It's not so much the fact that it's copper alone - it's that the distance is so short that the liquid copper's velocity is maximized.

I've always wondered, does 16" WWII battleship armor constitute the "rolled homogeneous steel" that is, according to old books I've long discarded now, the standard for measuring armor penetration?

I got thrown off by the original question being about copper per se. For a 30mm anti-tank round like those fired from the A-10 attack planes, DU (or something just as hard like tungsten, at least) is what's preferred. Then again, I hear DU more or less vaporizes as it hits at the very high temperatures but.. that's a whole different ball game, and at any rate, the insurgents can get copper a hell of a lot easier than DU in a form they could use so we're never going to see IED's using DU for comparison.

[formercia]

22. The shaped charge makes a small hole in the armor

and the molten copper jet does a lot of damage on the inside but the blast is mainly confined to the exterior. EFP's on the other hand, make a hole the diameter of the hot slug that creates a lot of razor-sharp fragments(spall) and the blast is sufficient internally to set off the munitions load inside the armored vehicle. I viewed a photograph of a Soviet T-55 in Afghanistan that went high-order after being hit with one. Even the round in the gun tube detonated. The biggest fragment left was the gun tube forward of the breech. The crew was vaporized.

[Kagemusha]

23. Sounds like what I've read regarding certain kinds of anti-tank missiles.

I forget the actual name but one book I read detailed how Croats were usng modified French helicopter missiles for anti-tank purposes. This didn't blow the rounds; it did wipe the crew out very effectively. After cleaning the interior and patching the hole like a dental cavity, the Croats had a slightly used, fully functional tank on their hands. Or so the claim went.

At any rate, it's certainly a very scientific way to breach armor. Whatever way the US' enemies in Iraq are making it work - home-grown stuff, bought from Iran, whatever - well, it's almost a surprise it took this long.

[formercia]

25. Kestrel missile or something similar.

http://www.military.com/soldiertech/0,14632,Soldiertech_EFP,,00.html


Here's a good article that explains the nuts and bolts.


There doesn't have to be complete penetration of the target, spall formed by flaking of the inside of the armor will do the job. More armor can be counter productive. With thin targets, the 'slug' just sails through with little spall formation.

[Paulie]

29. What was the effect on aluminum armor?

Any tests on aluminum?

Funny how you don't hear of many Bradley's being taken out with IED/EFPs in the news, mainly Humvees and Strykers. I'm sure the latter is using aluminum, but what about the up armored Humvees?

Now it has me thinking, any tests on Titanium by chance (like say the bathtub in an A-10)? :)

[formercia]

15. The first weapon to use EFP technology was the Panzerfaust

Germany WWII.

[Posteritatis]

30. I wouldn't say "better," but I would say "well enough"

If you don't have access to DU or the various other technobabblia used in AP stuff these days, something dense and easy to work like copper would be a decent enough fallback option. Readily accessible, lets you put a lot of joules onto a target at low cost, etc.

(And just because something's worked for awhile doesn't make it "primitive.")

[Strelnikov_]

6. Looks relatively simple to me

Seems experienced Sunni bomb makers could fabricate these up fairly easily. Especially if the copper plate is smuggled in from, say, Saudi Arabia. The rest of the bomb is just a pipe and C4, a big pipe bomb.

A simple weapon that is really only effective in built up areas, which is why maneuver warfare was developed around the concept of staying out of built up areas. Occupation is a whole different animal.

Maybe Iran is supplying them like they seem to be pumping. However, Juan Cole is dubious that Shia Iran would be supplying Sunni insurgents, and he has pointed out that the vast majority of US casualties are in Sunni areas. I trust Juan Cole more than our compromised military leadership at this point.

From the wiki

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_formed_penetrator

Use in improvised explosive devices

EFPs have been used in improvised explosive devices against armoured cars, for example in the 1989 assassination of the German banker Alfred Herrhausen (attributed<5> to the Red Army Faction), and by the Hezbollah in the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict. A recent development is their widespread introduction in IEDs by insurgents in Iraq<6>.

The charges are generally cylindrical, fabricated from commonly available metal pipe, with the forward end closed by a concave copper or steel disk-shaped liner to create a shaped charge. Explosive is loaded behind the metal liner to fill the pipe. Upon detonation, the explosive projects the liner to form a projectile at a velocity well over 1 km/s, depending on the design and type of explosive used.

Often mounted on crash barriers at window level, they are placed along roadsides at choke points where vehicles must slow down, such as intersections and junctions. This gives the operator time to judge the moment to fire, when the vehicle is moving more slowly<7>.

Detonation is controlled by cable, radio control (RC), or remote arming with passive IR (PIR) trigger. EFPs can be deployed singly, in pairs, or in arrays, depending on the tactical situation.

