is there any example?

That crew will have a bad day.

It really depends on the circumstances of the hit. If its a direct fire into the front of the armor array, the tank is likely to survive the hit with only minimal disruption such as loosing a track, having the main gun damaged or knocked out of alignment, but the crew are likely to survive.
If it get hit in a weak point such as the chin of the turret, a 155mm HE round does have enough energy to "decapitate".

Indirect is another issue. A direct hit on the roof of most tanks is likely to cause considerable damage to everything on top and likely to collapse or distort the turret or hull rendering it out of action. If the hatches are open, that tank is toast just from the blast overpressure. Even a air burst is dangerous to a tank that gets caught with open hatches.

Not necessarily. I had a friend who participated in a test at Ft Sill. This was back when the Bradley was new and getting a bad rap on survivability. The put a Brad and an M1 in prepared battle positions and subjected them to doctrinally correct Soviet fires. The Brad didn't survive it, but M1 was able to drive out of the position, it leaked just about every where a M1 could leak but it still ran, and my buddy won $100 off the canoncockers.

I wonder what exactly "doctrinally correct Soviet fires" meant, and what kind of punishment the tank in question actually ended up suffering.... how near misses, what caliber, etc.

I think he said battery 12 or some thing like that. It was a platoon position so...

There was a similar test carried out in the Cold War days using a large calibre shell; can't remember exactly how big. Various vehicles were parked around the shell in the open and someone pressed the loud switch. M1 and Chieftain were able to drive off after being half-tracked although both gave up the ghost after a few hundred metres and neither had working gun kit. The star of the show was a Ferret Scout Car which was blown some considerable distance but was driven off essentially intact. No doubt a crewed ferret would have resembled a liquidiser inside.

Something to read:
http://208.84.116.223/forums/index.php?showtopic=25994

IIRC in Chechen war (first one) there was an encounter where Russian T-72B ambushed Chechen T-72B using only HE (though from side or rear, cannot recall now, maybe some of our Russian friends would chime in), it scored five hits resulting in the Chechen tank burning, no idea what happened to the crew.

The sheer amount of Soviet artillery was awfully intimidating and certainly a major threat, one that I can imagine was feared by many Abrams crews more than the enemy armor. Yet were the chances of a direct hit or considerable damage from a near miss even that high when dug in?

When did the Soviets get DPICM ammuntion for their guns?

How effective was NATO counterbattery fire and airpower hoped to be against the masses of Russian guns?

No, but no one wants to be that one that or be a statistical outlier...

1989 pops into my mind for some reason.



Initially it would not have been effective at all. But if the initial drive could get blunted or slowed down, and presuming that NATO C3 could remain coherent, then it was expected to nullify via severe attrition the numerical advantage of WARPAC artillery. That was the plan anyway.

The only time it was even remotely tested in combat was in Iraq in '91 and it was quite capable of suppressing Iraqi artillery all the way down to 82mm mortar.

Comparing the Iraqi army to anything close to the WarPac is a little off, don´t you think? Less equipment, older equipment, worse C3, no AirForce etc.

Did they ever get DPICM, in fact? They did have HE-frag submunitions and minelets particularly for rocket artillery, later the homing MOTIV submunitions(SADARMski), but I was under the impression that against armour unitary HE and laser-guided Krasnopol/Kitolov were pretty much it.

Well, if concentrating only on CB missions then i don't see how it would be significantly different exept that there was less targets and targets were less motivated and therefore would be easier to suppress. But over the time damage would start to have its effect.

Bit off topic but still about artillery: Would scatterable mines be effective counter for enemy SP artillery that is using "shoot-and-scoot" tactics? Idea is that when enemy artillery fires and point of origin is calculated by CB-radar, you compare that point to the map and try to quess witch way enemy will go to escape. Then you shoot some FASCAM mines (are those mines fired by MLRS also called FASCAM?) on their path and possibly directly on top of them to pin them in place and then if possible call airforces to hunt them down or just shoot barrage where you expect them to have stopped.

I believe (atleast I found it during my search for SP:MBT OOB's) that there is a 152mm DPICM round developped around the time of MSTA howitzer, but don't know correct designation. It should carry 42 pieces of submunition, ca. 0,5kg each, with armor penetration some 164mm. Also found another round for 8 PTAB-2.5KO submunitions, weight 2.8kg, approx. HE content 0.2kg, penetration 153mm. I believe I found 'em on Venik's aviation page and/or in HRW submunitions users report.

Less mobile, less well trained, much less capable of CCB fire. And less in number as well. The Soviets could have asked every battery to fire exactly one round and would still put lots of rounds on target, the Iraqis would need to fire more rounds from the same battery and are so much more likely to be detected and their position fixed.

Then they'd have generated so much radio chatter that the counterbattery would go on SIGINT data

chinese army said thath in 199x thay have a test using 125 h.e to shoot the front of t-80

as a result ,dogs and rats in t-80 all dead.

