Recoil-less Guns

ghost

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Re: Army wants Light Specialist Vehicle

This is true for the particular scenarios you have in your mind. There are scenarios where a jeep mounted RCL can go to places and take cover where tanks cannot get away. Besides, RCLs are not for tanks alone. They can be used for support vehicles, enemy bunkers, troublesome machine gun posts.

Imagine airdropping 4 jeep mounted RCLs into a zone where friendly forces are under attack and need something to rapidly outflank and take out something. RCLs on jeeps can technically work in Aksai Chin where no one is going to get too many tanks. It's different in Punjab or Rajasthan. Even in Punjab - jeeps may be able to rapidly ford rivers with lighter/smaller bridges while tanks may have to wait for heavy duty fording hardware. Helos may be simply able to lift jeeps and RCLs over obstacles which may not be possible for tanks.

it is unwise to restrict scenarios to a limited one where tanks are considered invulnerable ergo jeep mounted RCLs are useless.
agree and disagree as far as scenario you put out it's true but then i would prefer man portable system such as javelin and carl gustav for the above mentioned scenario.isn't a man portable system more feasible than vehicle mounted RCL.
 

Kunal Biswas

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Re: Army wants Light Specialist Vehicle

@bennedose, I think its a gud idea to heli lift RCL mounted vehicles specially in the senerio you mentioned, Such Idea are in practice by US forces in astan, Indian Army on other hand is evolving too in this prospect ..


M20 recoilless rifle was a U.S. 75 mm caliber recoilless rifle, used primarily as a close infantry support weapon to engage all types of targets including infantry and lightly armored vehicles. The M20 proved useful against pillboxes and other types of field fortifications.

84mm Carl Gustaf MK3, though its not mounted does not mean it cannot be .. :)
There is a dedicated thread here at DFI, Opened by @shubhamsaikia

Link : http://defenceforumindia.com/forum/land-forces/35307-recoil-less-guns.html
 
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bennedose

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Re: Army wants Light Specialist Vehicle

agree and disagree as far as scenario you put out it's true but then i would prefer man portable system such as javelin and carl gustav for the above mentioned scenario.isn't a man portable system more feasible than vehicle mounted RCL.
There is no absolute rule that anything is "best". The option to have everything must be present. Jeeps move faster and cover more ground and can carry more reloads than man portable missile teams. A lot depends on the particular battle situation and the terrain. Jeeps can carry men with Car Gustavs if needed and reloads.
 
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bennedose

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Re: Army wants Light Specialist Vehicle

@<a href="http://defenceforumindia.com/forum/member.php?u=13223" target="_blank">bennedose</a>, I think its a gud idea to heli lift RCL mounted vehicles specially in the senerio you mentioned, Such Idea are in practice by US forces in astan, Indian Army on other hand is evolving too in this prospect ..
Check this video
 
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ghost

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Re: Army wants Light Specialist Vehicle

There is no absolute rule that anything is "best". The option to have everything must be present. Jeeps move faster and cover more ground and can carry more reloads than man portable missile teams. A lot depends on the particular battle situation and the terrain. Jeeps can carry men with Car Gustavs if needed and reloads.
brother man portable system are best coz they can do everything which rcl can do and much more where as rcl mounted jeep is very limited for example

suppose you are going through a terrain and need arise to move up hill with no road only narrow track in case of rcl you would have to leave it on road where as gustav and javelin can be easliy carried up hill.

in an urban scenario if a urgent need arise to hide you can enter a house along with man portable system where as you would have to ditch rcl

in a open scenario if a need arise to hide from enemy jet or heli you can easily hide with your carl and javelin whereas in case of rcl you are a sitting duck again the need arise to ditch rcl.

you can fire jav or carl from a rooftop from a window from behind a cover but in case of rcl you can't

in a scenario with rcl and reload you are moving in a jeep your jeep breakdown what to do you ditch rcl where as in same scenario you can walk or take some other vehicle and move in it with with your carl or javeline.

and you can carry more men along with carl and its reload in a jeep than rcl mounted jeep

the only advantage of rcl over carl or javeline is cost but brother war was never a cheap business.

and one last thing WHAT WOULD BE AN EASIER TARGET ......



OR THIS



 
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bennedose

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Re: Army wants Light Specialist Vehicle

brother man portable system are best coz they can do everything which rcl can do and much more where as rcl mounted jeep is very limited for example

suppose you are going through a terrain and need arise to move up hill with no road only narrow track in case of rcl you would have to leave it on road where as gustav and javelin can be easliy carried up hill.

in an urban scenario if a urgent need arise to hide you can enter a house along with man portable system where as you would have to ditch rcl

in a open scenario if a need arise to hide from enemy jet or heli you can easily hide with your carl and javelin whereas in case of rcl you are a sitting duck again the need arise to ditch rcl.

you can fire jav or carl from a rooftop from a window from behind a cover but in case of rcl you can't

in a scenario with rcl and reload you are moving in a jeep your jeep breakdown what to do you ditch rcl where as in same scenario you can walk or take some other vehicle and move in it with with your carl or javeline.

and you can carry more men along with carl and its reload in a jeep than rcl mounted jeep

the only advantage of rcl over carl or javeline is cost but brother war was never a cheap business.

and one last thing WHAT WOULD BE AN EASIER TARGET ......
Fair enough. You are entitled to your views, although I continue to disagree. A man with a Carl Gustav who hides is simply useless. the tank will continue doing its job. If he fires, he will be spotted. Running on two legs away from a tank is useless and gets a bit better if he throws away his reloads. And his water bottle. And his helmet.

Every weapon has an optimum usage profile and for you it is convenient to speak of scenarios in which the weapons you like can be used optimally. The same goes for me - and as an armchair general I wonder why armies still use light, fast, wheeled armed vehicles and not just men carrying stuff.

I have my views on that, as I am sure you do too.
 

cloud

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Re: Army wants Light Specialist Vehicle

What I gather from the discussion is that, RCL is no good against modern tanks(even if ones tries and is successful at close range, most probably the whole jeep with gun and ammunition will be blown up after one or two attempts), ATGMs are much more potent(especially the top attack ones). But for everything else having a RCL gun at border posts(defense wise) + a few good nos of ATGMs seems like a good combination, as I assume tank or artillery division will not be available for immediate support in most cases.

But 40 or 50 mm canons can also take up the role of RCL in this case when they are not that effective against tanks? and having 105mm LFG also looks good along with these. I think the utility of RCL guns will drop significantly if the war/skirmish prolongs and when tanks and artillery comes into the picture.

EDIT: Also the argument for mobility of RCL is questionable, because when we do such a thing that means we are moving for offensive or backing off to a defensive positions. during such times i. .e on offensive we don't want to charge with RCL guns as our big toys, whereas in moving back to defensive position means the war has already been started for some time and other big guns/tank or helo support should be available by that time.
 
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arnabmit

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Re: Army wants Light Specialist Vehicle

What I gather from the discussion is that, RCL is no good against modern tanks(even if ones tries and is successful at close range, most probably the whole jeep with gun and ammunition will be blown up after one or two attempts), ATGMs are much more potent(especially the top attack ones). But for everything else having a RCL gun at border posts(defense wise) + a few good nos of ATGMs seems like a good combination, as I assume tank or artillery division will not be available for immediate support in most cases.
Check out the Bofors Tandem 106 3A HEAT-T round from Sweden with 2km range and over 700 mm armour penetration after penetrating ERA.
 

arnabmit

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If only someone in IA thought of mounting one 106MM/120MM RCL with Tandem-HEAT shells on a riptide for the mountains!!!

Or even mount a 105MM/120MM compact gun turret on it!

[video=youtube_share;J_U5JxFD8GY]http://youtu.be/J_U5JxFD8GY[/video]

Type 60 Self-propelled 106 mm Recoilless Gun

The Type 60 Self-propelled 106 mm Recoilless Gun (60式自走無反動砲, roku-maru-shiki-jisou-muhandou-hou?) is a light anti-tank vehicle developed by Japan in the late 1950s. It mounts two M40 106 mm recoilless rifles as its main armament.



 
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arnabmit

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More R&D needs to be done on RCL technology IMHO. This has the potential to be a very potent modern anti-armour cheap weapon system.

