Posted on 02/20/2004 3:00:44 AM PST by Cannoneer No. 4
MOSUL, Iraq - For a while, Capt. A.J. Newtson considered removing the slat armor cages from his company's Stryker infantry carriers. The big steel cages make it tough to maneuver the vehicles through some of Mosul's narrow streets.
Then two of his trucks got hit by rocket-propelled grenades.
"We're going to keep it," said Newtson, commander of the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Infantry Regiment's Charger Company.
The cages, so far, are working as advertised. Strykers have come through four RPG hits with no major damage. One soldier was injured - a small shrapnel cut on his face.
Soldiers on board say they were able to absorb the shock of the blast, quickly recover their senses and keep on fighting.
Spc. Steven Bentz was driving his vehicle, Charlie 2-2, the morning of Jan. 30 when it was hit in the Domiz neighborhood in southeast Mosul. The round came in from close range - less than 100 yards.
"It was too fast. I didn't even have time to tell anyone it was coming," Bentz said. The explosion slammed his head against the bulkhead inside his driver's compartment, but it didn't knock him out.
It was a direct hit, right in front of him.
Officials at first believed the grenade skipped over the slat armor, but now they're convinced it detonated when it hit the cage.
The blast sent shards of shrapnel flying across the angled front of the vehicle, knocking out both headlights and penetrating a seam just above the engine compartment, Newtson said.
The metal cut a coolant hose, but Bentz and others on his vehicle didn't realize that until 90 minutes or so later, after they'd joined the other three Strykers in their platoon as they tried to find the shooter.
Charlie 2-2 vehicle commander Sgt. Brent Benjamin had a shot at the attacker's getaway car, but his Mk 19 grenade launcher malfunctioned three times.
"It ka-chinked," said Sgt. David Rudge, one of 2nd squad's two team leaders.
Newtson attributed the weapon's failure to the fact there is no local range where soldiers can test-fire the grenade launcher. The weapon occasionally produces a dud round, and Army commanders in Mosul haven't yet built a firing range where they're willing to risk adding to the already large volume of unexploded munitions in the fields around the city.
After the smoke cleared, the squad leader, Staff Sgt. Francisco Pinedo, fired his M-4 rifle at men he saw running from the end of the alley where the RPG was fired. The shooters got away.
Pinedo was standing in the squad leader's hatch, just to the left of the grenade launcher, and got hit with a small piece of shrapnel just left of his nose.
He bled like he cut himself shaving, Newtson said, but doctors later determined it would do more harm than good trying to remove the metal from his cheek.
For his trouble he was awarded the Purple Heart on Sunday and was among the first batch of Stryker brigade soldiers heading home for midtour leave.
Rudge was standing in one of the rear hatches.
"I heard this big bang - it happened so fast - and there was debris flying over my head," he said. "I felt the vehicle shake, and the next thing I know Sgt. Pinedo was firing. I didn't really know what happened."
Benjamin felt the shake from his position in the vehicle commander's seat next to Pinedo.
"There was a cloud of smoke covering me. I determined the driver was OK, the smoke cleared and we moved out," he said.
Bentz said that about an hour and a half later the vehicle's temperature gauge started to rise. Newtson decided to have the vehicle towed back to the company's base camp rather than risk any damage to the engine.
Bentz said he doesn't have bad dreams about his close encounter, although he had a pretty good headache for the next day or so. He said he's lucky he had his driver's hatch closed. He often drives with it open because it's easier to see that way.
But the periscopes that circle the hatch - they're a series of small but thick glass windows - were specked by shrapnel that would have hit him had he not had the hatch down, he said.
The Army added the 5,200-pound slat armor cages to the vehicles after the brigade arrived in Kuwait in November to enhance their protection against RPGs, the most common anti-armor weapon in the world. They are widespread throughout Iraq.
Newtson said RPGs typically contain a shape charge that blows a hole in its target when it makes contact with a solid surface, such as the side of a vehicle. When the nose of the round hits the target, it starts a secondary motor inside the round that shoots a hot metal core through the hole created by the shape charge.
The slat armor defeats the shape charge by detonating it against the rails of the cage, rather than the wall of the vehicle, and stops it from creating the hole for the hot rocket-powered core to penetrate.
The slats also apparently stopped the RPG that hit Charlie 1-2 three days later.
The crew from Charger Company's 1st Platoon was just wrapping up a security detail near Mosul's southernmost bridge after deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz's walking tour on the other side of the Tigris River.
The three other vehicles had all made U-turns and were ready to roll out when the RPG hit Charlie 1-2 at the front right side, said the squad leader, Staff Sgt. Chris Maxwell. He was in the left forward hatch.
Traffic was heavy and there were a lot of people in the streets, he and other crew members said.
The blast hit Maxwell hard, he said, ripping his communications helmet off his head and sending him falling down into the hatch.
"I got the hell knocked out of me," he said. But it lasted only a few seconds, and then he was back up in the hatch with his weapon, looking for the guys who did it.
