Ever since the advent of tanks, militaries around the world have sought ways to defeat
them.
From the earliest days of employing large caliber rifles to mass artillery barrages,
countries have come up with a wide variety of ways to knock out tanks.
While using artillery, airstrikes, mines, and even other tanks are all valid options,
they do come with their own pros and cons.
Having supporting fire from aircraft and artillery is great, but these options are not always
available or there might be issues with the weather or communications interfering with
their employment.
Mines do work well but there is no guarantee an armored vehicle will run over it or be
knocked out after the blast.
Tanks are great when they are available but on the modern battlefield tanks have become
a rarer and rarer sight.
They also must communicate with the infantry on where an enemy is thereby costing crucial
time that could allow the enemy to escape.
So what is a soldier supposed to do when they need instantaneous and accurate fire on an
armored target?
The solution that most militaries around the world have adopted is a man portable anti-tank
missile.
Though the systems vary greatly in guidance and munitions, the basic premise is that an
individual soldier can wield an accurate and lightweight yet powerful weapon capable of
destroying or disabling any armored threat on the battlefield.
While a seemingly simple concept, it has actually taken decades to perfect the weapon system
into what militaries are fielding today.
As it turns out, developing a weapon system strong enough to take out a tank that can
be easily carried by one soldier or mounted on a small vehicle is a surprisingly difficult
engineering concept.
The first earliest developments of anti-tank missiles or rockets came to the forefront
in the Second World War.
Almost every country developed their own anti-tank missiles that would become the baseline for
later systems.
The British PIAT, the German Panzershrek, and the infamous US Bazooka are a just a few
examples of these.
Though extremely effective at close ranges, these weapon systems had their own faults
from difficulty in reloading to accuracy problems.
But despite their vastly different designs, the one thing that these early weapons all
had in common was their explosive warheads.
Each weapon integrated publically available technology known as shaped charges.
Shaped charges would be crucial in anti-tank warfare since they have a much higher penetration
power than a normal high explosive round.
The way a shaped charge works is that the explosive is at the end of the warhead and
has a cone shaped cavity ahead of it.
At the end of this cavity is the detonator.
When the warhead strikes the target, the detonator will be the first thing that explodes.
This explosion creates a small electrical charge that serves as the catalyst for the
explosive charge held within the warhead to explode.
Once the explosive charge is ignited, the gases are funneled from the wide part of the
cone shaped cavity to the small end point near where the detonator was.
The gases crush the metal cone, usually made out of copper, into a white hot beam of metal
and energy.
This part of the process is called the stream and it is this superheated and dense stream
of energy that gives anti-tank missiles their power to punch through armor, and it all relies
on simple physics.
Take for example a 100 pound force being pressed onto one square inch.
The resulting pressure would be 100 pounds per square inch.
The square inch in the example would be the diameter of the warhead.
Now, let’s make this smaller by creating a shaped charge and decrease the surface area
over which the explosive charge is distributed.
For simplicity sake, let’s cut the surface area in half to 0.5 square inches.
The resulting pressure would be 200 pounds per square inch.
Therefore, by funneling the explosive energy into a smaller area, you can increase its
energy over a small surface area and give it the ability to punch through thick layers
of armor.
You can see this mechanic in action whenever you look at pictures of vehicles that have
been hit by High Energy Anti-Tank or HEAT rounds.
The entry hole is incredibly small and the exit hole is very large.
That is because as the concentrated energy punches through the armor it expands once
it reaches the air cavity inside the vehicle.
It is this basic principle that makes anti-tank rounds so effective.
However, there are some considerations that gunners and engineers need to consider to
make an effective weapon.
If a shaped charge detonates too close to the target, the stream does not have enough
time or space to fully develop, thereby making it weaker than it could have been.
If it detonates too far, like some common countermeasures make the rounds do, then the
stream will lose energy on the way to the armor and have less power to penetrate it.
Therefore, shaped charge explosives need to explode at just the right distance to be effective
at punching through armor.
After the end of World War Two, the various world powers set about creating their own
man-portable anti-tank missiles.
The first two most common examples were the American M72 LAW (pronounced law) and the
Russian RPG-7.
The M72 Light Anti-Armor Weapon was a small and disposable anti-tank rocket that could
be fired easily in any kind of environment.
The way that the LAW worked was that once the trigger was pressed it would ignite a
small amount of black powder in the back of the launcher.
This would ignite the rocket propellant and send the missile out of the tube.
Once outside the tube, rudimentary fins would deploy to keep the rocket stabilized in flight.
The Russian Rocket Propelled Grenade works in a similar fashion.
Though the Russians developed many different kinds of RPGs, the one that became the most
famous and is still in the most wide use today is the RPG-7.