For the rifle itself, a ballistic computer, Laser range finder, and optional few hydraulic actuators for remote aiming.

For the shells, maybe the technology of the AT4CS can be adopted for managing backblast. At the same time propellant technology evolution might help it to get >4km range.

IMHO such cheap systems mounted on fast vehicles has the potential to make light/medium armour irrelevant on the battlefield.
 

ghost

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Re: Army wants Light Specialist Vehicle

Fair enough. You are entitled to your views, although I continue to disagree. simply A man with a Carl Gustav who hides is useless. the tank will continue doing its job. If he fires, he will be spotted. Running on two legs away from a tank is useless and gets a bit better if he throws away his reloads. And his water bottle. And his helmet.

Every weapon has an optimum usage profile and for you it is convenient to speak of scenarios in which the weapons you like can be used optimally. The same goes for me - and as an armchair general I wonder why armies still use light, fast, wheeled armed vehicles and not just men carrying stuff.



I have my views on that, as I am sure you do too.
"A man with a Carl Gustav who hides is simply useless " unless you are ironman or superman in a battle you have to hide if a situation arises and struck enemy at the time and position suited to you most.

"If he fires, he will be spotted" bro a rpg ,carl or jave is a "dengu mosquito" loaded for kill and hard to detect where as rcl mounted on jeep is a dog coming at you when you are "armed" easier to detect and kill and even if it bite not fatal in most cases.

"Every weapon has an optimum usage profile" rcl mounted on vehicle is nothing but a light artillery mounted on jeep with limitation and venerability of artillery .best used from well defended or safe areas not in active battlefield crawling with enemy.rcl on vehicle can be destroyed by a well aimed grenade or a short burst of automatic fire as it,s easy to finish it,s crew which is always exposed where as carl or rpg can be fired from cover.

" I wonder why armies still use light, fast, wheeled armed vehicles and not just men carrying stuff." you know most of these vehicles are armored and and if not and faced with enemy with rpg or good firepower they just are sitting duck.

do you know why not rcl on jeep because "extreme firing signature (firing one round revealed your almost fully exposed position to anybody in sight), extreme back blast hazard, second degree breech burns, smashed fingers and toes, MULE rollovers, open breech cookoffs, permanent hearing loss even with ear plugs, high incidence of warhead skip and ricochet, on and on ..." and this i am quoting someone who has actually used them.

i am not saying it's not a weapon .it is a weapon but what i meant to say is that "what would you prefer if all these are available to yo rcl mounted on jeep,carl,rpg,javelin,spike" here "prefer" being the word cause if the need arise and with no option you will go to a war with whatever is available but what i fail to understand is that what logic is there in using this




when you can have this



which is more light more versatile more adaptable more accurate more practical more ergonomic..........if a personal choice i would say:thumb: go ahead but if you try to say a logical choice i would say:confused::frusty:

now lets here actual fact about man portable rpg in real battles


Most Valuable Weapon: the RPG
By Gary Brecher Browse author Email




Browse column

"The weapon of choice for the Iraqi resistance is the rocket propelled grenade (RPG)-7."

George J. Mordica II
USA Center for Army Lessons Learned

If you've been reading my columns for a while, you probably noticed I don't talk military hardware as much as most war buffs. There are a lot of people who'll talk all day about whether the Russian T-90 or the US Abrams is the best MBT. I don't do that much, for the simple reason that wars these days don't come down to one model of tank vs. another. It's pretty rare to find a war where both sides even use tanks. Most of the time it's guerrilla vs. guerrilla, or conventional army vs. guerrilla. The odds of an all-out hi-tech war between two conventional armies like the US and Russia are about...oh, zero-point-zero. So it just doesn't matter that much whether their tanks could beat ours in some make-believe replay of the Kursk Salient. If you want to play that kind of war, buy a computer game. God knows there's enough of them. If you want to know how people make war now, in the real world, you need to study people, not hardware.

Sad but true, boys: war these days is more like Social Studies than Metal Shop. It's about tribal vendettas, military intelligence, propaganda, money -- just about everything except pure hardware.

Don't get me wrong, I love the hardware as much as anybody. I used to spend every free hour, back before there was an internet, going over those big heavy reference books in the library: Jane's Tanks, Jane's Missile Systems, Jane's Combat Vehicles. I had those things memorized. Seriously, you could open any of Jane's handbooks at random, read me the name of a weapons system, and I'd recite its stats from memory -- Norwegian anti-ship missiles, South African APCs, you name it.

But eventually I had to face the facts: most of those weapons are never going to get used. If you look at all the real wars going on right now, you come across the same two weapons, over and over: the AK-47 and the RPG-7 -- both Russian designs, and both older than your Dad.

They're the weapons that matter, because they're already out there, millions of units, enough to equip every guerrilla army in the world, simple enough that you can teach a peasant kid with hookworm and a room-temperature IQ to fire them, and cheap enough to buy in bulk.

And the RPG is the best of all, even better than the Kalashnikov. This simple little beauty just keeps getting more and more effective. This cheap little dealie, nothing but a launcher tube and a few rockets shaped like two ice-cream cones glued together, has kicked our ass (and Russia's too) all over the world since back when the Beatles were still together. In fact, more and more guerrilla armies are making the RPG their basic infantry weapon, with the AK used to protect the RPG gunners, who provide the offensive punch. The Chechens fighting the Russian Army are so high on it that they've switched their three-man combat teams from two riflemen and an RPG gunner to two RPG gunners with a rifleman to protect them.

There's another stat that's even more important right now: the RPG has inflicted more than half -- half! -- of US casualties in Iraq. This is the weapon that's hurting us. And it's been doing that for one hell of a long time.

The Soviets created the RPG for use by Soviet infantry squads against US tanks, APCs and personnel in that big NATO/Warsaw Pact war everybody was dreaming of back in the sixties. The design was an example of beautiful simplicity. It was a classic of Warsaw-Pact reverse-engineering. Warsaw Pact weapons designers had this attitude that it was a waste of time to design from scratch when you could count on your spies (and the Russians had the best spies in the world back then) to get you the specs on the weapons other countries had spent billions designing. So they just put together a cross between the two best shoulder-fired anti-armor weapons around, the Wehrmacht Panzerfaust and the US Army bazooka. And that was the birth of the most important weapon in contemporary warfare.

The RPG got its start against our guys in Vietnam. The Viet Cong and NVA used them as squad-level anti-armor weapons, and they were so damn good at it that we never got our money's worth from the tanks and APCs we sent over. Our APC back then was a really lousy dumptruck, the M113 -- basically a light-tank chassis with flat slabs of aluminum on the sides and top.

Sometimes you can see how good a design is just by the way it looks. One look at an M113 and you can see that this was a lousy vehicle. It was about as tall as Yao Ming, which meant it was a real big target. The aluminum armor didn't have firing ports, so the soldiers inside just had to put their helmets over their balls, close their eyes and hope the crew would open the hatch and let them out ASAP. The armor was just thick enough to slow the thing down, but not nearly enough to stop an RPG round. Which is no surprise when you know that an RPG armor-piercing round can penetrate 300mm of rolled steel -- more than a foot of steel. Not a bad punch for such a little weapon to pack.

GIs who'd seen what an RPG hit could do to an M113 got in the habit of saying, "I'll walk, thanks." The RPG warhead does something called "spalling," which means the warhead turns the aluminum side armor of an APC into molten shrapnel which goes zipping through the guts of everybody inside like a Benihana chef's knife, only it's a knife as hot as the surface of the sun.

If GIs in Nam did have to ride an M113, they wore a lot of St. Christopher medals and sat on top. They were a lot less scared of getting shot by a sniper than of being hit by an RPG sitting inside.

We had nothing like it and still don't. We had the LAW, another shoulder-fired rocket originally designed to penetrate armor, but it wasn't nearly as easy to carry, because it didn't have the reuseable launcher the RPG featured. If you wanted to throw a dozen rockets at an enemy bunker, you had to carry a dozen LAWs along, whereas the RPG gunner needed just one launcher and a sack full of warheads.

