TopHatter

Kind of what I was saying earlier in the thread about Arabs in city fighting. It's really the only way to make a Western or Israeli army bleed. Meeting them on the conventional field of battle is like signing a suicide pact.

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Officer of Engineers

It would have been tougher but not that much tougher. Those houses would simply collapse if an Abrams simply bulldoze them. Again, the lack of a heavy ATGM environment will allow this to happenned. Unlike Western construction designed to stand up to the ice belt, these buildings and houses have softer concrete that crumbles under a weight of a tank. Thus, even a collapsed house ain't going to create too much obstacles.

From an engr's PoV, an ice belt is what makes a city a fort or a speed bump and Baghdad is a speed bump.

Then, there's the issue of thermobaric weapons. Depending on the type used, very easy to clear houses now. Even if you survive the overpressure, you won't survive the negative pressure or oxygen depravation. That's one of the reason why now all engr built bunkers must be NBC compliant.

Thugs are thugs. They die out in the open or they burn in houses. From what I saw, they don't have the discipline to stay in the houses and wait. They have to come out to beat their chests.

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Chimo

TopHatter

I'm certainly no tanker but I can't imagine that a Tank Commander would want to be blasting into buildings a lot. I would think that there are too many potentially nasty surprises concealed inside, not to mention debris from the building. Any thoughts?

Officer of Engineers

I've made my assesement a couple of months before the war. I did not see the prep work that I expected and some really disgusting thinking.

Bunkers were built with sandbags - not concrete. Glass windows were taped, not boarded up or taken out completely. No tiger traps (big holes in the ground). The bridges weren't primed. Chokepoints were manned by machine guns, not AT guns. Burning oil trenches were intended to provide smoke as cover but given no thought to wind direction.

A Canadian engr regt would have approached this alot differently. You build a re-enfoced concrete bunker within a building at a chokepoint. Not sandbag. You primed the building. You build a secondary fall back bunker.

The idea here is to fight with tenacity. Force the enemy dismounts to dislodge you and once they're inside the building, you blow it up only to collapse onto the road to block it and then you advance to recover the position until you're driven away and you start the whole thing over again.

There was no such prep work. Usually, you need tons and tons of plastique and alot of people drilling into buildings. Having seen what I saw, I would have told the tank force cmdr that there is nothing to stop him. My assesement was the correct one.

M21's comments about Shelton or Powell, hell even American Cols in there would be correct but you would also see the prep work started alot earlier and alot more effort than there actually was.

Anon

The thing at play here is not the construction of the houses, or their ability to withstand modern munitions.

It's that by firing from a building and immediately displacing, you force the enemy to level the house, and at the same time make you a ready made fortification of rubble.

Displacing infantry from rubble is one of the hardest things in all of warfare to do.

When a squad or platoon takes up positions on both sides of a block, and in numerous structures along that block, and they DON'T fire until the enemy is in the middile of the block, they can fire from elevated and defiled positions into vehicles rear and flanks after diversionary fires into the enemy's front fix his attention forward.

An RPG-7 fired down onto the rear deck of a tank or IFV will get you a mobility kill. Once one tank in the column is immobilized, you have created a barrier that is extremely hard to manuever around, and you cut the lead element's off from the follow on force.

You force infantry to dismount and command the high ground(rooftops) to secure the site while the disabled vehicle/s are recovered, and the road is cleared. The dismount infantry has to fight it's way up to the roofs, negotiating enemy fire coming down on them, and the myriad booby traps and improvised explosive devices MOUT is known for.

When you do this on block after block, in nieghborhood after nieghborhood, the cost to your opponent in men, vehicles, and materiel' quickly mounts.

Baghdad was a golden opportunity for Iraq to put a hurt on us, and they missed it entirely.

Officer of Engineers

M21,

A couple of things.

1) Thermobaric weapons is now the attacker's friend. The Russians used them to great effect in Grozny. Oxygen depravation does wonders to a defender, especially if he's not willing to move.

2) I had thought the highground (roof tops) were now to be secured by helo insert troops.

Anon

Thermobaric weapons are great, but we need to look at the scale of operations at play here. We are talking about tens of thousands of structures, and a very limited number of assets that can employ thermobaric weaponry.

It makes it so that one or two rifleman can lay fire on a column, and a thermobaric weapon is used to clear the house. This is a very time consuming process.

The enemy loses one or two men, a few rifles or LMG's, and a few hundred rounds of ammunition.

We lose time, anyone the enemy soldier hits, and must release a $100,000 weapon to kill one or two men. If the soldiers displace when they hear the helo's rotors, we have spent a lot of time and money to blow up an empty house.

