Re-inventing the wheel..

[quietfan 233]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14686871/

Army shuns system to combat RPGs

Experts agree it might help save lives, so why isn’t it in the field?

WASHINGTON - Rocket-propelled grenades, or RPGs, are a favorite weapon of insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are cheap, easy to use and deadly.

RPGs have killed nearly 40 Americans in Afghanistan and more than 130 in Iraq,

...

Sixteen months ago, commanders in Iraq began asking the Pentagon for a new system to counter RPGs and other anti-tank weapons.

Last year, a special Pentagon unit thought it found a solution in Israel — a high-tech system that shoots RPGs out of the sky. But in a five-month exclusive investigation, NBC News has learned from Pentagon sources that that help for U.S. troops is now in serious jeopardy.

The system is called “Trophy,” and it is designed to fit on top of tanks and other armored vehicles like the Stryker now in use in Iraq.

Trophy works by scanning all directions and automatically detecting when an RPG is launched. The system then fires an interceptor — traveling hundreds of miles a minute — that destroys the RPG safely away from the vehicle.

The Israeli military, which recently lost a number of tanks and troops to RPGs, is rushing to deploy the system.

Trophy is the brainchild of Rafael, Israel’s Armament Development Authority, which has conducted more than 400 tests and found that the system has “well above [a] 90 percent” probability of killing RPGs and even more sophisticated anti-tank weapons, according to reserve Col. Didi Ben Yoash, who helped develop the system. Ben Yoash says he is “fully confident” that Trophy can save American lives.

And officials with the Pentagon’s Office of Force Transformation (OFT) agree. Created in 2001 by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, OFT acts as an internal “think tank” for the Pentagon and is supposed to take a more entrepreneurial — and thereby less bureaucratic — approach to weapons procurement and other defense issues, and to get help to troops in the field more quickly. OFT officials subjected Trophy to 30 tests and found that it is “more than 98 percent” effective at killing RPGs.

An official involved with those tests told NBC that Trophy “worked in every case. The only anomaly was that in one test, the Trophy round hit the RPG’s tail instead of its head. But according to our test criteria, the system was 30 for 30.”

As a result, OFT decided to buy several Trophies — which cost $300,000-$400,000 each — for battlefield trials on Strykers in Iraq next year.

That plan immediately ran into a roadblock: Strong opposition from the U.S. Army. Why? Pentagon sources tell NBC News that the Army brass considers the Israeli system a threat to an Army program to develop an RPG defense system from scratch.

The $70 million contract for that program had been awarded to an Army favorite, Raytheon. Raytheon’s contract constitutes a small but important part of the Army’s massive modernization program called the Future Combat System (FCS), which has been under fire in Congress on account of ballooning costs and what critics say are unorthodox procurement practices.

Col. Donald Kotchman, who heads the Army’s program to develop an RPG defense, acknowledges that Raytheon’s system won’t be ready for fielding until 2011 at the earliest.

That timeline has Trophy’s supporters in the Pentagon up in arms. As one senior official put it, “We don’t really have a problem if the Army thinks it has a long-term solution with Raytheon. But what are our troops in the field supposed to do for the next five or six years?”

Kotchman, however, says the Army is doing everything prudent to provide for the protection and safety of U.S. forces and insists the Israeli system is not ready to be deployed by the U.S. “Trophy has not demonstrated its capability to be successfully integrated into a system and continue to perform its wartime mission,” he says.

That claim, however, is disputed by other Pentagon officials as well as internal documents obtained by NBC News. In an e-mail, a senior official writes: “Trophy is a system that is ready — today... We need to get this capability into the hands of our warfighters ASAP because: (1) It will save lives!” Officials also tell NBC News that according to the Pentagon’s own method of measuring a weapons system’s readiness, Trophy is “between a 7 and an 8” out of a possible score of 9. Raytheon’s system is said to be a “3.”

So why would the Army block a solution that might help troops?

“There are some in the Army who would be extremely concerned that if the Trophy system worked, then the Army would have no need to go forward with the Raytheon system and the program might be terminated,” says Steven Schooner, who teaches procurement law at both George Washington University and the Army’s Judge Advocate General’s School.

Trophy’s supporters inside the Pentagon are more blunt. As one senior official told NBC News, “This debate has nothing, zero, to do with capability or timeliness. It’s about money and politics. You’ve got a gigantic program [FCS] and contractors with intertwined interests. Trophy was one of the most successful systems we’ve tested, and yet the Army has ensured that it won’t be part of FCS and is now trying to prevent it from being included on the Strykers” that OFT planned to send to Iraq.

...

The Pentagon is now trying to interest the Marine Corps in testing Trophy. But because of Army opposition, there are currently no plans to send the system to Iraq.

So how many service men and women have to die between now and 2011 so that Raytheon can keep it's $70 million?

[Bottomfeeder 244]

The purpose of war is for people to die, regardless of what side they are on. Bush will tell you that for a shot of sodium pentathol.

[Captain Liger 0]

The purpose of war is for people to die, regardless of what side they are on.

You are so wrong on so many levels it isn't even worth commenting on.

There are quite a few things in this article that are misleading:

1. RPG's don't just "fly through the sky." We call those SAM's or Surface to Air Missles which are more of a worry for the Air Force than the Army. RPG's are used at close distances ON THE GROUND. How do I know? Because I've seen the enemy use them with my own two eyes. They are normally fired at distances of no more than 20 meters. I don't give a crap of what kind of system you develop to combat them, NO system will take out an RPG that's fired at distances from 20 meters.

2. Tanks, particularly, are not susceptible to RPG fire. At least not our own. the M1 Abrams has a protective armor that is still currently classified but we know this much: it's made from some sort of depleted uranium. In my mech infantry battalion in Iraq we had one armor company attached to us that had 14 M1 tanks. Out of those 14 only one fell prey to an RPG and it was quickly shipped back to the States for study and analysis because M1's aren't supposed to fall prey to RPG's. It was also the ONLY M1 in the ENTIRE theater of operations, at the time, to fall prey to an RPG. How did it happen? Beats me, just some freak occurance if you ask me. I don't know what the armor on Israeli tanks are made from but apparently, according to the article, it doesn't meet US specs.

3. The Stryker combat vehicle already has in place a pretty reliable system to combat RPG fire. It is basically a cage built around the entire vehicle. Looks like a luggage rack mounted on the sides of the vehicle. It is quite simple in design, is made from steel, and when an RPG strikes the surface it explodes rather harmlessly without penetrating the armored skin of the vehicle itself. Stryker crews need not worry.

4. Let's face it: Soldiers on the ground are more worried about IED's than they are with RPG's. Any terrorist stupid enough to fire an RPG at a moving vehicle is going to be killed. It's that simple. There's no secretive way to shoot one and not get caught. Will not happen. Period. IED's are our biggest threat to crews operating in tanks, Bradleys, and HMMWVs. NOT RPGs. Love the way the press is trying to make this into a big deal. Give me a break...

I will, however, admit that government contractors are in bed with high ranking Army brass. Let's be honest with ourselves be here, ok? Contracts don't get awarded without a little a$$ kissing and hob knobbing going on. So I will admit that much. That's about the only thing the article was correct on so it wouldn't surprise me that the Army is holding out for Raytheon to come out with their own system to "combat" RPGs...although I don't really think one is needed. As far as other weapons systems that Raytheon has given us I will say I'm satisfied with them. As a signal officer, I can speak intelligently about the FBCB2 platforms they fielded to us about 5 years ago. A great system to use on the battlefield given that a soldier knows how to use them so I don't buy into that what they may potentially field us to combat RPGs will have a score of 3. I doubt that.