When’s the last time you emplaced a clay­more mine? When’s the last time you’ve even seen one?

I’m sure I’ll get a few of the ‘you’re an idiot’ com­ments, but in sev­eral trips to Afghanistan and Iraq — as well as mul­ti­ple trips to the field for train­ing with a vari­ety of Marine and Army units — I have never once seen or heard of clay­mores being used or trained for employ­ment. That’s not to say it doesn’t hap­pen, it’s just that I’ve had a pretty good pass over a lot of the mod­ern mil­i­tary and never once did I run into any (fig­u­ra­tively, of course)…

And that’s a shame, because what a great piece of gear…

Well, more from the Wanat his­tory — seems the insti­tu­tional Army needs to take a closer look at clay­more train­ing and employment.

American sol­diers require addi­tional and enhanced train­ing in tac­ti­cal employ­ment of clay­more mines. Claymore mines were inte­gral to con­trol­ling and deny­ing the dead ground around OP Topside, and were not opti­mally employed to accom­plish this task. Claymore mines were not employed at COP Kahler, although they could have proven to be extremely effi­cient at con­trol­ling the dead ground in the ravine to the west and north of the COPs perimeter…

However, the lim­ited num­bers and fail­ure to have over­lap­ping Claymore fields of fire is evi­dence that Claymores were not employed to their max­i­mum effec­tive­ness at OP Topside.

Claymore mines should always be employed in depth, with the rear Claymores employed and recov­ered after dark­ness, all fir­ing wires buried, and all Claymores should have their rear high­lighted with vis­i­ble mark­ings (chem­i­cal lights, reflec­tive tape, IR glit­ter tape, white paint, etc.) so that any enemy dis­turb­ing or tam­per­ing with Claymores can be read­ily detected, and deterred by the employ­ment of cov­er­ing Claymores or other sup­pres­sive fire. The effec­tive use of Claymore mines needs to be empha­sized, and addi­tional num­bers of Claymore mines should be deployed for the defense of sta­tic posi­tions. Doctrine and TTPs for Claymore mine employ­ment need to be enhanced and strength­ened. This rec­om­men­da­tion should be addressed by the U.S. Army Center for Lessons Learned and by TRADOC ser­vice schools, par­tic­u­larly the Infantry School.

Now, I did take a look at a copy of the Small Unit Operations in Afghanistan hand­book recently com­piled by the Center for Army Lessons Learned in Leavenworth. It men­tions the use of “mines” and clay­mores in the defense of COPs, JCCs and OPs but doesn’t go into very much detail at all.

Like the water purifi­ca­tion call­out, maybe it’s time for more train­ing and bet­ter tech­nol­ogy with the claymore…

– Christian

Well folks, I’ve been down all day at tac­ti­cal gear man­u­fac­turer Blackhawk! down in Norfolk par­tic­i­pat­ing in a writer’s work­shop to get smart on their gear and the tech­niques to use it.

I’m rip­ping through the mate­r­ial I got through­out the day: tac­ti­cal nylon prod­ucts like web gear and pouches, hol­sters, knives and knife fight­ing, tac­ti­cal lights and their employ­ment in low-​​light sit­u­a­tions. So real quick, I’ll post a clip from tac­ti­cal pis­tol guru Todd Jarrett who’s got prob­a­bly some of the best tech­nique in the busi­ness. It’s a real honor to have even an hour of instruc­tion with Jarrett, and it’s the first time I’ve ever done tran­si­tion work from M4 to Glock and back.

I may not be that great at it, but at least I know I’ve learned the fun­da­men­tals from one of the best.

– Christian

At my old job, we used to always joke that it wasn’t news unless the Washington Post, New York Times or AP reported it — even if we’d done the story a month earlier.

Well, here’s another case of the “it ain’t news” phe­nom­e­non. We’ve been cov­er­ing the heck out of this issue for more than a year, but when the chief says some­thing about it and the AP hears it, well, then, Stop the Presses!

From today’s Military​.com head­lines:

The mil­i­tary is review­ing Soldiers’ com­plaints that their stan­dard ammu­ni­tion isn’t pow­er­ful enough for the type of fight­ing required in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army’s highest-​​ranking offi­cer said Thursday. But Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the Army chief of staff, said it was too soon to say whether the Pentagon will switch.

Current and for­mer Soldiers inter­viewed by The Associated Press said the military’s M855 rifle rounds are not pow­er­ful enough for close-​​in fight­ing in cities and towns in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Speaking with reporters at a con­fer­ence in Huntsville, Casey said lead­ers are con­stantly solic­it­ing feed­back from Soldiers in the field and were aware of com­plaints about the M855 ammunition.

“To effec­tively pre­pare them we have to adapt as the enemy adapts, and that is some of the feed­back we have got­ten,” Casey said. “We’ll eval­u­ate it quickly and then we’ll decide how we want to proceed.”

