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Home » Ammo and Munitions » Marines Quiet About Brutal New Weapon

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.
smaw-ne sequence.JPGA 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.

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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.

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  1. George Bradstein says:
    March 29, 2009 at 8:19 pm

    History has shown the side with the more advanced tech­nol­ogy wins con­flicts? No… how bout Vietnam? How bout the Russian-Aghani con­flict in the eight­ies? How about the war of inde­pen­dence? Insurgents will out­last occu­piers. Although I hope it is dif­fer­ent for us in Iraq and Afghanistan…

    Reply
  2. Bill says:
    April 9, 2009 at 9:35 pm

    I say that they can use it as long it doesn’t affect us in the long or short run. It may be use­ful at war but sheesh, if that thing mis­fires and hits a nurs­ery or some­thing then…

    Reply
  3. Joe Rocker says:
    June 24, 2009 at 3:03 pm

    Wrong weapon for Falluja. Just flat­ten the place with B-52s. Why should one American die for a bunch of mud huts.

    Reply
  4. Bobby says:
    June 29, 2009 at 8:33 pm

    America has become so good at using pro­pa­ganda that even it’s own peo­ple believe that it’s a free coun­try. America this, America that.Trying to be world police…to keep it’s fin­gers in all the pies more like.Oil,strategic bases,money,converting states to allies through what­ever means.They have been using Nazi tech­niques for years.Propaganda tech­niques and tech­nol­ogy and who knows what else. Take 9/11 for example..inside job? Don’t rule it out huh.I do agree that fight­ing for your coun­try may be valiant and brave..but before you sign your life away,when the amer­i­can people’s lives have been in no dan­ger from for­eign­ers in the first place,you should maybe con­sider either what your fight­ing for or who’s side (if any) ahould you be on.

    Reply
  5. nick maiocco says:
    September 16, 2009 at 1:23 pm

    george b, i dont know about the Russian-Aghani con­flict, but viet­nam was a mil­i­tary vic­tory, a polit­i­cal fail­ure for sure, but our tac­tics were sound.. also, in war of independence…we used bet­ter tac­tics. guerilla tac­tics to be pre­cise, as opposed to lin­ing up and duk­ing it out against supe­rior num­bers. hit and run tac­tics, the first sharp­shoot­ers, we even tar­geted their lead­ers. all of these were new and bet­ter strategems. where are you get­ting your info?

    Reply
  6. Cabrone says:
    October 22, 2009 at 2:08 pm

    neu­tron bomb them. Why spend any more money on devel­op­ing nice weapons, war is not nice. Lets use what we already have and fin­ish em off. set off the nuetron bomb and you can occupy ter­ri­tory in 4 days. Stop try­ing to spare so called inno­cent peo­ple. the women bare chil­dren that will grow up to be just like who we are fight­ing now. Remember they started this. The mus­lims are spread­ing like a plague through­out the free world and try­ing to impose their hor­ri­ble beliefs on unsus­pect­ing nice free­dom lov­ing folks. Lets stop screw­ing around and defeat this enemy.

    Reply
  7. SkysoldierRecon says:
    November 6, 2009 at 2:21 pm

    I really would like to see the M-3 CG given to line units, since only the ones we have are used by SOCOM. 1 and done ain’t good enough, 6 rnds a minute works 4 me..buy more. Wat a great weapon, we should have a hel­luva lot more. Those guys NEED them. 1 and done sux…

    Reply

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