peech [] 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