But Casey said it would be pre­ma­ture to say if the Pentagon will con­sider a dif­fer­ent type of ammunition.

“I can’t tell you exactly what we’re going to do,” he said.

How much do you want to bet the answer to that ques­tion is “noth­ing”…? Kinda like the M-​​4 debate, huh?

– Christian

Here’s a cool heads up that the Army has fired its first Excalibur artillery round in Afghanistan.

It was just a test, but it’s an impor­tant one since artillery actu­ally plays a pretty big role in fire sup­port dur­ing com­bat ops in Afghanistan. And with the recent rash of friendly fire inci­dents result­ing from off-​​target CAS, it’s always a good thing to add one more precision-​​guided muni­tion to the tool kit, I think.

Here’s part of the story we’re run­ning on Military​.com:

KUNAR PROVINCE, Afghanistan — Soldiers fired the first 155mm GPS-​​guided Excalibur artillery round in Afghanistan Feb. 25.

The GPS-​​guided Excalibur round was given the proper grid coor­di­nate to seek out and destroy a tar­get using the Enhanced Portable Inductive Artillery Fuse Setter by plac­ing the sys­tem on the tip of the round and send­ing a dig­i­tal mes­sage con­tain­ing the coor­di­nate for the round to find.

(more…)

In Defense News (sub­scrip­tion only):

The U.S. Army is con­sid­er­ing buy­ing more Counter Rocket, Artillery and Mortar (C-​​RAM) sys­tems, first fielded in 2006 to pro­tect for­ward oper­at­ing bases from incom­ing fire, said U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Michael Vane, who directs the Army Capabilities Integration Center.
The Army last increased its order in January, when it gave Northrop Grumman a $71 mil­lion con­tract to sup­ply an unspec­i­fied num­ber of C-​​RAMs. Vane declined to say how many of the weapons have been pur­chased, or how many might be added. 

This seems to be an unstated con­fir­ma­tion that the C-​​RAM is per­form­ing accept­ably in Iraq. C-​​RAM is based on the Navy’s Phalanx Block 1B 20mm Close In Weapons System and a Forward Area Air Defense Command and Control net­work. The actual results in the field are clas­si­fied.
See R2-​​D2 vs. Mortar Rounds and Land-​​Based Phalanx Weapon System C-​​RAM plus pre­vi­ous cov­er­age on Defense Tech for more on this sys­tem.
–Murdoc

When most bombs go off, they release a spray of deadly shards of steel. Now, imag­ine that those shards were them­selves explo­sive, det­o­nat­ing in a mas­sive chain reac­tion. It’s for real: Defense con­trac­tors are har­ness­ing the strange alchemy of reac­tive mate­ri­als (RMs) in which two or more inert mate­ri­als are mixed to cre­ate an explo­sion to develop smaller, more lethal war­heads, as well as new ways to pro­tect troops against mor­tar rounds and rocket-​​propelled grenades.

RMs gen­er­ally con­sist of pow­dered met­als, such as alu­minum or tita­nium, com­bined with an oxi­diz­ing agent. Whether that agent is another pow­dered metal or a non­metal­lic com­pound, such as Teflon, con­tact alone isn’t enough to trig­ger an explo­sion. A pow­er­ful impact, how­ever, will chem­i­cally mix the mate­ri­als, ignit­ing them and lead­ing to a mas­sive shock wave.

“A big chal­lenge is mak­ing [RMs] strong enough to sur­vive launch, but frag­ile enough to react on impact,” says Judah Goldwasser, pro­gram man­ager at the Office of Naval Research, which is devel­op­ing RMs for poten­tial use in antimis­sile systems…

Click HERE to read the full arti­cle from Popular Mechanics now avail­able on Military​.com.

Raytheons inno­v­a­tive satellite-​​guided 155mm artillery shell was used in oper­a­tions in Iraq last week­end to kill a top local al Qaeda leader south of Baghdad. 

Bloomberg News Tony Capaccio reports a salvo of XM982 Excalibur artillery shells were tar­geted against Abu Jurah and 14 asso­ciates in a house near the town of Arab Jabour. 

The two-​​shell salvo fired by Soldiers from the Armys 1st Battalion, 9th Field Artillery Regiment is par­tic­u­larly sig­nif­i­cant because it could mean the re-​​emergence of field artillery as a viable weapon in the highly restric­tive com­bat envi­ron­ment of an urban counterinsurgency.

The state­ment e-​​mailed from Baghdad said Abu Jurah was “the top tar­get” in al-​​Qaida south of Baghdad, respon­si­ble for a ter­ror­ist cell that made impro­vised road­side bombs and suicide-​​vehicle bombs and fired mor­tars at U.S. troops. 