"All the vehicles around were flooring it forward and in reverse, people were down and running in every direction," he said. "There were too many people, too many vehicles - no way of telling who to shoot at."
Spc. Adam Rawson was in the left rear hatch, farthest from the explosion. It knocked him backward, but he got down in the hatch and then popped back up looking for the shooters.
Sgt. Jeff Kissler was in the right rear hatch watching the crowd, checking to make sure the vehicle didn't hit any elderly Iraqi women as it backed up. They tend to not be afraid of the military, he said, and will walk right up close to the Strykers as they pass by.
"My eyes were just coming back to the direction where the round came from," he said. "It tore up the vehicle's drip pan (mounted on the side), because there was plastic flying everywhere.
"At first I thought it was an IED (improvised explosive device) because there was debris all over me. But I saw the puff of smoke where it was fired from."
The round was fired from about 100 to 150 yards away, from an alley across the busy street.
There's a bend in the slats where the RPG hit and part of it passed through. It hit the steel tab where the vehicle's tow bar is mounted for storage, then followed along the side of the truck until it stopped in a cargo rack.
And as was the case with Charlie 2-2, the vehicle had been stationary for some time before it was attacked.
"They had to be watching us for at least a half-hour," Kissler said.
In one of the other two RPG hits, a round apparently put a fist-sized dent in one of the rear gas tanks of a B Company, 2-3 Stryker on Feb. 6 but did no further damage. Officials think it must have been a dud.
And Lt. Col. Gordie Flowers, the 2-3 battalion commander, said one more of his vehicles was hit in a wheel but sustained only a bent rim.
Spc. Joseph Horton, the Charlie 2-2 driver, was part of the work detail back at Camp Udairi in Kuwait that had to help contractors install the slat armor. It was a pain in the neck - the armor's heavy, and the job took nearly all day working in the garage.
These days he figures it was time well-spent.
"It did its job," he said. "Keep it on."
Staff writer Michael Gilbert is embedded with the Stryker brigade in Iraq. Reach him at jgilbert41@yahoo.com.
(Published 12:01AM, February 20th, 2004)
Staff Sgt. Chris Maxwell stands near a damaged Stryker infantry carrier that was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade Feb. 2 in Mosul, Iraq. No soldiers in the vehicle were injured in the attack.
The bad news is the main armament doesn't. Somebody who knows more about MK19s than I do will have to comment on how much test firing must be done to ensure reliable function.
Spc. Steven Bentz was driving his vehicle, Charlie 2-2, the morning of Jan. 30 when it was hit in the Domiz neighborhood in southeast Mosul. The round came in from close range - less than 100 yards.
"It was too fast. I didn't even have time to tell anyone it was coming," Bentz said. The explosion slammed his head against the bulkhead inside his driver's compartment, but it didn't knock him out.
Private Mail to be added to or removed from the GNFI (or Pro-Coalition) ping list.
It may not be entirely necessary but it certainly builds confidence knowing that a short time ago, it fired when you pulled the trigger.
Way back when we would test fire every weapon just before heading up river even though we tore them down earlier and did complete inspections and cleaning - it was good to know they worked properly. In the middle of a firefight is not the time to tear down a .50.
Shoot ALL of 'em! After all, the were NO 'witnesses' to the RPG attack, were there!
Remember all the screaming about dead kids during the beginning of the war? You're asking for trouble Lady.
Winning hearts and minds is the only way to defeat a guerrilla war in the long-run. Machine-gunning a bunch of civilians is generally not a good way to win the support of the local populace.
Some good ideas never go out of style
ROTFLOL! Memories . . . .
Though a roll of chain link fencing fares pretty well. Since the RPG uses the outside shell of the projectile for one carrier of the electrical charge resulting when the piezo crystal in the noze is crushed, and the cone of the shaped charge for the other, a dent serious enough to bring the two incontact with each other results in a short-circuit to the detonator in back and a dud round. That's the real *secret* of the slat armor; even if a PG-7 grenade's fuze misses the armor slats and fail to detonate the grenade away from the vehicle, it'll still protect the crew by *killing* the warhead.
Even tanks have tough times with RPGs -- it's why reactive and applique armor was invented.
Well, no. Applique armor was developed as protection against hardened, bore-diameter *shot rounds* essentially a large solid steel bullet, that punches through armor by virtue of its velocity and mass combined. *Passive* explosive reactive armor is more meant to counter shaped-charge tank gun rounds, with such active measures as the Russian *Arena* system used against the more relatively slow-moving guided and unguided antitank missile launchers, some with warheads with diameters of six inches or more. But as kinetic energy projectiles go, the solid shot projectiles have generally fallen out of favour in recent times for hypervelocity saboted rounds, whose penetrator *darts* may only be an inch or so in diameter, but may be travelling three or four times as fast as a full bore-diameter projectile could.
