Marines Quiet About Brutal New Weapon

War is hell. But its worse when the Marines bring out their new urban com­bat weapon, the SMAW-NE. Which may be why theyre not talk­ing about it, much.
This is a ver­sion of the stan­dard USMC Shoulder Mounted Assault Weapon but with a new war­head. Described as NE — “Novel Explosive”- it is a ther­mo­baric mix­ture which ignites the air, pro­duc­ing a shock­wave of unpar­al­leled destruc­tive power, espe­cially against build­ings.
A post-action report from Iraq describes the effect of the new weapon: “One unit dis­in­te­grated a large one-storey masonry type build­ing with one round from 100 meters. They were extremely impressed.” Elsewhere it is described by one Marine as “an awe­some piece of ord­nance.”
It proved highly effec­tive in the bat­tle for Fallujah. This from the Marine Corps Gazette, July edi­tion: “SMAW gun­ners became expert at deter­min­ing which wall to shoot to cause the roof to col­lapse and crush the insur­gents for­ti­fied inside inte­rior rooms.”
The NE round is sup­posed to be capa­ble of going through a brick wall, but in prac­tice gun­ners had to fire through a win­dow or make a hole with an anti-tank rocket. Again, from the Marine Corps Gazette:

“Due to the lack of pen­e­trat­ing power of the NE round, we found that our assault­men had to first fire a dual-purpose rocket in order to cre­ate a hole in the wall or build­ing. This blast was imme­di­ately fol­lowed by an NE round that would incin­er­ate the tar­get or lit­er­ally level the structure.”

The ratio­nal for this approach was straightforward:

“Marines could employ blast weapons prior to enter­ing houses that had become pill­boxes, not homes. The eco­nomic cost of house replace­ment is not com­pa­ra­ble to American lives…all bat­tal­ions adopted blast tech­niques appro­pri­ate to enter­ing a bunker, assum­ing you did not know if the bunker was manned.”

The man­u­fac­tur­ers, Talley, make bold use of its track record, with a brochure head­lined Thermobaric Urban Destruction.”
The SMAW-NE has only been pro­cured by the USMC, though there are reports that some were ‘bor­rowed’ by other units. However, there are also pro­pos­als on the table that thou­sands of obso­lete M-72 LAWs could be retro­fit­ted with ther­mo­baric war­heads, mak­ing then into effec­tive urban com­bat tools.
But in an era of pre­ci­sion bombs, where col­lat­eral dam­age is expected to be kept to a min­i­mum, such mas­sively bru­tal weapons have become highly con­tro­ver­sial. These days, every civil­ian casu­alty means a few more hearts and minds are lost. Thermobaric weapons almost invari­able lead to civil­ian deaths. The Soviet Union was heav­ily crit­i­cized for using ther­mo­baric weapons in Afghanistan because they were held to con­sti­tute “dis­pro­por­tion­ate force,” and sim­i­lar crit­i­cisms were made when ther­mo­bar­ics were used in the Chechen con­flict. According to Human Rights Watch, ther­mo­baric weapons “kill and injure in a par­tic­u­larly bru­tal man­ner over a wide area. In urban set­tings it is very dif­fi­cult to limit the effect of this weapon to com­bat­ants, and the nature of FAE explo­sions makes it vir­tu­ally impos­si­ble for civil­ians to take shel­ter from their destruc­tive effect.”
So its under­stand­able that the Marines have made so lit­tle noise about the use of the SMAW-NE in Fallujah. But keep­ing quiet about con­tro­ver­sial weapons is a lousy strat­egy, no mat­ter how effec­tive those arms are. In the short term, it may save some bad press. In the long term, its a recipe for a scan­dal. Military lead­ers should debate human right advo­cates and the like first, and then pub­licly decide “we do/do not to use X”. Otherwise when the media find do find out as they always do — not only do you get a level of hys­te­ria but there is also the charge of cov­er­ing up.
I’m unde­cided about ther­mo­bar­ics myself, but I think they should let the legal peo­ple sort out all these issues and clear things up. Otherwise you get claims of chem­i­cal weapons and vio­lat­ing the Geneva Protocol. Which doesn’t really help any­one. The warfighter is left in doubt, and it hands pro­pa­ganda to the bad guys. Just look at what hap­pened it last weeks scream­ing over white phos­pho­rous rounds.
– David Hambling
THERE’S MORE: Americans arent the only ones with these weapons. The Chinese, the Russians — even guerilla groups — now have ther­mo­bar­ics’ shock­ingly destruc­tive power in their grasps.

November 14th, 2005 | Ammo and Munitions | 1770307 Comments »http://defensetech.org/2005/11/14/marines-quiet-about-brutal-new-weapon/Marines+Quiet+About+Brutal+New+Weapon2005-11-14+15%3A22%3A24dupont You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.