[infowar.de] US-Militär baut elektrische Schilde für Fahrzeuge

[Ralf Bendrath <bendrath -! - zedat - fu-berlin - de>]

Infowar.de, http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~bendrath/liste.html
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Wired News
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,54641,00.html

U.S. Military Uses the Force  
By Noah Shachtman  

2:00 a.m. Aug. 22, 2002 PDT 

One of the most dangerous and pervasive threats facing American and
British troops in combat zones is a primitive grenade launcher that only
sets your typical terrorist back about $10.  

The Anglo-American defense against this no-tech threat: an electrical
force field that's costing hundreds of millions of dollars to develop.   

Fitted on light armored vehicles such as personnel carriers, the force
field uses a series of charged metal plates to dissipate the effects of
rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), a weapon found by the thousands from
Mogadishu to Kabul to Baghdad.  

RPGs and other "shape charge" munitions derive their destructive power
from cones of copper embedded in their noses. When the warhead explodes,
it crushes the cone, shooting out a jet of hot copper at 5,000 mph --
instantly destroying anything short of a tank.  

The electrical armor system, powered by the vehicle's regular supply
of electricity, stops the jets by zapping them with tens of thousands of
amps of current. This vaporizes some of the deadly copper jets and
reduces the rest to a relatively harmless mixture of melted and
pulverized debris that disperses around the vehicle.  

In recent proof-of-concept tests by the British military, RPG attacks
on an electric-armor-equipped personnel carrier left only dents and
scratches.  

"We knew that just a few amps blows a household fuse. So we scaled it
all up to fry these copper jets," said John Brown, the physicist at the
Defense Science and Technology Laboratory who heads up British electric
armor research.  

Brown has been working on developing the system for six years. He
expects it will be ready for widespread deployment in "certainly 10
years, and maybe quite a lot less than that."  

But the menace facing soldiers in personnel carriers is here now.  

In use since the early 1960s, and weighing a little more than 15
pounds each, RPGs can total a carrier from nearly 1,000 meters away.
They are cheap and extremely easy to get.  

"RPGs can be easily picked up from street stalls for as little as $10
in most of the world's trouble spots," Brown said.  

"RPGs are extraordinarily widespread," said John Pike, director of
GlobalSecurity.org. "And if you have any doubt of that, watch Black Hawk
Down."  

Tanks are largely protected from the threat of RPGs, Pike said,
because they use "reactive armor": bricks of explosives that detonate
the grenade before it hits the tank's skin.  

But such armor weighs 10 to 20 tons, too much for trucks and personnel
carriers to bear. These vehicles must be light to function in the
mobile, often urban, combat that military planners predict will become
common.  

Electric armor only weighs a ton or two, and offers much of the same
protection as the reactive defense. That's why the U.S. military plans
to spend more than $74 million on electromagnetic armor and gun research
and development in the next fiscal year. It spent more than $110 million
on the endeavor over the last two years.   

"When Americans get to the west side of Baghdad and find they've got
to fight street to street to get to the east side, this (electric armor)
is the kind of thing they'd like to have," Pike said.  

Against enemy tanks, however, electric defenses won't do much good.
And "any armored warfare guy would tell you that the biggest threat to
light armored vehicles are heavy armored vehicles" like tanks, said
Clark Murdock, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies, in an e-mail interview.  

Shells from tanks rely on solid pointed chunks of tungsten or depleted
uranium to break through armor, instead of the copper jets RPGs use.  

Also, the electric armor can't protect carriers from mines and bombs
dropped from the sky.  

"This is a very specific solution to a very specific problem. It's
definitely not like the force screens you'd see in the movies," Pike
said.

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