Nam was just the beginning of the RPG's career. Just think back to Mogadishu 1993. The whole Blackhawk Down mess happened because some Afghan Jihadis who'd retired to Mogadishu -- guess it was nice'n'restful compared to Kandahar -- showed the Somalis how to use the RPG-7 as an anti-aircraft weapon, which its Russian designers never even thought of. The RPG was the key to the whole battle that ended up killing 18 Ranger and Delta guys (Jeez, remember when 18 GIs dead was supposed to be "unacceptably high" losses?), getting us to bug out from Somalia, and getting Ridley Scott's directing career back on track.

First the Somali RPG gunners, firing up from the streets where they'd dug holes to channel the big rocket backblast, hit our Blackhawks, bringing them down in the maze of slums. That drew our troops into the slums, where everybody from toddlers to grandmas started potshotting them with AKs.

The Afghans worked out how to use RPGs as AA back in the 80s, fighting the Soviets. I guess it was a little bit of poetic justice that the first helicopters to get brought down were Russian. The Afghans didn't have much to use against choppers except captured Russian heavy 14.5 cal. machineguns, which didn't have enough punch to bring down the Mi-24. And Reagan, the wimpiest hawk that ever flew, waited five long years to give the Mujahideen the Stingers that could take down an Mi-24 every time. So the Afghans started playing around with using the RPG against Russian CAS.

They came up with some great improvisations. There's nothing like war to bring out the inventor in people! One thing the Afghans figured out was how to use the self-destruct device in the warhead to turn the RPG into an airburst SA missile. See, the RPG comes with a safety feature designed to self-destruct after the missile's gone 920 meters. So if you fire on up at a chopper from a few hundred meters away, at the right angle, you get an airburst just as effective as SA missiles that cost about a thousand times more.

When the Chechens took on the post-Soviet Russian army in 1994, the good old RPG was the key weapon once again. By this time, the Russians must've been cursing the name of the man who designed the thing. What the Chechens found out in their first war against the Russians in 1994 was that the RPG is the perfect weapon for urban combat. The Russians sent huge columns of armor into the streets of the city, and the Chechens waited on the upper floors, where they couldn't be spotted by choppers but still held the high ground. They waited till the tanks and APCs were jammed into the little streets, then hit the first and last vehicles with RPGs -- classic anti-armor technique. That left the whole column stopped dead, and all they had to do was keep feeding warheads into the launchers, knocking out vehicle after vehicle by hitting it on the thin top armor. The Russians were slaughtered, and they had to pull back and settle for saturating the city with massed artillery fires, which killed lots of old ladies but didn't do any harm to the fighters. So basically the RPG singlehandedly lost the Russians their first Chechen War.

Which brings us to Iraq, now. The first key to the RPG's effectiveness is availability, and it turns out that the one thing Iraq had more than enough of, in spite of all those sanctions, was RPG launchers and rounds. Saddam's army had an official license from the Russians to produce RPGs in Iraqi factories, and they made so many that, when Saddam went down, there were piles of launchers with plenty of anti-armor and anti-personnel rounds in most Iraqi towns. And after the Iran-Iraq War and Gulf War I, so many Iraqi men had trained on the RPG that there were plenty of gunners and instructors to teach the new generation how to use it.

Everything about the RPG design seems like it was designed to be used in Iraqi cities. It's got one of the shortest arming ranges of any shoulder-fired anti-armor weapons, which means you can fire it at a Hummer coming right down the street. It's light enough, at 15 pounds, for even the wimpiest teenager to run through alleys with. It's simple enough for any amateur to use -- the original non-camera example of "point and shoot."

US doctrine for countering the RPG always stressed looking for the flash when it's fired, and the blue-grey smoke trail it leaves. There are two problems with that, though. In the first place, unlike, say, the TOW, the RPG is unguided, so once it's launched, it doesn't do much good to kill the gunner. You're still going to get hit. Second, it's not easy to see the blast or the smoke trail in one of these Iraqi "urban canyons." Too many walls to hide behind.

Our doctrine also used to stress laying down heavy fire in the general direction of the RPG launcher, to suppress further firings and hopefully kill the crew. But when you're fighting in the middle of an Iraqi city, that kind of general fire is going to kill a lot of hunkered-down civilians along with the RPG crew. And that doesn't look good on TV. More importantly, it makes you a lot of new enemies among the people whose cousins got shot.

Even if the RPG doesn't disable a vehicle, the blast radius of the anti-armor round is four meters, which means anybody in the area is going to be seeing little birdies for a good few minutes, deaf from the blast, temporarily blind, not to mention very scared and pissed off. Once you've got the occupying troops in a position like that -- I mean literally blind and deaf -- you're in a guerrilla strategist's idea of Heaven. Troops in that mood tend to start firing blind, which makes everybody hate them even more, which suits the guerrilla right down to the ground.

he RPG-29 uses a tandem-charge high explosive anti-tank warhead to penetrate explosive reactive armor (ERA) as well as composite armor behind it. It is capable of penetrating MBTs such as the M1 Abrams, older model Mark II version of the Merkava,[10] Challenger 2, or T-90.[11]

In August 2006 in al-Amarah, a Soviet RPG-29 damaged the front underside of a Challenger 2, detonating ERA in the area of the driver's cabin. The driver lost part of his foot and two more of the crew were also injured but the driver was able to reverse 1.5 mi (2.4 km) to an aid post. The incident was not made public until May 2007, and in response to accusations, the MoD said "We have never claimed that the Challenger 2 is impenetrable." Since then, the ERA has been replaced with a Dorchester block and the steel underbelly lined with armour, as part of the 'Streetfighter' upgrade, which was a direct response to this incident.[12] In May 2008, The New York Times disclosed that an American M1 tank had also been damaged by an RPG-29 in Iraq.[13][14] The American army is ranking the RPG-29 threat to American armor as high; they have refused to allow the newly formed Iraqi army to buy it, fearing it will fall into the insurgent hands.

At the beginning of the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict, the main Israeli concern was a report that Hezbollah possessed Russian Kornet antitank missiles. However, it has been the RPG-29 that is stolen the show. These man-portable lightweight weapons are powerful enough to destroy the Merkava tank, which is reputed to be the most thoroughly armored tank in the world. According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Hezbollah acquired significant numbers of the RPG-29 from Syria, and the weapon has been a major source of Israeli casualties in the conflict.

The RPG-29 Vampir with the tandem HEAT (high explosive anti-tank) PG-29V tandem charge warhead was developed by Russia in the late 1980s in response to the development of tanks having explosive reactive armor. The weapon is designed to actuate explosive armor with a first shaped charge, while a second charge is reserved to penetrate the tank's hull. The Soviet army received the RPG-29 in 1989. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, these weapons could be found in almost all of the former Warsaw Pact nations.

The strategic impor. tance of the dramatic battlefield effectiveness of the RPG-29 cannot be underestimated .The Iraqi resistance has not had access to significant quantities of RPG-29s because they were not readily available in the international weapons market until after post-Gulf War sanctions were applied to Saddam Hussein's Iraq. However, Syria and Iran possess large inventories of these weapons. Certainly, the Pentagon must be taking note of the effectiveness of these weapons against the Israeli forces in south Lebanon when considering the possibility of a military confrontation with Iran or Syria. In fact, the calculus of occupying any potentially hostile country has been significantly shifted. If the occupying forces can no longer rely on armored vehicles to engage militants or to travel, the price of occupation in terms of casualties will be much greater. This necessarily impacts countries like the United States and Israel more than it would countries that place a lesser value on the lives of their soldiers. In other words, the unexpected effectiveness of the RPG-29 is a severe blow to the West. It is the great equalizer. For $500 per launcher and $250 per missile round, a militant group can purchase a light, mobile weapon that is easy to conceal and that can reliably destroy a main battle tank that costs millions of dollars.

The long-term implications for Israel are even more significant. If Palestinian militants are ever able to acquire significant quantities of RPG-29s they could for the first time ever present a significant challenge to the Israeli army. This is particularly true because the Israelis have demonstrated an aversion to ground fighting and taking casualties in the campaign against Hezbollah. There is no doubt that groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, both of which have close ties to Hezbollah, have been observing the conflict in South Lebanon with strong interest and have noted Israel's reluctance to send more ground troops in against Hezbollah fighters who are armed primarily with RPG-29s.