I was not comparing the Iraqi Army to WARPAC forces. Only commenting on the effectiveness of "NATO" at the counterbattery mission during its only practical employment.




No. The idea behind "shoot-n-scoot" is to not be there by the time opposing artillery can get around to sending return fire your way. So if you don't catch them before they displace, all you are going to do is seed a minefield at some random spot on the ground, that probably has no value except for the odd chance that the battery would return to that firing point or that some other unit would blunder into it while trying to use it as an AA position. Attempting to predict which way the flexing battery is going to go afterwards has even lower odds of effectiveness. At a point of the conflict where artillery missions would be at peak demand and every round counted, flinging random FASCAM shots around on whim is not a prudent use of resources.

Re cargo round for 152mm, yes it's been developed but not really used. DPICMs are delivered by rockets normally in Soviet school, tube artillery just delivers HE. The guidelines call for 2300 rounds per platoon area of responsibility for platoon "destruction" (which means 50% of assets destroyed). This is a lot of stuff falling to the ground So yeah, there are a lot of tubes, but it's not for redundancy, they actually are needed.

Wasn't the soviet doctrine in regards to artillery delivered minelets about dropping them on the target unit in order fix them in place and deal wit them later? It seems a lot more efficient than second guessing enemy movements.



Reading UXO catalogues from the Iraq war I have come across a submunitions 152mm cargo round, designation 3-O-23.

Here also
http://www.hrw.org/backgrounder/arms/submunitions.pdf
http://www.orteh.com/eng/products/catalogue/books/12.php

152mm 3O23 42 DPICM
152mm 3O13 8 DPICM

I agree it's not necessarily a CB weapon per se but it can still be a big headache if one has constricted terrain and lacks manouver room. Doubly so if one is on defence and thus tied to a predictable area. It was a possibility that we paid attention to when planning deployment and resupply routes.

Sure, but that's not counterbattery (make the bad guy's guns go away). That's interdiction and blocking.

If you do get a confirmed "perfect target", like a catch a battery setting up via a UAV you can be "cute" by shooting a mix of HE, DPICM, with some FASCAM thrown in to add insult to injury and make the recovery and evacuation of the surviviors of the unit that much more miserable. But as a direct way of suppressing enemy artillery, you gotta hit them with the real stuff.

125mm HE? Are you sure? Surely a 125mm APFSDS or HEAT delivers more energy on target than a mere HE that. Now a 152mm HE I would expect to be rather nasty, though even then I would doubt its deadliness when hitting the frontal arc.

Note that here Finland armoured unit (including SP artillery) would be mostly road bound if quick movement would be needed. This also would make movement predictable. Also, artillery firing positions may be relatively hard to find unless you wish to clear lots of forest, so it might not be all that bad idea to mine those few already existing firing positions if there is possibility that it slows enemy artillery's movements between shoots. It may require some planing in advance, but it should be doable.

I do agree that you need to hit them with HE and DPICM to get permanent effect, but if they keep moving then it may be bit more difficult so FASCAM might help in that.

But you wouldn't do such speculative missions if your artillery was already busy doing DS calls for fire or you got a clear target of opportunity. Perhaps if you were on the offense and these were part of your preparatory fires, but that is trundling even further off topic...

Re: Chinese clobbering a tank with HE-
An HE shell will contain more explosive filler and thus have more overall energy than a shaped charge. If it hit something relatively vulnerable such as the turret ring or square on the driver's hatch, I could see such a "lucky hit" causing a catastrophic kill. Remember the "golden BB" rule.

That's pretty much what happened to that Challenger early in the war in Iraq...

yep, 120mm HESH straight down the loaders open hatch; while they were bombing up. No chance of survival.

There was a link on this site that shows the after action report. Not sure if it is still live.

Had all the hatches been closed; headaches all around for the crew; no comms for the tank.

Charles

...wouldn't have mattered one bit. The round impacted on the commander's hatch superstructure and sheared it off completely. Were the hatch closed or not would have had no significance that I can see...

Rumor. China have never got T-80. The famous "China" T-80 in pictures belongs to Russia. Russia showed T-80 in China for sale in 199x . The exist of China 3rd MBT(later ZTZ-99) beated Russia's efforts.

According to what manual...? If we use roads and put our artillery units in to open place's at peace time exercises IOT avoid terrain compensation claims from civil society and thus save tax payers money - it doesn't mean that we would necessarily do so in real situation...

I recall reading about an incident where a 109 took out a T72 w/direct-fire, but cannot find the article anymore. Anyone else recall this event?

Vas, I managed to find the fratricide report. Army Board of Inquiry Report 25 March 2003.
The evidence from the Board of Inquirery, has that the Chally 2 CMD was standing in the cmd's hatch when the HESH round struck him and the cupola (RIP).

P34 part 65. Raised hatch lid .... near horizontal attack.

I think (possibly) only a MerkIV with its massive well armoured cmd's hatch could survive a Top Attack like that; provided the hatch is closed.

Then again, what other tanks are we aware of have special armour arrays on their turret hatches?.

Charles