If the enemy soldiers are operating smart, and moving through the structures via holes in the walls(VERY, VERY effective mode of displacement), they can set up shop a few houses down, and repeat the whole scenario. We must remember, a tank or IFV's main gun and co-ax is severely limited in elevation, and therefore cannot engage targets elevated more than 20 degrees above the road surface.
In many instances, the road will be so narrow there is no room for an MBT to even slew it's gun onto the target without smashing the tube into buildings.
In order for the TC to engage the enemy with his .50(in the case of the Abrams), he has to expose himself to fire, and expose the entire tank to the threat of improvised devices hurled from rooftops. A brad would be forced to have the TC engage the enemy with hand held rifle fire.

This was one of the reasons that i stated before that the Vulcan PIVADs ADA track was so effective for MOUT, because it has an elevation of +65 degrees, and can engage rooftops and such. It is still limited though in that the TC/Gunner is exposed to enemy fires from elevated positions.

This is an example of an instance where the US policy of using precision fires to clear enemy fortifications can be used against us. If one knows how his enemy fights, he can use it against that enemy to great effect.

It is also an example of how one squad of light infantry can significantly delay the advance of an entire Mechanized or Motorized Company moving in Column formation.

It is also a further example of why infantry must be used in conjunction with mechanized units to provide cover for the vehicles. An M-1 is a devastating opponent in open terrain, but in MOUT or broken terrain, while it still can be quite useful, it is really not much more than a sitting duck if engaged in CQB.

All the rules are out the window in MOUT, that is the first thing one must realize when fighting in such an environment. That is why commanders that fight 'off the cuff' and those that take advantadge of their organic assets in unconventional ways do so much better than those that adhere to written doctrine in MOUT environments.

Moving on, Helo inserted infantry can certainly move in to seize the rooftops and positions of elevation, but then they open themselves to the 'blackhawk down' scenario of short range engagement of the helos by enemy infantry equipped with RPGs.

It has been my experience that it is best to send dismounted infantry out ahead of the heavies along the axis of advance to clear the buildings prior to the appearance of armor.
This allows the infantry to identify ambush sites, and then call the heavy vehicles in as needed for direct fire support.
While an M-1 or Brad cannot engage a rooftop or elevated position in CQB, it has no problem doing so from 500 meters distance.
Of course, the downside to this is that your infantry must expose itself to enemy fire in order to ID the ambush sites to begin with by clearing EVERY house on both sides of the unit's axis of advance. It is still bloody dangerous work, but it is a lot safer than sending tanks in columns through an enemy held city as the vanguard.

In open terrain, dismounted infantry supports tanks/IFV's. In close/MOUT terrain, it is the exact opposite.

I've had a lot of experience with MOUT, and i had the opportunity to see many theories in action in training, and it is my opinion that the forward infantry sweep is easily the most effective i have witneseed.

The presence of heavy ATGM's makes that method even more desirable from a force protection standpoint.

Anyway, the Iraqi's didn't do any of that in Baghdad, which should make us all very happy.

Praxus

If they issued Thermobaric rounds to Marines with SMAW and Army with AT4 it could be done pretty quickly. They did use Thermobaric warheads in the SMAW in GW2. They used two of them, one of them worked perfectly and the other slammed into a wall.

Are you trying to say a Thermobaric warhead would cost $100,000. I would guess more around 5,000$ per round. The thing isn't even guided so it would be pretty cheap.

Anon

As a side issue to this conversation, i have long been a proponent of a GAU-8/A Avenger armed high elevation M-1 based ADA vehicle.

The HEI 30x173mm cartridge of the GAU-8/A is extremely effective at penetrating concrete, has a decent blast radius, and the Avenger has a withering ROF of 3,900RPM- EXCELLENT for direct suppression fires.
If firing the HVAPDU cartridge, this vehicle would have excellent anti-armor capability as well.

Combined with the M-1s superior armor protection, this would be as close to an ideal MOUT weapon as i can possibly imagine.

Praxus

I bet it would be a lot cheaper to launch a single unguided Thermobaric missile from a SMAW then it would be to spray 30mm rounds all over the place.

Anon

"If they issued Thermobaric rounds to Marines with SMAW and Army with AT4 it could be done pretty quickly."

1) They don't

2) You are still talking about using infantry to do the clearing, which i advocate anyway(and which is still very dangerous)

3) A shoulder fired rocket PROBABLY lacks the neccesary warhead volume to be an effective thermobaric delivery device. Even if it was effective, it would leave you high and dry if you happened across an enemy tank!!!

4) The AT-4 is pretty good for 'bunker busting' as is.

"Are you trying to say a Thermobaric warhead would cost $100,000. I would guess more around 5,000$ per round. The thing isn't even guided so it would be pretty cheap."

The Hellfire ATGM is the only thermobaric weapon in the US Army arsenal, and costs about $100,000 a round.

"
I bet it would be a lot cheaper to launch a single unguided Thermobaric missile from a SMAW then it would be to spray 30mm rounds all over the place."

An AT-4 HEAT rocket costs about $5,000.

A one second burst from the GAU-8 costs $1,105.00

Anon

BTW, if it's unguided, it's a rocket, not a missile.

Praxus

You
a.) Run and Hide
b.) Kiss your ass good bye

:-D