In fact, given the proximity of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to major Israeli population centers (the distances could easily be traveled on foot by armed militants, who would have to keep themselves dispersed enough to avoid being destroyed by aircraft or armored vehicles) it is possible to imagine that sometime in the future that a Palestinian militia armed with such man-portable weapons could possibly successfully invade and conquer Israel without the use of expensive military equipment such as aircraft and tanks. If militants could penetrate Israeli territory enough to turn the battle into hand-to-hand fighting within major population centers, F-16s and nuclear weapons would be of no use to Israel. The previously unthinkable defeat of Israel could become a possibility.

For this reason, it could be theorized that recent developments on the ground in South Lebanon have made the "two state solution" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict effectively unworkable from a pragmatic standpoint. Once a Palestinian state is established it would be practically impossible to prevent militants from acquiring large quantities of RPG-29s and other military equipment that could be used to equip infantry ground fighters. Once this happened, Israel would be in deep trouble.

On the other hand, judging from how Israel's Arab citizens have been integrated into the country, the establishment of a single secular state incorporating both present-day Israel and the present Palestinian territories might have a chance for success. Demographically, Arabs would have a small voting advantage in such a state, however economic power would remain largely in the power of the Jewish citizens. The rights of Jews and Arabs alike would be preserved in such a state, and a secular Israel/Palestine could become a genuine beacon of democracy and liberalism to the region. This could be the catalyst to the "New Middle East" that Washington has been seeking.

Of course, a certain amount of goodwill would need to be established before a one state solution could ever be made feasible. If Israel continues to inflict needless civilian casualties on Arab populations that end up on the front pages of the Arab press, the well will be further poisoned and its most viable path out of this seemingly endless conflict will be closed.

THE ONLY USE I CAN SEE OF VEHICLE MOUNTED RCL GUN IS BEING USED AS A LIGHT ARTILLERY BUT IF I CAN LAY MY HANDS ON CARL RPG OR JAVELIN ALONG WITH A LIGHT JEEP IT WOULD BE MORE VERSATILE,USER FRIENDLY,EFFECTIVE ..........WITH IT I WOULD BE ABLE TO DO THIS...










have these and you will have this





what more can you ask for in the iraq and Afghanistan war the american special forces used carl gustav extensively but the infantry was not issued these but on seeing the immense success of carl on battlefield there was a tremendous pressure from army as a result us haD to place a large order OF carl for their infantry due to the the real time experience in the battlefield."AND THIS IS A FACT NOT MINE OR YOUR PERCEPTION"
 
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ghost

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Re: Army wants Light Specialist Vehicle

bennedose since you laid so much stress on mobility i would say

my choice



ur choice




LET'S RACE BROTHER:thumb:
 

bennedose

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Re: Army wants Light Specialist Vehicle

do you know why not rcl on jeep because "extreme firing signature (firing one round revealed your almost fully exposed position to anybody in sight), extreme back blast hazard, second degree breech burns, smashed fingers and toes, MULE rollovers, open breech cookoffs, permanent hearing loss even with ear plugs, high incidence of warhead skip and ricochet, on and on ..." and this i am quoting someone who has actually used them.

i am not saying it's not a weapon .it is a weapon but what i meant to say is that "what would you prefer if all these are available to yo rcl mounted on jeep,carl,rpg,javelin,spike" here "prefer" being the word cause if the need arise and with no option you will go to a war with whatever is available but what i fail to understand is that what logic is there in using this
Stop pretending that these things cannot happen with other weapons.

Your post is far too long for me to read completely - and I'm not convinced. I think you are simply repeating yourself and talking past me Thanks for trying. I don't think the world will end if I disagree with you.
 

ghost

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Re: Army wants Light Specialist Vehicle

Stop pretending that these things cannot happen with other weapons.

Your post is far too long for me to read completely - and I'm not convinced. I think you are simply repeating yourself and talking past me Thanks for trying. I don't think the world will end if I disagree with you.
when "Your post is far too long for me to read completely " then " you are simply repeating yourself " does not make sense

and when one state fact's there is always a chance to sound repetitive at times.

anyways " let's agree to disagree "
 

hitesh

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Re: Army wants Light Specialist Vehicle

"A man with a Carl Gustav who hides is simply useless " unless you are ironman or superman in a battle you have to hide if a situation arises and struck enemy at the time and position suited to you most.

"If he fires, he will be spotted" bro a rpg ,carl or jave is a "dengu mosquito" loaded for kill and hard to detect where as rcl mounted on jeep is a dog coming at you when you are "armed" easier to detect and kill and even if it bite not fatal in most cases.

"Every weapon has an optimum usage profile" rcl mounted on vehicle is nothing but a light artillery mounted on jeep with limitation and venerability of artillery .best used from well defended or safe areas not in active battlefield crawling with enemy.rcl on vehicle can be destroyed by a well aimed grenade or a short burst of automatic fire as it,s easy to finish it,s crew which is always exposed where as carl or rpg can be fired from cover.

" I wonder why armies still use light, fast, wheeled armed vehicles and not just men carrying stuff." you know most of these vehicles are armored and and if not and faced with enemy with rpg or good firepower they just are sitting duck.

do you know why not rcl on jeep because "extreme firing signature (firing one round revealed your almost fully exposed position to anybody in sight), extreme back blast hazard, second degree breech burns, smashed fingers and toes, MULE rollovers, open breech cookoffs, permanent hearing loss even with ear plugs, high incidence of warhead skip and ricochet, on and on ..." and this i am quoting someone who has actually used them.

i am not saying it's not a weapon .it is a weapon but what i meant to say is that "what would you prefer if all these are available to yo rcl mounted on jeep,carl,rpg,javelin,spike" here "prefer" being the word cause if the need arise and with no option you will go to a war with whatever is available but what i fail to understand is that what logic is there in using this




when you can have this



which is more light more versatile more adaptable more accurate more practical more ergonomic..........if a personal choice i would say:thumb: go ahead but if you try to say a logical choice i would say:confused::frusty:

now lets here actual fact about man portable rpg in real battles


Most Valuable Weapon: the RPG
By Gary Brecher Browse author Email




Browse column

"The weapon of choice for the Iraqi resistance is the rocket propelled grenade (RPG)-7."

George J. Mordica II
USA Center for Army Lessons Learned

If you've been reading my columns for a while, you probably noticed I don't talk military hardware as much as most war buffs. There are a lot of people who'll talk all day about whether the Russian T-90 or the US Abrams is the best MBT. I don't do that much, for the simple reason that wars these days don't come down to one model of tank vs. another. It's pretty rare to find a war where both sides even use tanks. Most of the time it's guerrilla vs. guerrilla, or conventional army vs. guerrilla. The odds of an all-out hi-tech war between two conventional armies like the US and Russia are about...oh, zero-point-zero. So it just doesn't matter that much whether their tanks could beat ours in some make-believe replay of the Kursk Salient. If you want to play that kind of war, buy a computer game. God knows there's enough of them. If you want to know how people make war now, in the real world, you need to study people, not hardware.

Sad but true, boys: war these days is more like Social Studies than Metal Shop. It's about tribal vendettas, military intelligence, propaganda, money -- just about everything except pure hardware.

Don't get me wrong, I love the hardware as much as anybody. I used to spend every free hour, back before there was an internet, going over those big heavy reference books in the library: Jane's Tanks, Jane's Missile Systems, Jane's Combat Vehicles. I had those things memorized. Seriously, you could open any of Jane's handbooks at random, read me the name of a weapons system, and I'd recite its stats from memory -- Norwegian anti-ship missiles, South African APCs, you name it.

But eventually I had to face the facts: most of those weapons are never going to get used. If you look at all the real wars going on right now, you come across the same two weapons, over and over: the AK-47 and the RPG-7 -- both Russian designs, and both older than your Dad.

They're the weapons that matter, because they're already out there, millions of units, enough to equip every guerrilla army in the world, simple enough that you can teach a peasant kid with hookworm and a room-temperature IQ to fire them, and cheap enough to buy in bulk.

And the RPG is the best of all, even better than the Kalashnikov. This simple little beauty just keeps getting more and more effective. This cheap little dealie, nothing but a launcher tube and a few rockets shaped like two ice-cream cones glued together, has kicked our ass (and Russia's too) all over the world since back when the Beatles were still together. In fact, more and more guerrilla armies are making the RPG their basic infantry weapon, with the AK used to protect the RPG gunners, who provide the offensive punch. The Chechens fighting the Russian Army are so high on it that they've switched their three-man combat teams from two riflemen and an RPG gunner to two RPG gunners with a rifleman to protect them.

