U.S. GETS EXPLOSIVE ARMOR FROM ISRAEL

The U.S. Army wants to pro­tect its Bradley fight­ing vehi­cles — by strap­ping dozens of Israeli explo­sives to their skins.
The idea behind “reac­tive armor” is to blow up a road­side bomb or rocket pro­pelled grenade just before it reaches the vehi­cle. The Israeli mil­i­tary pio­neered the con­cept in the 1970’s. American tanks have had been out­fit­ted with it for years. And now, Bradleys in Iraq are being rushed the armor, too, Defense News reports.
The add-on armor… con­sists of 105 tiles that attach to the sides, the tur­ret and the front of each Bradley. Each tile has a small explo­sive charge that can destroy the war­head of an attack­ing mis­sile or rocket.
The idea is to apply chem­i­cal energy against chem­i­cal energy, an offi­cial within [Israeli firm] Rafaels armored sys­tems direc­torate. These tiles con­tain a very spe­cial, insen­si­tive explo­sive that is det­o­nated only when hit by a mis­sile or a rocket. For safety rea­sons, our armor does not react to other heat sources such as small arms or other frag­ments. When it det­o­nates, the action of the ele­ments inside the tiles inter­act with the incom­ing jet of the war­head, and defeats it…
The armored sys­tems direc­torate offi­cial noted that Rafael pro­vided add-on armor for the U.S. Marine Corps AAV7 amphibi­ous assault vehi­cles used dur­ing major com­bat oper­a­tions in Iraq ear­lier last year.
THERE’S MORE: “I’d be leery of tak­ing these into sit­u­a­tions where large num­bers of non­com­bat­ants might find them­selves near [reac­tive armored] vehi­cles,” says Defense Tech reader JA. “An RPG hit that trig­gered one of these pan­els might not pen­e­trate the vehi­cle but I sus­pect the poten­tial for exac­er­bat­ing col­lat­eral casu­al­ties might give one pause. Or it will after Al-Jazeera trum­pets it from the minarets.”
Meanwhile, reader MS points us to this online primer on reac­tive armor.
AND MORE: “The story here,” says reader DP, “is that the cheap­skate Army under [chief of staff Eric] Shinseki squan­dered bil­lions on hand­fuls of Stryker truck death­traps and didn’t even come close to buy­ing enough [reac­tive armor.”

May 19th, 2004 | Armor | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.