The attack marked the U.S. military’s first acknowl­edge­ment that the new precision-​​guided weapon has been used in Iraq. In com­bat test­ing before deploy­ment, the weapon demon­strated accu­racy within 20 feet (6 meters) of its tar­get, a pre­ci­sion designed to min­i­mize civil­ian casu­al­ties and acci­den­tal U.S. mil­i­tary deaths in a war that is increas­ingly urban.

(more…)

Defense Tech infre­quent con­trib­u­tor and res­i­dent bal­lis­tics expert David Woroner busted out an inter­est­ing first-​​person analy­sis of a bul­let that could answer sol­diers call for more stop­ping power. 

As our read­ers might remem­ber, we reported two weeks ago that a Center for Naval Analyses study obtained by DT found of all the sug­gested improve­ments for Americas standard-​​issued sidearm and car­bine, sol­diers sur­veyed said they want a more deadly weapon or round. 

CNA pointed out that one answer is off the table: hol­low point ammo. 

But Woroner took a first-​​hand look at a type of round that could answer a pol­i­tics vs. lethal­ity dilemma 

From Dave (its a longish entry, but I think youll find it worth the read): 

Known as the Federal EFMJ for expand­ing full metal jacket the round would appear to be a gift from above to the sol­dier on the ground. It is fully jack­eted, yet expands like a hol­low point upon impact. 

The basic con­cept was devel­oped by pro­jec­tile whiz Tom Burzynski and Larry Head, lead ammo designer for Federal applied some of his magic to bring this bul­let to fruition. 

So what makes this round so dif­fer­ent and special? 

Well first of all it is a full metal jack­eted bul­let — this means there is no cup at the front as with most hol­low points. Standard hol­low points work by tak­ing advan­tage of fluid dynam­ics — the fluid being the liq­uid or blood in a target.

(more…)

Mike Goldfarb over at the Worldwide Standard blog banged out an inter­est­ing piece today on the lat­est test in Iraq of an Excalibur 155mm artillery round.

Inside Defense reported the shot yes­ter­day, though it occurred ear­lier in the month against an al Qaeda safe house.

The WWS quotes a few defense experts cri­tiquing the oper­a­tional test, some call­ing it a stunt and say­ing the precision-​​guided artillery round isnt much use when the U.S. has total air superiority.

This morn­ing I spoke with Stuart Koehl, a mil­i­tary ana­lyst at Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Transatlantic Relations, who called the strike “a stunt, because they didn’t have to use an artillery round, they could have used an airplane–it would have been a lot cheaper.
In coun­terin­sur­gency this kind of thing is mainly irrel­e­vant. If I really need the long-​​range indi­rect fires, I’ve got total air supremacy, I’ve got all-​​weather capa­bil­ity, I really don’t need an artillery round when I could drop it from an air­plane. It just makes a lot more sense to have some­thing right there on the scene shoot­ing from a much shorter range…a JDAM dropped from over­head is going to go right down the pipe, no mat­ter what.“ 

Except thats not exactly true. Aircraft are not always on sta­tion and some­times if there are planes aloft, there arent enough of them or theyre tasked out to do other things, like search for IEDs.

But every for­ward oper­at­ing base has an artillery bat­tery and that bat­tery has guys ready to pull the fir­ing cord at a moments notice. The artillery fires are much more respon­sive and a precision-​​guided 155 round packs just enough punch to knock out what you need, leav­ing the rest largely undamaged.

As John Pike at Globalsecurity​.org points out correctly

“If all I want to do is blow up one build­ing, JDAM’s just too much of a good thing.“ 

Critics say the Army should be spend­ing more time look­ing into a precision-​​guided mor­tar. But, thing is, they already are.

Infantry mor­tars are good for sup­pres­sion and fix­ing the enemy. The 120mm mor­tar fits the bill for an infantry vehicle-​​portable pre­ci­sion fire plat­form for medium dis­tances. If a sol­dier or Marine needs to knock out a spe­cific room in the short range, he can use an AT4 or LAW.

Programs like Excalibur, how­ever, could suf­fer from the time worn Pentagon prac­tice of adding capa­bil­i­ties that boost the cost and make the thing more com­pli­cated and expen­sive that it needs to be. Army, Marine and Navy, for that mat­ter can­non cock­ers need pre­ci­sion rounds just as much as the jet jocks do. And in a coun­terin­sur­gency, pre­ci­sion is everything.

– Christian

The two com­pa­nies com­pet­ing to design a more pre­cise way for the Army to put artillery on bad guys wrapped up a shoot-​​off last month at Yuma Proving Ground, Ariz.

BAE Systems and Alliant Techsystems are work­ing with the Army to design and field a low-​​cost, low-​​tech way to make dumb artillery rounds smarter. Its called the Precision Guidance Kit, and the long and short of it is its basi­cally a fuze screwed on to the end of a stan­dard 155mm or 105mm round that houses a GPS guid­ance pack­age and a series of spoiler-​​like fins to help it home in on its target.

