[Wednesday,
June 2, 2004] Profile
of a Killer Weapon: "The weapon of choice for the
Iraqi resistance is the rocket propelled grenade
(RPG)-7." [source] Most Valuable
Weapon: the RP By George
J. Mordica II
USA Center for Army Lessons Learned IF you've been reading my
columns for a while, you probably noticed I don't
talk military hardware as much as most war buffs.
There are a lot of people who'll talk all day about
whether the Russian T-90 or the US Abrams is the
best MBT. I don't do that much, for the simple reason that
wars these days don't come down to one model of
tank vs. another. It's pretty rare to find a war
where both sides even use tanks. Most of the time
it's guerrilla vs. guerrilla, or conventional army
vs. guerrilla. The odds of an all-out hi-tech war
between two conventional armies like the US and
Russia are about . . . oh,
zero-point-zero. So it just doesn't matter that much whether
their tanks could beat ours in some make-believe
replay of the Kursk Salient. If you want to play
that kind of war, buy a computer game. God knows
there's enough of them. If you want to know how
people make war now, in the real world, you need to
study people, not hardware. Sad but true, boys: war these days is more like
Social Studies than Metal Shop. It's about tribal
vendettas, military intelligence, propaganda, money
-- just about everything except pure hardware. Don't get me wrong, I love the hardware as much
as anybody. I used to spend every free hour, back
before there was an internet, going over those big
heavy reference books in the library: Jane's
Tanks, Jane's Missile Systems, Jane's Combat
Vehicles. I had those things memorized.
Seriously, you could open any of Jane's handbooks
at random, read me the name of a weapons system,
and I'd recite its stats from memory -- Norwegian
anti-ship missiles, South African APCs, you name
it. But eventually I had to face the facts: most of
those weapons are never going to get used. If you
look at all the real wars going on right now, you
come across the same two weapons, over and over:
the AK-47 and the RPG-7 -- both Russian designs,
and both older than your Dad. They're the weapons that matter, because they're
already out there, millions of units, enough to
equip every guerrilla army in the world, simple
enough that you can teach a peasant kid with
hookworm and a room-temperature IQ to fire them,
and cheap enough to buy in bulk. And the RPG is the best of all, even better than
the Kalashnikov. This simple little beauty just
keeps getting more and more effective. This cheap
little dealie, nothing but a launcher tube and a
few rockets shaped like two ice-cream cones glued
together, has kicked our ass (and Russia's too) all
over the world since back when the Beatles were
still together. In fact, more and more guerrilla
armies are making the RPG their basic infantry
weapon, with the AK used to protect the RPG
gunners, who provide the offensive punch. The
Chechens fighting the Russian Army are so high on
it that they've switched their three-man combat
teams from two riflemen and an RPG gunner to two
RPG gunners with a rifleman to protect them. There's another stat that's even more important
right now: the RPG has inflicted more than half --
half! -- of US casualties in Iraq. This is the
weapon that's hurting us. And it's been doing that
for one hell of a long time. The Soviets created the RPG for use by Soviet
infantry squads against US tanks, APCs and
personnel in that big NATO/Warsaw Pact war
everybody was dreaming of back in the sixties. The
design was an example of beautiful simplicity. It
was a classic of Warsaw-Pact reverse-engineering.
Warsaw Pact weapons designers had this attitude
that it was a waste of time to design from scratch
when you could count on your spies (and the
Russians had the best spies in the world back then)
to get you the specs on the weapons other countries
had spent billions designing. So they just put
together a cross between the two best
shoulder-fired anti-armor weapons around, the
Wehrmacht Panzerfaust and the US Army bazooka. And
that was the birth of the most important weapon in
contemporary warfare. The RPG got its start against our guys in
Vietnam. The Viet Cong and NVA used them as
squad-level anti-armor weapons, and they were so
damn good at it that we never got our money's worth
from the tanks and APCs we sent over. Our APC back
then was a really lousy dumptruck, the M113 --
basically a light-tank chassis with flat slabs of
aluminum on the sides and top. Sometimes you can see how good a design is just
by the way it looks. One look at an M113 and you
can see that this was a lousy vehicle. It was about
as tall as Yao Ming, which meant it was a real big
target. The aluminum armor didn't have firing
ports, so the soldiers inside just had to put their
helmets over their balls, close their eyes and hope
the crew would open the hatch and let them out
ASAP. The armor was just thick enough to slow the
thing down, but not nearly enough to stop an RPG
round. Which is no surprise when you know that an
RPG armor-piercing round can penetrate 300mm of
rolled steel -- more than a foot of steel. Not a
bad punch for such a little weapon to pack. GIs who'd seen what an RPG hit could do to an
M113 got in the habit of saying, "I'll walk,
thanks." The RPG warhead does something called
"spalling," which means the warhead turns the
aluminum side armor of an APC into molten shrapnel
which goes zipping through the guts of everybody
inside like a Benihana chef's knife, only it's a
knife as hot as the surface of the sun. If GIs in Nam did have to ride an M113, they
wore a lot of St. Christopher medals and sat on
top. They were a lot less scared of getting shot by
a sniper than of being hit by an RPG sitting
inside. 
WE had nothing like it and still don't. We had the
LAW, another shoulder-fired rocket originally
designed to penetrate armor, but it wasn't nearly
as easy to carry, because it didn't have the
reuseable launcher the RPG featured. If you wanted
to throw a dozen rockets at an enemy bunker, you
had to carry a dozen LAWs along, whereas the RPG
gunner needed just one launcher and a sack full of
warheads.