[Kagemusha]

8. Yep, well said, it's just as you put it.

These are not complicated weapons. They're more complicated than AK-47's, and insurgents wouldn't bother with them unless forced (more or less) to by US tactics. By forcing the US in the direction of changing its tactics, the insurgents have prima facia taken back the initiative in this area. This is not good news for the long haul.

[formercia]

17. Riding around an urban environment in armored vehicles

is a losing proposition. History has shown that. The MI was designed to go against Soviet armor and kill them before they could get within the effective range of their guns.
Traditionally, armor always used dismounted or mechanized infantry to protect them against enemy with close-range AT weapons.

[Kagemusha]

19. While true, the minute you start doing regular patrols, snipers come into heavy play

And if the US does more dismounted patrols as a result of the attacks on armor, that's what we'll see. It'll be next month's headline as one poster here put so succinctly.

But for assaults/ invasions? Absolutely. The Russians (re-?) learned a lot of hard lessons about infantry support during their first failed attack on Grozny when the Chechnya stuff was going bad.

[formercia]

26. The Russians relied on poorly trained conscripts to draw fire.

Cannon Fodder Doctrine.

[alcibiades_mystery]

9. McCain was RIGHT! Just strolling around Baghdad!

:evilgrin:

[formercia]

10. Afghanistan 1981

we gave the insurgents EFP technology and they used it successfully against Soviet armor, so this red herring about the Iranians is a bunch of crap.

[Ian David]

11. It's called "Virtual Attrition."

The insurgents have created a weapon that forces the enemy to change to less effective tactics that create the effect of having less forces.

[Ian David]

12. Maybe the army should be looking into THIS

Inventor hopes to sell armour suit to the military
By Wade Hemsworth
The Hamilton Spectator
(Jan 11, 2007)

<snip>

Troy Hurtubise, the Hamilton-born inventor who became famous for his bulky bear-protection suit by standing in front of a moving vehicle to prove it worked, has now created a much slimmer suit that he hopes will soon be protecting Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan and U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

He has spent two years and $15,000 in the lab out back of his house in North Bay, designing and building a practical, lightweight and affordable shell to stave off bullets, explosives, knives and clubs. He calls it the Trojan and describes it as the "first ballistic, full exoskeleton body suit of armour."

<snip>

Already, he says, the suit has stood up to bullets from high-powered weapons, including an elephant gun. The suit was empty during the ballistics tests, but he's more than ready to put it on and face live fire.

<snip>

The whole suit -- which draws design inspiration from Star Wars, RoboCop, Batman and video games -- is made from high-impact plastic lined with ceramic bullet protection over ballistic foam.

Its many features include compartments for emergency morphine and salt, a knife and emergency light. Built into the forearms are a small recording device, a pepper-spray gun and a detachable transponder that can be swallowed in case of trouble.

<snip>

In the helmet, there's a solar-powered fresh-air system and a drinking tube attached to a canteen in the small of the back. A laser pointer mounted in the middle of the forehead is ready to point to snipers, while LED lights frame the face.

The whole suit comes in at 18 kilograms. It covers everything but the fingertips and the major joints, and could be mass-produced for about $2,000, Hurtubise says.

More:
http://www.hamiltonspectator.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=hamilton/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1168470616997&call_pageid=1020420665036&col=1014656511815


Remember THIS guy?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Project_Grizzly_%28film%29.jpg

[pokercat999]

13. Perfect evening wear for that special Saturday night

at your favorite Honky Tonk. Wonder if they come in colors other than black?

[Nihil]

21. White would be good for the desert ...

[pokercat999]

28. Obviously daytime attire and a bit too formal for

Saturday afternoon at your favorite honky tonk.

[Javaman]

14. Or is the military realizing that it costs way to much to cart soldiers around everywhere?

each soldier requires 14 gallons of gas daily. In WWII it was 4 gallons. The next war, it's predicted that each soldier will require 32 gallons.

Frankly, I always thought it was a stupid idea to have the soldiers ride around, much like taking cops off a beat and putting them in cars. It makes them more impersonal.

I'm so glad the bright lights in the penagon finally came up with this brilliant idea, 4 fucking years later.

[formercia]

16. Safer than riding in Armored vehicles until

the insurgents us a warhead from a 122mm rocket. Inside are notched and coiled steel bands that form a very effective weapon against people, and other thin-skinned targets.

It reminds me of the propaganda training film made during WWII to try and counter the fear the troops had from the MG42. The argument was that, even though it had a cyclic rate of 1200 RPM, it wasn't as accurate as the MG34.

What you mean WE, White Man?

[roamer65]

24. This reminds me of a famous Einstein quote:

"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." -- Albert Einstein

[formercia]

27. A few well placed EMP weapons

Will bring the whole technology based economy crashing down.

[Aristus]

31. Smart people predicted a Stalingrad-like situation in Baghdad even before

we invaded. When the Saddam statue came down, lots of smug right-wingers laughed at the prediction. Well, we're living it now, that's for sure.