The "fantastic" thing about the RPG is while it's cheap and simple, it uses kinetic energy with devastating results. I believe the gas jet travels at 10,000-30,000 feet per second. That's an awesome amount of energy to deal with. On top of that there is a metal slug which follows the gas at high speed, moving through the hole the gas jet cut.
Not so. It's a chemical energy effect developing a high-energy plasma jet, the Monroe effect most generrally used in hollow charge anti armor warheads and demolition charges, the self-forging Misznay-Schardin effect being used in many top-attack weapons such as the US TOW. And it's likely to be real unpleasant for the crew in a Stryker when one of those top-attack missiles is usaed against them, the next logical step when the attackers find out the Stryker's *bedsprings* defeat their PG-7 rounds.
Or, they may just switch to a different round to be used in their RPG launchers, some of which can penetrate mnore than a half meter of armor and have seperate fuzing circuitry for the warhead and don't *go dud* if dented.
And then sprayed the open breech of the gun/launcher with a handheld CO2 fire extinguisher, so that remaining burning embers from the round fired didn't ignite the *caseless* propellent of the next round loaded.
The Sheridan indeed had *a few bugs in the system* that should have been worked out before going to troops in the field. But the troops in the field did a pretty good job of working most of them out, probably better than most of the engineering consultants would have.
No problem, if we can borrow some TO-55 flamethrower tanks from the Russians.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Manufacturer: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ACE co
Yep. It was an interesting vehicle, all right. :)
I don't think they have a relunctance to dismount. The purpose of the vehicle is to transport the infantry squad, the purpose of the infantry squad is not to precede the vehicle to make sure nothing bad happens to it. What's the use to be able to go 60 mph if you restrict yourself to 2.5?Strykers are battle taxis, not real mechanized infantry fighting vehicles.
Michael Gilbert knows military equipment pretty well for a non-prior service civilian journo. He has been writing for the Fort Lewis hometown paper for many years, and has been covering the Stryker since Shinseki dreamed it up, and has been embedded with 3/2 since November.
40mm grenades are big dud producers. I know at Fort McClellan when the MP School got MK19's they dudded up a big chunk of Pelham Range which became unusable for anything but grenade launching.
I think we are into hearts and minds right now.
Side skirts are the good idea? Or PzKw IV's
There are some websites like G2mil.com and MilitaryCorruption.com and 1st Tactical Studies Group (Airborne) the authors of which must be surprized that the hated Strykers have not failed miserably and got a lot of troopers killed.
I have been watching 3/2 fairly closely since July and I haven't been very surprized by anything I have read so far.
The Stryker is an armored truck. Much hoopla surrounds the first major armored vehicle purchase since the Bradley 20 years ago, much hand-wringing goes on over Shinseki's henchman Heebner getting a job with General Dynamics, the Mobile Gun System variant is probably FUBAR, and indications are that the Norwegian Remote Weapons Station still has reliability issues.
Be that as it may, 3/2 is just the first of 6 Stryker Brigade Combat Teams. They're a done deal. Now it is up to the Stryker crewmen and their passengers to make the best they can out of what they got.
We don't have a winner, yet, but we may, someday. So far, there is cause for optimism.
Who do you think 2nd Platoon, Charger Co., 2nd Battalion, 3rd Infantry is?
I am coming around to slat armor, but there isn't much more you can bolt on to a Stryker before it just won't do the job anymore. Sort of like a SVT Lightning Pickup with 4 tons of horse manure in the back.
????????
In some cases, firing from a moving vehicle that's jostling around on an uneven surface can cause misfeeds because the bumps in the road can slow the forward velocity of the bolt. Also, the linked 40mm grenades can sometimes get twisted and stop feeding when firing on the move. Twisting the belted ammo is also the way to stop any 'runaway gun'.
The Mk19MOD3 is a gun that requires two people to clear. From a Hummer or LVTP7-A1, the loader can stick his head up and assist with this operation. I don't know how it's done on a Stryker AFV that has an enclosed turret pylon.
Makes me wonder if they're not keeping a round chambered until they make contact with the enemy. The Mk19 takes a two-handed approach on the charging handles to cycle the bolt, and it can be a bit clumsy to do in a hasty situation. It also has a safety switch below the spade grips unlike the M2 Browning HBAR which has no safety at all. The Mk19 also fires from the open bolt, where the M2 can fire from either open or closed bolt positions.
I am not familiar with the Stryker, so I don't know if the Mk19MOD3 is remotely-controlled when mounted on one. That would complicate things.
When it's working properly, the Mk19MOD3 is definitely the platoon-level crew-served gun you want to be behind. Using a whole array of special-purpose grenades, it lays waste to all but well fortified enemy positions: Starts huge fires, shreds metal, tunnels through dirt embankments, causes a smokescreen, blows saplings into the air, fires bounding fragmentation grenades, HEDP, and willy pete, and generally scares the living crap out of everyone on both sides of the fight.
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