The Russians are usually credited with building good, simple weapons (like the Kalashnikov series and RPG-7 ) but considered weak when to comes to high tech. A close look at one of their tank-busting smart bombs shows how far they’ve come, however.
 
The sensor-fuzed weapon is one of the most sophisticated weapons in the US air-to-ground arsenal. This is a 1,000-pound bomb which releases forty small BLU-108 submunitions, over an area the size of 20 football fields. Each BLU-108 (or “cans of whup ass” as some call them) scans the area below with an infra-red sensor; on detecting an armored vehicle below, it fires an explosively formed penetrator with lethal accuracy. The EFP is capable of piercing the thin top armor and scoring a mobility kill any known tank: basically, there goes your engine. A single sensor-fuzed weapon will knock out several vehicles in a formation; an aircraft armed with several of them could stop a large-scale armored assault in its tracks. (The video, above, is a reconstruction of a B-52 which took out a battalion-sized Iraqi force in one pass using sensor-fuzed weapons.)

It turns out the Russian have their own version. This is a 500-kilogram bomb made by Bazalt, termed SPBE-D.

The similarities with the SFW are obvious – the way the submunitions are scattered, the infra-red sensor to look for vehicles, and the EFP kill mechanism. There are some differences, however. The Russian submunitions are much larger, with only 15 rather than 40 in each bomb. And they weigh four times as much as their American counterparts. Bazalt claim that each bomb can knock out six tanks.

You might assume that the SPBE-D is a “me too” weapon, developed long after the US version. But it seems that the Russians got there first. The BLU-108 has been in production since 1992 and in service since 1994. According to Armada magazine, when the SPBE-D was first shown in 1994, the Russians claimed it had already in service for some years; a Soviet origin is likely. According to Janes’, the air-delivered version of the Russian submunition was derived from an earlier model called MOTIV-3F developed for the SMERCH long-range rocket launcher in the 1980’s. The Russians have been selling it on the international market since 1997.

The US Multiple Launch Rocket System does not have this kind of smart anti-tank capability, instead relying on area-saturating bomblets — but Bazalt have apparently proposed a MOTIV-3F warhead for it. I can’t see the US buying, but Bazalt might well find other customers. Future opponents armed with Russian weapons may have a lot more than just AKs and rocket-propelled grenades.

TAKEN FROM /blog.wired.com



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