Posted on 01/31/2004 10:23:42 AM PST by Cannoneer No. 4
MOSUL, Iraq - The Army's new Stryker vehicle had its first combat encounter with a rocket-propelled grenade Friday.
The round struck the front of the vehicle above its slat armor cage, cutting a hose inside the engine compartment. The vehicle commander suffered a superficial cut near his nose, officials said.
But the Fort Lewis crew was otherwise unhurt and drove the vehicle out of danger, their company commander and 1st sergeant said.
It was one of four RPG attacks on Strykers on Friday in Mosul. The other three rounds missed.
Soldiers throughout the brigade had figured it was only a matter of time before a Stryker was hit by an RPG, one of the most widely available anti-armor weapons in the world.
Commanders said the attacks are proof that local insurgents are finished with merely observing the new vehicles moving about the city streets.
"You need to tell your soldiers this is still a very, very dangerous environment," 2nd Battalion, 3rd Infantry Regiment commander Lt. Col. Gordie Flowers told his troop leaders after the day's events. "They need to know that they need to have their 'A game' on every time they go out the gate."
All four attacks were against vehicles from the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Infantry.
Battalion officials gave these details:
•A few minutes before the Stryker was hit at 8:30 a.m., gunmen attacked the same vehicle with small-arms fire and an RPG from about 750 feet away. The round fell short.
•About 7:30 a.m., in a neighborhood in northeast Mosul, insurgents fired an RPG at a Stryker parked near where soldiers had discovered a weapons cache. The attackers got away.
•Attackers tried to hit the same vehicle just before 3 p.m. as it was parked along the eastern shore of the Tigris River, near where dive and boat teams were looking for one of two soldiers missing in the river since Sunday.
The attackers fired the RPG from the west side of the river, from at least 750 feet away, officers said. The grenade struck hanging lines above the vehicle and caused no damage.
Soldiers saw the attackers on the other shore. They returned fire, and a squad searched the area moments later but found no sign of them.
Depending on the type, RPGs are capable of boring through a Stryker's armor and spraying hot shrapnel all around the interior of the vehicle.
The threat prompted the Army to install bulky, 5,000-pound slat cages around the Strykers while RPG-resistant armor is still being developed.
Friday's strike didn't answer the question of whether the slat armor will work as advertised and diffuse the impact of the RPG before it strikes the body of the vehicle.
But at least on this day, the RPG strike wasn't the deadly event that many feared.
The grenade was fired from close range - less than 300 feet - and struck above the cage at the front of the Stryker, battalion officials said. Photographs of the damage showed finger-sized holes near the hinge of the armored hatch that covers the engine compartment.
Crew members had headaches after the blast, but drove the vehicle out of danger, said 1st Sgt. Mike Hurtado of the company.
"The vehicle was drivable. We drove it around in an attempt to pursue the enemy," said company commander Capt. A.J. Newtson.
It was another half-hour or so before they realized one of the engine hoses had been cut, so they stopped driving it to avoid further damage and later towed it to their base camp in central Mosul, he said.
When they were fired at the first time, the soldiers were on an early morning patrol in search of roadside bombs set overnight in the southeast section of town.
After the grenade fell short, the soldiers tried to seal off the area. A resident of the neighborhood told soldiers where they might find the insurgents who shot at them, battalion officials said.
They searched the area on foot, recovering a 155 mm artillery round from the yard where the tipster had told them to look. But they didn't find the gunmen and were reboarding their vehicles when the second attack came.
The same shooters, they believe, moved in closer, fired the RPG and climbed into a car and drove away.
Newtson said the attackers used the dense urban setting to blend in with civilians and escape. Mosul is one of the largest cities in Iraq, with some 1.8 million residents.
Newtson and Hurtado said their injured soldier from the damaged Stryker had returned to duty and would likely be back out on roadside bomb patrol this morning.
They said the expected repairs to the vehicle wouldn't take long and that it would be returned to service soon.
"It worked the way it was supposed to," Flowers said. "To take the hit and still get you out of the attack zone."
Battalion officials said they figured sooner or later their search operations along the Tigris would be attacked. The mission to find two missing soldiers is tying up one of its infantry companies as they provide security coverage for the divers and boat teams working in the water.
Staff Sgt. Christopher Bunda, 29, a squad leader with the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Infantry, was lost in the river when a boat he was in capsized Sunday afternoon. Lt. Adam Mooney, 28, and Chief Warrant Officer 3 Patrick Dorf, 32, disappeared after their OH-58 Kiowa Warrior helicopter crashed into the river about an hour later as they searched for Bunda.
