Could be an Aerotech Initiator modified for a J-350...
Oh, and I'm kidding about DOJ being right.
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Defense News October 27, 2003 Pg. 1
What Killed A U.S. Tank?
Mystery Projectile Punches Through Abrams Armor
By John Roos
Shortly before dawn on Aug. 28, an M1A1 Abrams tank on routine patrol in Baghdad "was hit by something" that crippled the 69-ton behemoth, according to an unclassified U.S. Army report.
Service officials still are puzzling over what that "something" was.
The mystery projectile punched through the vehicle's skirt and drilled a pencil-sized hole through the 4-inch-think steel hull. The hole was so small that "my little finger will not go into it," wrote the report's author.
The "something" continued into the crew compartment, where it passed through the gunner's seatback, grazed the kidney area of his flak jacket and finally came to rest after boring a hole 1½ to 2 inches deep in the hull on the far side of the tank.
As it passed through the interior, it hit enough critical components ? including the turret network box ? to knock the tank out of action, making it one of only two Abrams disabled by enemy fire during the war this year and only one of a handful knocked out since they rumbled onto the scene 20 years ago. The other killed in Iraq was hit by an RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenade earlier in the Iraq war.
According to other experts, whatever knocked out the tank was not an RPG-7 but most likely something new ? and that worries tank crews who have come to regard their M1s as invulnerable to enemy fire.
The M1 has been touted by the Army and its maker, General Dynamics Land Systems, Sterling Heights, Mich., as the best-protected tank in the world by virtue of its sophisticated armor plating and novel protective features. For example, the highly classified armor incorporates dense depleted uranium panels to protect against enemy rounds.
Mystery and Anxiety
Terry Hughes is a technical representative from the Army's Rock Island Arsenal, Ill., who examined the tank in Baghdad and wrote the report.
Using the sort of excited language seldom seen in official service documents, Hughes wrote, "The unit is very anxious to have this ?SOMETHING' identified. It seems clear that a penetrator of a yellow molten metal is what caused the damage, but what weapon fires such a round and precisely what sort of round is it? The bad guys are using something unknown, and the guys facing it want very much to know what it is and how they can defend themselves."
Investigators found "residue of what appears to be copper or bronze," and analysts said copper is a material used in armor-piercing shaped-charge projectiles, including rocket-propelled grenades and anti-tank rounds.
Despite the incident, the Abrams continues its record of extraordinary crew protection, officials said. The four-man crew suffered only minor injuries in the attack. The tank commander received "minor shrapnel wounds to the legs and arms and the gunner got some in his arm," the report said.
Whatever penetrated the tank created enough heat inside the hull to activate the vehicle's Halon firefighting gear, which probably prevented more serious crew injuries.
The soldiers of 2nd Battalion, 70th Armor Regiment, 1st Armor Division, who were targets of the attack, were not the only ones wondering what damaged their 69-ton tank. Hughes was also puzzled.
"Can someone tell us?" he wrote. "If not, can we get an expert on foreign munitions over here to examine this vehicle before repairs are begun?"
His report went to the office of the combat systems program manager at the U.S. Army Tank-automotive and Armaments Command in Warren, Mich. A command spokesman said he could provide no information.
Following the Clues
While it's impossible to determine what caused the damage without examining the tank, some conclusions can be drawn from photos that accompanied the incident report. Those photos show a pencil-size penetration hole through the tank body, but very little sign of the distinctive damage ? called spalling ? that typically occurs on the inside surface after a hollow- or shaped-charge warhead burns its way through armor.
Spalling results when an armor penetrator pushes a stream of molten metal ahead of it as it bores through an armored vehicle's protective skin.
"It's a real strange impact," said a source who has worked both as a tank designer and as an anti-tank weapons engineer. "This is a new one. ? It almost definitely is a hollow-charge warhead of some sort, but probably not an RPG-7."
The well-known RPG-7 has been the scourge of lightly armored vehicles since its introduction more than 40 years ago. Its hollow-charge warhead easily could punch through an M1's skirt ? whose composition is classified ? and the relatively thin armor of its armpit joint, the area above the tracks and beneath the deck on which the turret sits, just where the mystery round hit the tank.
An RPG-7 can penetrate about 12 inches of steel, a thickness far greater than the armor that was penetrated on the tank in Baghdad.
"When a tank gets hit by a shaped-charge weapon, whether an RPG or a missile, you won't find a big hole, but one that's basically the width of a pencil, because the way it penetrates is by very finely focusing blast energy," said John Pike, the director of GlobalSecurity.org, which tracks world weapon developments.
"The hope is that you are going to hit the ammunition or the fuel and set something off, destroying the tank. But the damage described in the report is consistent ? it's a description of drilling a skinny, straight hole through the tank, which is exactly what you expect from a shaped-charge weapon."
But the limited spalling evident in the photos accompanying the incident report all but rules out the RPG-7 as the culprit, experts say.
Limited spalling is a telltale characteristic of Western-manufactured weapons designed to defeat armor with a cohesive jet stream of molten metal. In contrast, RPG-7s typically produce a fragmented jet spray.
On the other hand, some experts suggest that a shaped-charge weapon would have splattered the inside of the tank with molten metal, rather than the projectile that appears to have pierced the hull, shattering equipment in its way.
Dean Lockwood, a land warfare analyst for consultancy Forecast International of Newtown, Conn., said it was unlikely that any of the light armor-piercing rounds available in Iraq could have defeated the tank's armor.
Instead, Lockwood said the round might have carried a tandem warhead, which uses one charge to pierce the reactive armor and a second to attack the tank hull. Two Russian varieties are known: the PG-7VR and the RPG-27, he said.
"This was a lucky shot with a tandem round that did what it was supposed to, penetrate two layers of protection, the skirt and the hull armor," he said. "On the other hand, the tank did what it was supposed to as well. The combination of the skirt and the hull absorbed the blow, and combined with the Halon fire suppression system, kept the crew alive."
A spokesman for General Dynamics Land Systems, which manufactures the Abrams, said company engineers agree some type of RPG probably caused the damage. After checking with them, the spokesman delivered the manufacturer's verdict: The tank was hit by "a ?golden' RPG" ? an extremely lucky shot.
In the end, a civilian weapon expert said, "I hope it was a lucky shot and we are not part of someone's test program. Being a live target is no fun."
John Roos is editor of Armed Forces Journal.