There's another stat that's even more important right now: the RPG has inflicted more than half -- half! -- of US casualties in Iraq. This is the weapon that's hurting us. And it's been doing that for one hell of a long time.

The Soviets created the RPG for use by Soviet infantry squads against US tanks, APCs and personnel in that big NATO/Warsaw Pact war everybody was dreaming of back in the sixties. The design was an example of beautiful simplicity. It was a classic of Warsaw-Pact reverse-engineering. Warsaw Pact weapons designers had this attitude that it was a waste of time to design from scratch when you could count on your spies (and the Russians had the best spies in the world back then) to get you the specs on the weapons other countries had spent billions designing. So they just put together a cross between the two best shoulder-fired anti-armor weapons around, the Wehrmacht Panzerfaust and the US Army bazooka. And that was the birth of the most important weapon in contemporary warfare.

The RPG got its start against our guys in Vietnam. The Viet Cong and NVA used them as squad-level anti-armor weapons, and they were so damn good at it that we never got our money's worth from the tanks and APCs we sent over. Our APC back then was a really lousy dumptruck, the M113 -- basically a light-tank chassis with flat slabs of aluminum on the sides and top.

Sometimes you can see how good a design is just by the way it looks. One look at an M113 and you can see that this was a lousy vehicle. It was about as tall as Yao Ming, which meant it was a real big target. The aluminum armor didn't have firing ports, so the soldiers inside just had to put their helmets over their balls, close their eyes and hope the crew would open the hatch and let them out ASAP. The armor was just thick enough to slow the thing down, but not nearly enough to stop an RPG round. Which is no surprise when you know that an RPG armor-piercing round can penetrate 300mm of rolled steel -- more than a foot of steel. Not a bad punch for such a little weapon to pack.

GIs who'd seen what an RPG hit could do to an M113 got in the habit of saying, "I'll walk, thanks." The RPG warhead does something called "spalling," which means the warhead turns the aluminum side armor of an APC into molten shrapnel which goes zipping through the guts of everybody inside like a Benihana chef's knife, only it's a knife as hot as the surface of the sun.

If GIs in Nam did have to ride an M113, they wore a lot of St. Christopher medals and sat on top. They were a lot less scared of getting shot by a sniper than of being hit by an RPG sitting inside.

We had nothing like it and still don't. We had the LAW, another shoulder-fired rocket originally designed to penetrate armor, but it wasn't nearly as easy to carry, because it didn't have the reuseable launcher the RPG featured. If you wanted to throw a dozen rockets at an enemy bunker, you had to carry a dozen LAWs along, whereas the RPG gunner needed just one launcher and a sack full of warheads.

Nam was just the beginning of the RPG's career. Just think back to Mogadishu 1993. The whole Blackhawk Down mess happened because some Afghan Jihadis who'd retired to Mogadishu -- guess it was nice'n'restful compared to Kandahar -- showed the Somalis how to use the RPG-7 as an anti-aircraft weapon, which its Russian designers never even thought of. The RPG was the key to the whole battle that ended up killing 18 Ranger and Delta guys (Jeez, remember when 18 GIs dead was supposed to be "unacceptably high" losses?), getting us to bug out from Somalia, and getting Ridley Scott's directing career back on track.

First the Somali RPG gunners, firing up from the streets where they'd dug holes to channel the big rocket backblast, hit our Blackhawks, bringing them down in the maze of slums. That drew our troops into the slums, where everybody from toddlers to grandmas started potshotting them with AKs.

The Afghans worked out how to use RPGs as AA back in the 80s, fighting the Soviets. I guess it was a little bit of poetic justice that the first helicopters to get brought down were Russian. The Afghans didn't have much to use against choppers except captured Russian heavy 14.5 cal. machineguns, which didn't have enough punch to bring down the Mi-24. And Reagan, the wimpiest hawk that ever flew, waited five long years to give the Mujahideen the Stingers that could take down an Mi-24 every time. So the Afghans started playing around with using the RPG against Russian CAS.

They came up with some great improvisations. There's nothing like war to bring out the inventor in people! One thing the Afghans figured out was how to use the self-destruct device in the warhead to turn the RPG into an airburst SA missile. See, the RPG comes with a safety feature designed to self-destruct after the missile's gone 920 meters. So if you fire on up at a chopper from a few hundred meters away, at the right angle, you get an airburst just as effective as SA missiles that cost about a thousand times more.

When the Chechens took on the post-Soviet Russian army in 1994, the good old RPG was the key weapon once again. By this time, the Russians must've been cursing the name of the man who designed the thing. What the Chechens found out in their first war against the Russians in 1994 was that the RPG is the perfect weapon for urban combat. The Russians sent huge columns of armor into the streets of the city, and the Chechens waited on the upper floors, where they couldn't be spotted by choppers but still held the high ground. They waited till the tanks and APCs were jammed into the little streets, then hit the first and last vehicles with RPGs -- classic anti-armor technique. That left the whole column stopped dead, and all they had to do was keep feeding warheads into the launchers, knocking out vehicle after vehicle by hitting it on the thin top armor. The Russians were slaughtered, and they had to pull back and settle for saturating the city with massed artillery fires, which killed lots of old ladies but didn't do any harm to the fighters. So basically the RPG singlehandedly lost the Russians their first Chechen War.

Which brings us to Iraq, now. The first key to the RPG's effectiveness is availability, and it turns out that the one thing Iraq had more than enough of, in spite of all those sanctions, was RPG launchers and rounds. Saddam's army had an official license from the Russians to produce RPGs in Iraqi factories, and they made so many that, when Saddam went down, there were piles of launchers with plenty of anti-armor and anti-personnel rounds in most Iraqi towns. And after the Iran-Iraq War and Gulf War I, so many Iraqi men had trained on the RPG that there were plenty of gunners and instructors to teach the new generation how to use it.

Everything about the RPG design seems like it was designed to be used in Iraqi cities. It's got one of the shortest arming ranges of any shoulder-fired anti-armor weapons, which means you can fire it at a Hummer coming right down the street. It's light enough, at 15 pounds, for even the wimpiest teenager to run through alleys with. It's simple enough for any amateur to use -- the original non-camera example of "point and shoot."

US doctrine for countering the RPG always stressed looking for the flash when it's fired, and the blue-grey smoke trail it leaves. There are two problems with that, though. In the first place, unlike, say, the TOW, the RPG is unguided, so once it's launched, it doesn't do much good to kill the gunner. You're still going to get hit. Second, it's not easy to see the blast or the smoke trail in one of these Iraqi "urban canyons." Too many walls to hide behind.

Our doctrine also used to stress laying down heavy fire in the general direction of the RPG launcher, to suppress further firings and hopefully kill the crew. But when you're fighting in the middle of an Iraqi city, that kind of general fire is going to kill a lot of hunkered-down civilians along with the RPG crew. And that doesn't look good on TV. More importantly, it makes you a lot of new enemies among the people whose cousins got shot.

Even if the RPG doesn't disable a vehicle, the blast radius of the anti-armor round is four meters, which means anybody in the area is going to be seeing little birdies for a good few minutes, deaf from the blast, temporarily blind, not to mention very scared and pissed off. Once you've got the occupying troops in a position like that -- I mean literally blind and deaf -- you're in a guerrilla strategist's idea of Heaven. Troops in that mood tend to start firing blind, which makes everybody hate them even more, which suits the guerrilla right down to the ground.

he RPG-29 uses a tandem-charge high explosive anti-tank warhead to penetrate explosive reactive armor (ERA) as well as composite armor behind it. It is capable of penetrating MBTs such as the M1 Abrams, older model Mark II version of the Merkava,[10] Challenger 2, or T-90.[11]

In August 2006 in al-Amarah, a Soviet RPG-29 damaged the front underside of a Challenger 2, detonating ERA in the area of the driver's cabin. The driver lost part of his foot and two more of the crew were also injured but the driver was able to reverse 1.5 mi (2.4 km) to an aid post. The incident was not made public until May 2007, and in response to accusations, the MoD said "We have never claimed that the Challenger 2 is impenetrable." Since then, the ERA has been replaced with a Dorchester block and the steel underbelly lined with armour, as part of the 'Streetfighter' upgrade, which was a direct response to this incident.[12] In May 2008, The New York Times disclosed that an American M1 tank had also been damaged by an RPG-29 in Iraq.[13][14] The American army is ranking the RPG-29 threat to American armor as high; they have refused to allow the newly formed Iraqi army to buy it, fearing it will fall into the insurgent hands.