Nam was just the beginning of the RPG's career.
Just think back to Mogadishu 1993. The whole
Blackhawk Down mess happened because some Afghan
Jihadis who'd retired to Mogadishu -- guess it was
nice'n'restful compared to Kandahar -- showed the
Somalis how to use the RPG-7 as an anti-aircraft
weapon, which its Russian designers never even
thought of. The RPG was the key to the whole battle
that ended up killing 18 Ranger and Delta guys
(Jeez, remember when 18 GIs dead was supposed to be
"unacceptably high" losses?), getting us to bug out
from Somalia, and getting Ridley Scott's
directing career back on track. First the Somali RPG gunners, firing up from the
streets where they'd dug holes to channel the big
rocket backblast, hit our Blackhawks, bringing them
down in the maze of slums. That drew our troops
into the slums, where everybody from toddlers to
grandmas started potshotting them with AKs. The Afghans worked out how to use RPGs as AA
back in the 80s, fighting the Soviets. I guess it
was a little bit of poetic justice that the first
helicopters to get brought down were Russian. The
Afghans didn't have much to use against choppers
except captured Russian heavy 14.5 cal.
machineguns, which didn't have enough punch to
bring down the Mi-24. And Reagan, the wimpiest hawk
that ever flew, waited five long years to give the
Mujahideen the Stingers that could take down an
Mi-24 every time. So the Afghans started playing
around with using the RPG against Russian CAS. They came up with some great improvisations.
There's nothing like war to bring out the inventor
in people! One thing the Afghans figured out was
how to use the self-destruct device in the warhead
to turn the RPG into an airburst SA missile. See,
the RPG comes with a safety feature designed to
self-destruct after the missile's gone 920 meters.
So if you fire on up at a chopper from a few
hundred meters away, at the right angle, you get an
airburst just as effective as SA missiles that cost
about a thousand times more. When the Chechens took on the post-Soviet
Russian army in 1994, the good old RPG was the key
weapon once again. By this time, the Russians
must've been cursing the name of the man who
designed the thing. What the Chechens found out in
their first war against the Russians in 1994 was
that the RPG is the perfect weapon for urban
combat. The Russians sent huge columns of armor
into the streets of the city, and the Chechens
waited on the upper floors, where they couldn't be
spotted by choppers but still held the high ground.
They waited till the tanks and APCs were jammed
into the little streets, then hit the first and
last vehicles with RPGs -- classic anti-armor
technique. That left the whole column stopped dead,
and all they had to do was keep feeding warheads
into the launchers, knocking out vehicle after
vehicle by hitting it on the thin top armor. The
Russians were slaughtered, and they had to pull
back and settle for saturating the city with massed
artillery fires, which killed lots of old ladies
but didn't do any harm to the fighters. So
basically the RPG singlehandedly lost the Russians
their first Chechen War.
WHICH brings us to Iraq, now. The first key to the
RPG's effectiveness is availability, and it turns
out that the one thing Iraq had more than enough
of, in spite of all those sanctions, was RPG
launchers and rounds. Saddam's army had an official
license from the Russians to produce RPGs in Iraqi
factories, and they made so many that, when Saddam
went down, there were piles of launchers with
plenty of anti-armor and anti-personnel rounds in
most Iraqi towns. And after the Iran-Iraq War and
Gulf War I, so many Iraqi men had trained on the
RPG that there were plenty of gunners and
instructors to teach the new generation how to use
it. Everything about the RPG design seems like it
was designed to be used in Iraqi cities. It's got
one of the shortest arming ranges of any
shoulder-fired anti-armor weapons, which means you
can fire it at a Hummer coming right down the
street. It's light enough, at 15 pounds, for even
the wimpiest teenager to run through alleys with.
It's simple enough for any amateur to use -- the
original non-camera example of "point and
shoot." US doctrine for countering the RPG always
stressed looking for the flash when it's fired, and
the blue-grey smoke trail it leaves. There are two
problems with that, though. In the first place,
unlike, say, the TOW, the RPG is unguided, so once
it's launched, it doesn't do much good to kill the
gunner. You're still going to get hit. Second, it's
not easy to see the blast or the smoke trail in one
of these Iraqi "urban canyons." Too many walls to
hide behind. Our doctrine also used to stress laying down
heavy fire in the general direction of the RPG
launcher, to suppress further firings and hopefully
kill the crew. But when you're fighting in the
middle of an Iraqi city, that kind of general fire
is going to kill a lot of hunkered-down civilians
along with the RPG crew. And that doesn't look good
on TV. More importantly, it makes you a lot of new
enemies among the people whose cousins got
shot. Even if the RPG doesn't disable a vehicle, the
blast radius of the anti-armor round is four
meters, which means anybody in the area is going to
be seeing little birdies for a good few minutes,
deaf from the blast, temporarily blind, not to
mention very scared and pissed off. Once you've got
the occupying troops in a position like that -- I
mean literally blind and deaf -- you're in a
guerrilla strategist's idea of Heaven. Troops in
that mood tend to start firing blind, which makes
everybody hate them even more, which suits the
guerrilla right down to the ground. The next question about the RPG is how it's done
in its first big combat test against a whole new
generation of US Armor that was designed to counter
it, like the M1 Abrams, Bradley, and Stryker. I'll
talk about that in my next column. | ![[]](../../std/dings/list.gif){kind=small}
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