New Warhead for the MLRS, Or What’s Old is New Again.

The Obama administration’s decision to retire submunition warheads from the military inventory was stupid, and purely political posturing. Submunitions do have a significant dud rate, but that problem can be mitigated, and the military effectiveness of submunition warheads is undoubted. There are a great number of targets on the battlefield that are best dealt with via a submunition warhead, such as enemy artillery, air defense sites, and Petroleum, Oil, Lubricant (POL) storage sites.

The original M26 rocket of the M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System carried 644 M77 Dual Purpose Improved Conventional Munitions. Each bomblet was roughly the size of a 40mm grenade, and featured a small shaped charge with a fragmentation sleeve. That gave it the ability to both penetrate the thin top armor of lightly armored vehicles, and cause casualties to thin skinned vehicles, personnel and material via the fragmentation.

An MLRS field artillery battalion has three firing batteries, with 9 launchers each.  With each launcher firing two pods of six rockets each, that gives us a total of 208,656 bomblets on a given target. Small wonder Iraqi artillery forces hated being on the receiving end of “steel rain.”

The withdrawal of M26 series left the Army  with only the M31 Guided MLRS rocket in the inventory. Mind you,  it’s a fantastic capability, with much better range, and a formidable 225 pound warhead. That’s not nothing. But while it has the ability to take out a point target, it is lacking in its ability to defeat area targets.  Even modest dispersion allows the enemy to mitigate the effects of an MLRS attack.

To address this shortcoming, the Army worked with Lockheed Martin to develop the Alternative Warhead program. Basically, instead of a GMLRS (pronounced “glimmers”) having a simple HE warhead, they put in an airburst fuse for a charge surrounded by  about 180,000 tungsten pellets. The combination of airbust and the large number of pellets yields a significant fragmentation pattern that can yield casualties over a wide area.

^Lots of good ‘splodey  up in  there^

The new Alternative Warhead is now in service, and deployed forces in the Centcom area have used it for the first time during training at the Udairi range complex.

What’s interesting is that the idea of using a vast number of pellets as a fragmentation warhead for a battlefield rocket is hardly new.

When the Army fielded the MGR-1 Honest John unguided rocket in the 1950s, it was first seen as a way of delivering tactical nuclear weapons, or chemical agents. But as US strategy shifted away from tactical nuclear weapons, a conventional warhead was developed for the Honest John, and used the same principle as today’s Alternative Warhead M30A1 round.

Comments

[timactual]

The return of the shrapnel round.

Not long ago the viability of tanks on the modern battlefield was questioned. Things like this make me question the viability of Infantry on the modern battlefield.

[Captain Ned]

Well, one of those with command detonation would certainly improve my dick/goose hunting odds. Any idea on the pellet size? With 180,000 crammed in there they must be somewhat small.

[Captain Ned]

Duck. Ugh.

[R Brown]

The original design for the 3 nations (US, UK, FRG) was for the submunition rockets, the AT-2 tank mine dispensing rocket. During the final troop test phase of the first US battery, I was as a DS/GS repairer sent to a Dev meeting as the rep for DS/GS repairers, and heard the Program Mngr (O-6) talk about follow on warheads of Smoke, Binary Chemical. The officers and civilians, didn't like my comment that the DS/GS repairer who was supposed to deploy with, and follow the MLRS battery, didn't have a designed truck to carry ALL the tools (US Standard and Meteric) and COSTLY spare modules, or a quick way to rotate and lock a disabled LLM (Launcher Loader Module) around to the stowed condition so the vehicle could be evacuated for major repairs/rebuild. We did one test with a Sears ratchet wrench and it flat wore out 4 DS/GS maintainers and took several hours to hand ratchet the turret around and lower and lock it for travel.
Lockheed over engineerd to stupid requirements. Fire control extension cable so the troops could fire from outside the vehicle with a 25 meter cable. Irreguardless of the fact that the danger zone of the exhaust from the rockets was 50meters or more iirc.