The intent is to have a 50-​​meter Circular Error Probable with the PGK sys­tem. Later, the Army wants an even more pre­cise artillery guid­ance kit that deliv­ers a 10-​​meter CEP.

According to BAE:

The test­ing included 20 rounds of var­i­ous test con­fig­u­ra­tions includ­ing fully autonomous GPS guided rounds. BAE Systems fired M549 Rocket Assisted Projectiles (RAP) to a range of about 20.5 kilo­me­ters. All test objec­tives were adhered with all rounds func­tion­ing prop­erly. The GPS guided rounds demon­strated the abil­ity to acquire GPS within the desired time and the abil­ity to maneu­ver within the required 50-​​meter CEP.

As Maj. John Moorhead, muni­tions branch chief at the Armys Training and Doctrine Command, wrote in the Jan.-Feb. issue of Field Artillery Magazine:

Commanders will be able to select PGK as the muni­tion of choice when mit­i­ga­tion of col­lat­eral dam­age is a con­cern at extended ranges and pre­ci­sion muni­tions are nei­ther avail­able nor fea­si­ble. In addi­tion, improved accu­racy with PGK could lessen the logis­tics resup­ply bur­den. Depending on the mis­sion, units could sus­tain fires longer with­out ammo resup­ply. This would free trans­porta­tion assets for other mis­sions on the battlefield

PGK will pro­vide com­man­ders the option of scal­able pre­ci­sion to more closely match the round to the task. Instead of fir­ing large num­bers of pro­jec­tiles to attack a tar­get as spec­i­fied today in AFATDS, the com­man­der will be able to choose PGK to tighten up the shot group and achieve the desired effects with fewer rounds. Using PGKs, units will be able to ser­vice more tar­gets in the same span of time, result­ing in a bet­ter over­all effi­ciency and use of UBLs. Firing fewer rounds also will decrease the crews sus­cep­ti­bil­ity to counter-​​battery fires, increas­ing their survivability

Heres how the sys­tem will work:

Handling and stor­ing PGK will dif­fer very lit­tle from other fuzes; PGK will have the same dimen­sions as a stan­dard NATO fuze. The only excep­tion is it may require spe­cial han­dling if the wing-​​like con­trol sur­faces are exposed and fixed in the final solution.

Upon receipt of a fire mis­sion request­ing PGK, Cannoneers mate PGK to the pro­jec­tile in a sim­i­lar man­ner as with cur­rent fuzes. Using the enhanced portable induc­tive artillery fuze set­ter (EPIAFS), Cannoneers set/​load (pro­gram) the PGK the same as any induc­tively set fuze, trans­fer­ring all mission-​​essential data (fuze mode, how­itzer and tar­get loca­tion) nec­es­sary for PGK to func­tion reliably.

It takes less than 10 sec­onds to pass all the fuze mode and GPS mis­sion data to PGK. Once fired, the PGK-​​equipped pro­jec­tile acquires GPS dur­ing flight and fol­lows a nor­mal bal­lis­tic tra­jec­tory to apogee (top of flight path) where the proces­sor begins cal­cu­lat­ing the esti­mated miss dis­tance to deter­mine when to deploy the con­trol sur­faces (brakes or canards). At the opti­mal time dur­ing the descend­ing leg of the tra­jec­tory, the con­trol sur­faces deploy and begin cor­rect­ing the flight path.

Control sur­face deploy­ment time is crit­i­cal. The proces­sor esti­mates the miss dis­tance and uses the sur­faces to make small cor­rec­tions to the tra­jec­tory, guid­ing it to the intended aim point

And the antic­i­pated timeline:

…The PM antic­i­pates field­ing of Increment 1 some­time in FY09. PGKs acqui­si­tion strat­egy will fol­low an incre­men­tal devel­op­men­tal approach to prove the con­cept. Once the pro­gram achieves a 50-​​meter CEP, pro­duc­tion will begin for lim­ited quan­ti­ties of Increment 1 for field­ing while devel­op­ment begins on Increment 2.

A long-​​range goal for Increment 3 is to lever­age the 155-​​mm PGK tech­nolo­gies for PGK use with 105-​​mm pro­jec­tiles. The ini­tial ver­sion of PGK may be robust enough to meet the 105-​​mm how­itzer require­ments, but only time and test­ing will deter­mine its compatibility…

Its about time the Army made their dumb artillery less, well, dumb. Maybe field­ing the PGK in num­bers will give artillery units a needed rebound from the pro­vi­sional jobs theyre increas­ingly tasked with in todays coun­terin­sur­gency fight.

BAE Systems has some cool video of their ver­sion of the PGK with some down­load­able grafix as well.

– Christian