At the beginning of the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict, the main Israeli concern was a report that Hezbollah possessed Russian Kornet antitank missiles. However, it has been the RPG-29 that is stolen the show. These man-portable lightweight weapons are powerful enough to destroy the Merkava tank, which is reputed to be the most thoroughly armored tank in the world. According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Hezbollah acquired significant numbers of the RPG-29 from Syria, and the weapon has been a major source of Israeli casualties in the conflict.

The RPG-29 Vampir with the tandem HEAT (high explosive anti-tank) PG-29V tandem charge warhead was developed by Russia in the late 1980s in response to the development of tanks having explosive reactive armor. The weapon is designed to actuate explosive armor with a first shaped charge, while a second charge is reserved to penetrate the tank's hull. The Soviet army received the RPG-29 in 1989. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, these weapons could be found in almost all of the former Warsaw Pact nations.

The strategic impor. tance of the dramatic battlefield effectiveness of the RPG-29 cannot be underestimated .The Iraqi resistance has not had access to significant quantities of RPG-29s because they were not readily available in the international weapons market until after post-Gulf War sanctions were applied to Saddam Hussein's Iraq. However, Syria and Iran possess large inventories of these weapons. Certainly, the Pentagon must be taking note of the effectiveness of these weapons against the Israeli forces in south Lebanon when considering the possibility of a military confrontation with Iran or Syria. In fact, the calculus of occupying any potentially hostile country has been significantly shifted. If the occupying forces can no longer rely on armored vehicles to engage militants or to travel, the price of occupation in terms of casualties will be much greater. This necessarily impacts countries like the United States and Israel more than it would countries that place a lesser value on the lives of their soldiers. In other words, the unexpected effectiveness of the RPG-29 is a severe blow to the West. It is the great equalizer. For $500 per launcher and $250 per missile round, a militant group can purchase a light, mobile weapon that is easy to conceal and that can reliably destroy a main battle tank that costs millions of dollars.

The long-term implications for Israel are even more significant. If Palestinian militants are ever able to acquire significant quantities of RPG-29s they could for the first time ever present a significant challenge to the Israeli army. This is particularly true because the Israelis have demonstrated an aversion to ground fighting and taking casualties in the campaign against Hezbollah. There is no doubt that groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, both of which have close ties to Hezbollah, have been observing the conflict in South Lebanon with strong interest and have noted Israel's reluctance to send more ground troops in against Hezbollah fighters who are armed primarily with RPG-29s.

In fact, given the proximity of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to major Israeli population centers (the distances could easily be traveled on foot by armed militants, who would have to keep themselves dispersed enough to avoid being destroyed by aircraft or armored vehicles) it is possible to imagine that sometime in the future that a Palestinian militia armed with such man-portable weapons could possibly successfully invade and conquer Israel without the use of expensive military equipment such as aircraft and tanks. If militants could penetrate Israeli territory enough to turn the battle into hand-to-hand fighting within major population centers, F-16s and nuclear weapons would be of no use to Israel. The previously unthinkable defeat of Israel could become a possibility.

For this reason, it could be theorized that recent developments on the ground in South Lebanon have made the "two state solution" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict effectively unworkable from a pragmatic standpoint. Once a Palestinian state is established it would be practically impossible to prevent militants from acquiring large quantities of RPG-29s and other military equipment that could be used to equip infantry ground fighters. Once this happened, Israel would be in deep trouble.

On the other hand, judging from how Israel's Arab citizens have been integrated into the country, the establishment of a single secular state incorporating both present-day Israel and the present Palestinian territories might have a chance for success. Demographically, Arabs would have a small voting advantage in such a state, however economic power would remain largely in the power of the Jewish citizens. The rights of Jews and Arabs alike would be preserved in such a state, and a secular Israel/Palestine could become a genuine beacon of democracy and liberalism to the region. This could be the catalyst to the "New Middle East" that Washington has been seeking.

Of course, a certain amount of goodwill would need to be established before a one state solution could ever be made feasible. If Israel continues to inflict needless civilian casualties on Arab populations that end up on the front pages of the Arab press, the well will be further poisoned and its most viable path out of this seemingly endless conflict will be closed.

THE ONLY USE I CAN SEE OF VEHICLE MOUNTED RCL GUN IS BEING USED AS A LIGHT ARTILLERY BUT IF I CAN LAY MY HANDS ON CARL RPG OR JAVELIN ALONG WITH A LIGHT JEEP IT WOULD BE MORE VERSATILE,USER FRIENDLY,EFFECTIVE ..........WITH IT I WOULD BE ABLE TO DO THIS...










have these and you will have this





what more can you ask for in the iraq and Afghanistan war the american special forces used carl gustav extensively but the infantry was not issued these but on seeing the immense success of carl on battlefield there was a tremendous pressure from army as a result us haD to place a large order OF carl for their infantry due to the the real time experience in the battlefield."AND THIS IS A FACT NOT MINE OR YOUR PERCEPTION"
Actually before the stinger was fielded ISI used Blowpipe sam Blowpipe (missile) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia but it failed so it was never passed on to the afghans this was the comments as per the book "the bear trap" by maj Usuf Akdin
 
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Kunal Biswas

Member of the Year 2011
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Re: Army wants Light Specialist Vehicle

106mm RCL can be used as portable artillery also it can fire on move so does able to cause massive destruction at cheap against Infantry fortifications ..

These things cannot be done with ATGM mounted vehicle, Never underestimate Old stuff can do and out do new tech ..

bennedose since you laid so much stress on mobility i would say

my choice



ur choice




LET'S RACE BROTHER:thumb:
 

TrueSpirit1

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Re: Army wants Light Specialist Vehicle

"A man with a Carl Gustav who hides is simply useless " unless you are ironman or superman in a battle you have to hide if a situation arises and struck enemy at the time and position suited to you most.

"If he fires, he will be spotted" bro a rpg ,carl or jave is a "dengu mosquito" loaded for kill and hard to detect where as rcl mounted on jeep is a dog coming at you when you are "armed" easier to detect and kill and even if it bite not fatal in most cases.

"Every weapon has an optimum usage profile" rcl mounted on vehicle is nothing but a light artillery mounted on jeep with limitation and venerability of artillery .best used from well defended or safe areas not in active battlefield crawling with enemy.rcl on vehicle can be destroyed by a well aimed grenade or a short burst of automatic fire as it,s easy to finish it,s crew which is always exposed where as carl or rpg can be fired from cover.

" I wonder why armies still use light, fast, wheeled armed vehicles and not just men carrying stuff." you know most of these vehicles are armored and and if not and faced with enemy with rpg or good firepower they just are sitting duck.

do you know why not rcl on jeep because "extreme firing signature (firing one round revealed your almost fully exposed position to anybody in sight), extreme back blast hazard, second degree breech burns, smashed fingers and toes, MULE rollovers, open breech cookoffs, permanent hearing loss even with ear plugs, high incidence of warhead skip and ricochet, on and on ..." and this i am quoting someone who has actually used them.

i am not saying it's not a weapon .it is a weapon but what i meant to say is that "what would you prefer if all these are available to yo rcl mounted on jeep,carl,rpg,javelin,spike" here "prefer" being the word cause if the need arise and with no option you will go to a war with whatever is available but what i fail to understand is that what logic is there in using this




when you can have this



which is more light more versatile more adaptable more accurate more practical more ergonomic..........if a personal choice i would say:thumb: go ahead but if you try to say a logical choice i would say:confused::frusty:

now lets here actual fact about man portable rpg in real battles


Most Valuable Weapon: the RPG
By Gary Brecher Browse author Email




Browse column

"The weapon of choice for the Iraqi resistance is the rocket propelled grenade (RPG)-7."