To fire the RPG-7 the gunner must first screw the rocket booster into the back of the grenade.
Once inserted into the tube, the firing pin creates an electrical shock that ignites the
propellant and sends it away.
Once outside the barrel, its fins will deploy and its rocket booster will engage to propel
it to its intended target.
Though the green-colored HEAT warheads are the most famous, this weapon can be fired
with other kinds of warheads as well.
While both of these weapon systems were tried and true, serving in dozens of conflicts from
Vietnam and still to this day, they do have a major drawback of being unguided.
Once the gunner fires the weapon, if the target moves before impact then the round might miss.
While this might not be a problem for short ranges, after all the RPG does move hundreds
of feet per second contrary to what Hollywood might have you believe, effective fire on
targets greater than several hundred yards becomes an issue.
To solve that problem, the US developed one of the most famous and still used anti-tank
systems today: the TOW missile.
TOW stands for Tube-launched, Optically-tracked, Wire-guided missile.
Each part describes exactly what it does.
The missile is launched from a tube that can be reloaded with more missiles once fired.
The launcher is equipped with more advanced optics and sighting systems, including ones
for night, that are a far cry from the crude iron sights of LAWs and RPGs.
But the most important feature here is its wire guided system.
Attaching wires to an explosive is nothing new.
After all, most torpedoes in both World Wars were wire-guided systems.
But taking this technology out of the water and onto land was a revolutionary concept.
By attaching long, thin wires to the missile it would now be possible to create a much
more accurate weapon.
The way that a TOW missile works is that after it is launched from the tube, it emits an
infrared beacon that is picked up by the Missile Guidance System.
The MGS then makes course corrections that are sent via the wires to the missile.
The missile can then make the required course corrections to the target.
Because the missile can correct itself, the gunner just needs to keep his or her sights
on the target.
By keeping their sights on the target, the MGS will have a steady reference point from
which to send data to the missile and keep it on target.
This concept differed greatly than earlier Russian concepts like the Sagger missile that
required the gunner to manually guide the missile the entire time.
Because the TOW missile system incorporates a feedback loop, the gunner can just focus
on where the target is and not just the missile.
Another added benefit is that the gunner does not have to take into consideration factors
like windage or elevation.
The TOW system is pretty much a basic point and shoot concept.
Despite the great strides made in man portable anti-tank missile technology, the TOW missile
still has its downsides.
For one, the gunner must remain exposed throughout the entire flight path of the missile, since
if they take their eye off the target the missile could veer off course.
Additionally, the missile can only hit what the gunner can see.
Armored vehicles like tanks typically have their heaviest armor on the front and sides.
If this is all a gunner can see, it is certainly better than nothing but decreases the chance
of a kill.
To solve these issues, the US military continued to develop their newest man portable anti-tank
weapon yet that could solve all their issues from previous models: the Javelin missile.
The Javelin, also known as the FMG 148, is the premier portable anti-tank system in the
world.
Staying true to its roots by having a shaped charge warhead, the missile system incorporates
a host of new technologies that make it the deadliest tank killer in the world.
The Javelin missile system is made up of two parts, the Command Launch Unit or CLU and
the missile launcher itself.
For starters, the Javelin is an active seeking missile.
That means that once the gunner has acquired a target through the CLU and the missile is
launched, there is an active infrared seeker inside the warhead that will help keep the
missile on target.
By keeping a constant, internal feedback loop, this system is truly fire and forget allowing
for the gunner to slip away to a new position immediately after firing.
Another unique feature is the way it attacks its target.
Once the missile is in flight, it will immediately launch upwards.
While this has the added benefit of allowing a gunner to stay concealed, its true purpose
is in defeating enemy armor.
Most tanks and armored vehicles have their thinnest armor in the back and on top of the
vehicle.
By attacking from a vertical position, this increases the chance of a catastrophic kill
and not merely damaging the vehicle.
If these features were not enough, the Javelin missile has a state-of-the-art warhead designed
to defeat enemy countermeasures.
One of the most common countermeasures is reactive armor.
Reactive armor is explosive plating that will explode outwards when hit by enemy fire to
deflect the blast away from the armor.
Javelin missiles come prepared to counter this by having a precursor charge in the warhead
meant to deflect this blast thereby allowing the main charge its full penetration power.
Since World War Two, militaries have sought to make man equal to machine on the battlefield.
By creating weapons that can feasibly take out enemy armor, not only can troops effect
change tactically on the battlefield, but will have an added benefit of increasing morale
by giving a real solution to enemy tanks.
Modern military equipment has come a long way from the rudimentary methods employed
during the World Wars.
With the plethora of threats facing tanks, it is no wonder their utility on the battlefield
has been greatly diminished due in no small part to the effectiveness of anti-tank guided
missiles.