Navy divers recovered Dorf's body Thursday afternoon.
Michael Gilbert: mjgilbert41@yahoo.com
(Published 12:01AM, January 31st, 2004)
Pretty demoralizing, if true.
Well, for defending force, yes. For the guerrilla, who can choose the time and place for the first shot, the immediate effect, whether sniper's shot or precisely detonated bomb, is all-important. If ideally successful, it can be followed up with an assault, in which the fire effect is also of great importance. If not, fall away and repeat some other ideal time, just as Sun Tzu directs.
And when it broke, what did your elbow hit? Nothing like catching a radio knob in the funny bone at 0200 on a frosty November morning.
Getting the CVC helmet commo cord wrapped around your neck when you'd spun the cupola a couple of times was another real fun possibility, especially if it caught on the little traversing handwheel.
You have a sick and twisted mind.
~40 rds/sec downrange?
"Hello RPG Boy. Goodbye RPG Boy."
Hello charred nibblets of smoking meat.
Works for me.
Flattery will get you nowhere. There's also a fella in Arizona with a 7,62mm minigun in one of the .50 positions on his M55 mount.
~40 rds/sec downrange?
"Hello RPG Boy. Goodbye RPG Boy."
Hello charred nibblets of smoking meat.
Works for me.
That's one way to go. Think of a two vehicle team, one with quad Mk 19s, with HEDP in the top two guns in the event someone naughty takes cover behind a wall or vehicle. And with *bouncing betty* 40mm rounds in the bottom two, should they be on the reverse of a hill or knoll, or egress across an open area.
Then for the other vehicle, instead of four Mk 19s, mount 4 paired 5,56mm M249 SAWS, for eight guns total- like the Spitfire and Hurricane fighters of the Battle of Britain, which used 8-gun setups to chainsaw German fighters to splinters from up close. You'd have to develop a right-hand feed top cover and bolt for the guns, not too difficult, or the South African 5,56mm M77 could be used. Works out to around 6000 rounds per minute, or 100 per second...on slow rate. Wide open would work out to around 8000 RPM....
I'm not familiar with the tank/trailer combo, although the concept looks interesting.
Remember what Patton said: You can't put too many machine guns on an armored vehicle!
ROTFLMAO!!!!!!!!
Stirling's SAS used their jeeps primarily as long-distance personnel carriers initially, utilizing the grenade-sized *Lewis bomb* they developed [both explosive AND thermite incendiary] to destroy multiples of German aircraft on the ground at their airfields. When the Germans were forced to staff their rear-area airfields with ground defence forces, they followed up those stealth raids with brute force, smashing through gates with their jeeps using multiple-mount Vickers .303 MGs taken from obsolete bomber turrets, with a few scrounged .50 aircraft guns scrounged here and there. But the multiple Vickers *K-guns* were their real tools.
The raiding unit that made best use of the jeep as weapon as much as transport was the lesser-known raiders of *Popski's Private Army,* also operating in the British Eighth Army advance areas, both as raiders and intelligence-gatherers. Indeed, General Sir Bernard Montgomery described the unit of less than a hundred men as *the most effective intelligence-gathering unit of the war....*
PPA used the jeep, usually with a .50 and .30 Browning, sometimes with a British Bren or captured paired German MG34s or 42s facing rearward as *getaway guns,* though Italian weapons, a former Messerschmitt aircraft 20mm autocannon and even a flamethrower were among the hardware adapted to their jeeps. Occasionally encountering a German or Italian armoured car or light tank at intersecting route roadblocks, American bazookas were one answer, but the .50 Brownings were said to be quite capable as well, and more certain at night-though the mad Irishman with the flamethrower must have gotten their attention.
Popski's personal jeep, it should be noted, mounted a pair of .50 Brownings, and they were the M2 heavy barreled model, not the lighter barrel aircraft guns that couldn't stand up to sustained bursts in ground fire use.
After the fighting in the Western Desert was concluded, Popski's band relocated operations to Italy, where they worked their way behind the German lines again, further assisting both the British forces and Pattons with route teconnaisance and expectations as to German resistance in the villages and towns they were entering. And so PPA continued, all the way to Venice, thence on to Vienna, where they met up with occupying Russian forces, and things took an interesting turn of events- but though the Soviet forces may have trifled with some Brits, they found that the Gurkhas and PPA were a bad choice for such games.
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