George J. Mordica II
USA Center for Army Lessons Learned

If you've been reading my columns for a while, you probably noticed I don't talk military hardware as much as most war buffs. There are a lot of people who'll talk all day about whether the Russian T-90 or the US Abrams is the best MBT. I don't do that much, for the simple reason that wars these days don't come down to one model of tank vs. another. It's pretty rare to find a war where both sides even use tanks. Most of the time it's guerrilla vs. guerrilla, or conventional army vs. guerrilla. The odds of an all-out hi-tech war between two conventional armies like the US and Russia are about...oh, zero-point-zero. So it just doesn't matter that much whether their tanks could beat ours in some make-believe replay of the Kursk Salient. If you want to play that kind of war, buy a computer game. God knows there's enough of them. If you want to know how people make war now, in the real world, you need to study people, not hardware.

Sad but true, boys: war these days is more like Social Studies than Metal Shop. It's about tribal vendettas, military intelligence, propaganda, money -- just about everything except pure hardware.

Don't get me wrong, I love the hardware as much as anybody. I used to spend every free hour, back before there was an internet, going over those big heavy reference books in the library: Jane's Tanks, Jane's Missile Systems, Jane's Combat Vehicles. I had those things memorized. Seriously, you could open any of Jane's handbooks at random, read me the name of a weapons system, and I'd recite its stats from memory -- Norwegian anti-ship missiles, South African APCs, you name it.

But eventually I had to face the facts: most of those weapons are never going to get used. If you look at all the real wars going on right now, you come across the same two weapons, over and over: the AK-47 and the RPG-7 -- both Russian designs, and both older than your Dad.

They're the weapons that matter, because they're already out there, millions of units, enough to equip every guerrilla army in the world, simple enough that you can teach a peasant kid with hookworm and a room-temperature IQ to fire them, and cheap enough to buy in bulk.

And the RPG is the best of all, even better than the Kalashnikov. This simple little beauty just keeps getting more and more effective. This cheap little dealie, nothing but a launcher tube and a few rockets shaped like two ice-cream cones glued together, has kicked our ass (and Russia's too) all over the world since back when the Beatles were still together. In fact, more and more guerrilla armies are making the RPG their basic infantry weapon, with the AK used to protect the RPG gunners, who provide the offensive punch. The Chechens fighting the Russian Army are so high on it that they've switched their three-man combat teams from two riflemen and an RPG gunner to two RPG gunners with a rifleman to protect them.

There's another stat that's even more important right now: the RPG has inflicted more than half -- half! -- of US casualties in Iraq. This is the weapon that's hurting us. And it's been doing that for one hell of a long time.

The Soviets created the RPG for use by Soviet infantry squads against US tanks, APCs and personnel in that big NATO/Warsaw Pact war everybody was dreaming of back in the sixties. The design was an example of beautiful simplicity. It was a classic of Warsaw-Pact reverse-engineering. Warsaw Pact weapons designers had this attitude that it was a waste of time to design from scratch when you could count on your spies (and the Russians had the best spies in the world back then) to get you the specs on the weapons other countries had spent billions designing. So they just put together a cross between the two best shoulder-fired anti-armor weapons around, the Wehrmacht Panzerfaust and the US Army bazooka. And that was the birth of the most important weapon in contemporary warfare.

The RPG got its start against our guys in Vietnam. The Viet Cong and NVA used them as squad-level anti-armor weapons, and they were so damn good at it that we never got our money's worth from the tanks and APCs we sent over. Our APC back then was a really lousy dumptruck, the M113 -- basically a light-tank chassis with flat slabs of aluminum on the sides and top.

Sometimes you can see how good a design is just by the way it looks. One look at an M113 and you can see that this was a lousy vehicle. It was about as tall as Yao Ming, which meant it was a real big target. The aluminum armor didn't have firing ports, so the soldiers inside just had to put their helmets over their balls, close their eyes and hope the crew would open the hatch and let them out ASAP. The armor was just thick enough to slow the thing down, but not nearly enough to stop an RPG round. Which is no surprise when you know that an RPG armor-piercing round can penetrate 300mm of rolled steel -- more than a foot of steel. Not a bad punch for such a little weapon to pack.

GIs who'd seen what an RPG hit could do to an M113 got in the habit of saying, "I'll walk, thanks." The RPG warhead does something called "spalling," which means the warhead turns the aluminum side armor of an APC into molten shrapnel which goes zipping through the guts of everybody inside like a Benihana chef's knife, only it's a knife as hot as the surface of the sun.

If GIs in Nam did have to ride an M113, they wore a lot of St. Christopher medals and sat on top. They were a lot less scared of getting shot by a sniper than of being hit by an RPG sitting inside.

We had nothing like it and still don't. We had the LAW, another shoulder-fired rocket originally designed to penetrate armor, but it wasn't nearly as easy to carry, because it didn't have the reuseable launcher the RPG featured. If you wanted to throw a dozen rockets at an enemy bunker, you had to carry a dozen LAWs along, whereas the RPG gunner needed just one launcher and a sack full of warheads.

Nam was just the beginning of the RPG's career. Just think back to Mogadishu 1993. The whole Blackhawk Down mess happened because some Afghan Jihadis who'd retired to Mogadishu -- guess it was nice'n'restful compared to Kandahar -- showed the Somalis how to use the RPG-7 as an anti-aircraft weapon, which its Russian designers never even thought of. The RPG was the key to the whole battle that ended up killing 18 Ranger and Delta guys (Jeez, remember when 18 GIs dead was supposed to be "unacceptably high" losses?), getting us to bug out from Somalia, and getting Ridley Scott's directing career back on track.

First the Somali RPG gunners, firing up from the streets where they'd dug holes to channel the big rocket backblast, hit our Blackhawks, bringing them down in the maze of slums. That drew our troops into the slums, where everybody from toddlers to grandmas started potshotting them with AKs.

The Afghans worked out how to use RPGs as AA back in the 80s, fighting the Soviets. I guess it was a little bit of poetic justice that the first helicopters to get brought down were Russian. The Afghans didn't have much to use against choppers except captured Russian heavy 14.5 cal. machineguns, which didn't have enough punch to bring down the Mi-24. And Reagan, the wimpiest hawk that ever flew, waited five long years to give the Mujahideen the Stingers that could take down an Mi-24 every time. So the Afghans started playing around with using the RPG against Russian CAS.

They came up with some great improvisations. There's nothing like war to bring out the inventor in people! One thing the Afghans figured out was how to use the self-destruct device in the warhead to turn the RPG into an airburst SA missile. See, the RPG comes with a safety feature designed to self-destruct after the missile's gone 920 meters. So if you fire on up at a chopper from a few hundred meters away, at the right angle, you get an airburst just as effective as SA missiles that cost about a thousand times more.

When the Chechens took on the post-Soviet Russian army in 1994, the good old RPG was the key weapon once again. By this time, the Russians must've been cursing the name of the man who designed the thing. What the Chechens found out in their first war against the Russians in 1994 was that the RPG is the perfect weapon for urban combat. The Russians sent huge columns of armor into the streets of the city, and the Chechens waited on the upper floors, where they couldn't be spotted by choppers but still held the high ground. They waited till the tanks and APCs were jammed into the little streets, then hit the first and last vehicles with RPGs -- classic anti-armor technique. That left the whole column stopped dead, and all they had to do was keep feeding warheads into the launchers, knocking out vehicle after vehicle by hitting it on the thin top armor. The Russians were slaughtered, and they had to pull back and settle for saturating the city with massed artillery fires, which killed lots of old ladies but didn't do any harm to the fighters. So basically the RPG singlehandedly lost the Russians their first Chechen War.

Which brings us to Iraq, now. The first key to the RPG's effectiveness is availability, and it turns out that the one thing Iraq had more than enough of, in spite of all those sanctions, was RPG launchers and rounds. Saddam's army had an official license from the Russians to produce RPGs in Iraqi factories, and they made so many that, when Saddam went down, there were piles of launchers with plenty of anti-armor and anti-personnel rounds in most Iraqi towns. And after the Iran-Iraq War and Gulf War I, so many Iraqi men had trained on the RPG that there were plenty of gunners and instructors to teach the new generation how to use it.

Everything about the RPG design seems like it was designed to be used in Iraqi cities. It's got one of the shortest arming ranges of any shoulder-fired anti-armor weapons, which means you can fire it at a Hummer coming right down the street. It's light enough, at 15 pounds, for even the wimpiest teenager to run through alleys with. It's simple enough for any amateur to use -- the original non-camera example of "point and shoot."

US doctrine for countering the RPG always stressed looking for the flash when it's fired, and the blue-grey smoke trail it leaves. There are two problems with that, though. In the first place, unlike, say, the TOW, the RPG is unguided, so once it's launched, it doesn't do much good to kill the gunner. You're still going to get hit. Second, it's not easy to see the blast or the smoke trail in one of these Iraqi "urban canyons." Too many walls to hide behind.

Our doctrine also used to stress laying down heavy fire in the general direction of the RPG launcher, to suppress further firings and hopefully kill the crew. But when you're fighting in the middle of an Iraqi city, that kind of general fire is going to kill a lot of hunkered-down civilians along with the RPG crew. And that doesn't look good on TV. More importantly, it makes you a lot of new enemies among the people whose cousins got shot.

Even if the RPG doesn't disable a vehicle, the blast radius of the anti-armor round is four meters, which means anybody in the area is going to be seeing little birdies for a good few minutes, deaf from the blast, temporarily blind, not to mention very scared and pissed off. Once you've got the occupying troops in a position like that -- I mean literally blind and deaf -- you're in a guerrilla strategist's idea of Heaven. Troops in that mood tend to start firing blind, which makes everybody hate them even more, which suits the guerrilla right down to the ground.

he RPG-29 uses a tandem-charge high explosive anti-tank warhead to penetrate explosive reactive armor (ERA) as well as composite armor behind it. It is capable of penetrating MBTs such as the M1 Abrams, older model Mark II version of the Merkava,[10] Challenger 2, or T-90.[11]

In August 2006 in al-Amarah, a Soviet RPG-29 damaged the front underside of a Challenger 2, detonating ERA in the area of the driver's cabin. The driver lost part of his foot and two more of the crew were also injured but the driver was able to reverse 1.5 mi (2.4 km) to an aid post. The incident was not made public until May 2007, and in response to accusations, the MoD said "We have never claimed that the Challenger 2 is impenetrable." Since then, the ERA has been replaced with a Dorchester block and the steel underbelly lined with armour, as part of the 'Streetfighter' upgrade, which was a direct response to this incident.[12] In May 2008, The New York Times disclosed that an American M1 tank had also been damaged by an RPG-29 in Iraq.[13][14] The American army is ranking the RPG-29 threat to American armor as high; they have refused to allow the newly formed Iraqi army to buy it, fearing it will fall into the insurgent hands.

At the beginning of the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict, the main Israeli concern was a report that Hezbollah possessed Russian Kornet antitank missiles. However, it has been the RPG-29 that is stolen the show. These man-portable lightweight weapons are powerful enough to destroy the Merkava tank, which is reputed to be the most thoroughly armored tank in the world. According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Hezbollah acquired significant numbers of the RPG-29 from Syria, and the weapon has been a major source of Israeli casualties in the conflict.

The RPG-29 Vampir with the tandem HEAT (high explosive anti-tank) PG-29V tandem charge warhead was developed by Russia in the late 1980s in response to the development of tanks having explosive reactive armor. The weapon is designed to actuate explosive armor with a first shaped charge, while a second charge is reserved to penetrate the tank's hull. The Soviet army received the RPG-29 in 1989. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, these weapons could be found in almost all of the former Warsaw Pact nations.

The strategic impor. tance of the dramatic battlefield effectiveness of the RPG-29 cannot be underestimated .The Iraqi resistance has not had access to significant quantities of RPG-29s because they were not readily available in the international weapons market until after post-Gulf War sanctions were applied to Saddam Hussein's Iraq. However, Syria and Iran possess large inventories of these weapons. Certainly, the Pentagon must be taking note of the effectiveness of these weapons against the Israeli forces in south Lebanon when considering the possibility of a military confrontation with Iran or Syria. In fact, the calculus of occupying any potentially hostile country has been significantly shifted. If the occupying forces can no longer rely on armored vehicles to engage militants or to travel, the price of occupation in terms of casualties will be much greater. This necessarily impacts countries like the United States and Israel more than it would countries that place a lesser value on the lives of their soldiers. In other words, the unexpected effectiveness of the RPG-29 is a severe blow to the West. It is the great equalizer. For $500 per launcher and $250 per missile round, a militant group can purchase a light, mobile weapon that is easy to conceal and that can reliably destroy a main battle tank that costs millions of dollars.

The long-term implications for Israel are even more significant. If Palestinian militants are ever able to acquire significant quantities of RPG-29s they could for the first time ever present a significant challenge to the Israeli army. This is particularly true because the Israelis have demonstrated an aversion to ground fighting and taking casualties in the campaign against Hezbollah. There is no doubt that groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, both of which have close ties to Hezbollah, have been observing the conflict in South Lebanon with strong interest and have noted Israel's reluctance to send more ground troops in against Hezbollah fighters who are armed primarily with RPG-29s.

In fact, given the proximity of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to major Israeli population centers (the distances could easily be traveled on foot by armed militants, who would have to keep themselves dispersed enough to avoid being destroyed by aircraft or armored vehicles) it is possible to imagine that sometime in the future that a Palestinian militia armed with such man-portable weapons could possibly successfully invade and conquer Israel without the use of expensive military equipment such as aircraft and tanks. If militants could penetrate Israeli territory enough to turn the battle into hand-to-hand fighting within major population centers, F-16s and nuclear weapons would be of no use to Israel. The previously unthinkable defeat of Israel could become a possibility.

For this reason, it could be theorized that recent developments on the ground in South Lebanon have made the "two state solution" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict effectively unworkable from a pragmatic standpoint. Once a Palestinian state is established it would be practically impossible to prevent militants from acquiring large quantities of RPG-29s and other military equipment that could be used to equip infantry ground fighters. Once this happened, Israel would be in deep trouble.

On the other hand, judging from how Israel's Arab citizens have been integrated into the country, the establishment of a single secular state incorporating both present-day Israel and the present Palestinian territories might have a chance for success. Demographically, Arabs would have a small voting advantage in such a state, however economic power would remain largely in the power of the Jewish citizens. The rights of Jews and Arabs alike would be preserved in such a state, and a secular Israel/Palestine could become a genuine beacon of democracy and liberalism to the region. This could be the catalyst to the "New Middle East" that Washington has been seeking.

Of course, a certain amount of goodwill would need to be established before a one state solution could ever be made feasible. If Israel continues to inflict needless civilian casualties on Arab populations that end up on the front pages of the Arab press, the well will be further poisoned and its most viable path out of this seemingly endless conflict will be closed.

THE ONLY USE I CAN SEE OF VEHICLE MOUNTED RCL GUN IS BEING USED AS A LIGHT ARTILLERY BUT IF I CAN LAY MY HANDS ON CARL RPG OR JAVELIN ALONG WITH A LIGHT JEEP IT WOULD BE MORE VERSATILE,USER FRIENDLY,EFFECTIVE ..........WITH IT I WOULD BE ABLE TO DO THIS...










have these and you will have this





what more can you ask for in the iraq and Afghanistan war the american special forces used carl gustav extensively but the infantry was not issued these but on seeing the immense success of carl on battlefield there was a tremendous pressure from army as a result us haD to place a large order OF carl for their infantry due to the the real time experience in the battlefield."AND THIS IS A FACT NOT MINE OR YOUR PERCEPTION"
Excellent article you have quoted. It laid so much emphasis on common sense (not-so-common anymore), & unrivaled power of design simplicity.

Btw, what exactly are the credentials of Gary Brecher ? Sorry, I have not read him yet.
 
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ghost

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Re: Army wants Light Specialist Vehicle

Excellent article you have quoted. It laid so much emphasis on common sense (not-so-common anymore), & unrivaled power of design simplicity.

Btw, what exactly are the credentials of Gary Brecher ? Sorry, I have not read him yet.



Gary Brecher - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

very true it also highlight the fact that it's not the weapon but ultimately the art of using that weapon which influence the battlefield.
 
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