"Anyone see more about the Israeli "force field"" Topic

Last night on one of the news channels, I caught a brief overview of an anti-rocket systems the Israeli's have developed. Sounded like close in radar with sometype of counter rocket that hits the warhead of the incoming RPG.

This is the first time I have encountered news about this and wondered if anyone else knew anything about it.

This? :

TROPHY ACTIVE PROTECTION SYSTEM SUCCESSFUL IN FIRST U.S. TESTS – The faces of more than 100 soldiers and sailors killed by rocket propelled grenades (RPGs) in Iraq over the course of a year passed by on the large screen in the auditorium here at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Dahlgren Division.
More than 140 U.S. and foreign visitors sat silent before learning more about the near-term system that can defeat the cheap and available RPGs—the Trophy Active Protection System (APS), mounted on a Stryker combat vehicle before a live-fire test.
The visitors viewed the live-fire demonstration on screens in a tent near the range, as the Trophy system successfully detected, tracked and broke apart an inert incoming RPG while the Stryker was accelerating.
"The system worked just like it was supposed to work," defeating a threatening RPG, watching and ignoring an RPG that would not enter the vehicle's protected zone, Robert Dibble, FSEP project lead at Dahlgren, said after the test.
The Office of the Secretary of Defense's Office of Force Transformation (OFT) and the Joint Rapid Acquisition Cell (JRAC) sponsored the March 30 tests.
Some two weeks of tests here are to gather data and certify comprehensive experiments conducted by the Israel Defense Forces in Israel in late February.

So would this be a variation on ERA then? With the difference of destroying the incoming missile a bit further from the target?

Mongols are 1/72, correct. Therefore they're much smaller.

Ahem.

With these sorts of things, I always worry about the prospects for the infantrymen on the outside of the vehicle when the "active disruption system" goes off. The Soviets developed an ATGM protection system that used a millimeter band radar to detect incoming missiles, then fired grenades in the direction of the missile. "Hey!" said the weapons wonks, "We can put this on the BMP, too!"

"No," said the soldiers, staring at the scarred landscape where Kaktus had discharged, "No, you cannot."

Even the company literature for this system starts to wax euphemistic about "reduced potential for friendly casualties." You'll also note it does nothing to protect against IEDs. So while this is a great system for the Israelis, whose policy towards armor in urban operations is Never Get Out of the Tank, I don't see it being particularly great for the guys in Iraq today.

Right out of Hammer's Slammers! I believe that they are developinig IFF tags for friendly infantry that will alleviate some of the "friendly fire" possibilities. The impact on modern armored warfare for the future will be huge, though. An entire company of M-1s with this system would be virtually invulnerable to ATGMs and RPGs, meaning that the only thng that could take them out would be other armored vehicles. Couple this with the new anti-artillery defenses that will be mounted on armored vehicles(they intercept incoming artillery and mortar rounds) and we enter a new phase of warfare. Namely, the countries that can develop these types of weapons and defenses will see their force power at least quadrupled, while poorer countries are going to get left behind quickly.

How does it determine that the incoming round is an RPG? One could have great fun throwing rocks at tanks…

I'd imagine that the best way of coping with this when attacking a tank equipped with this system is just to fire multiple missiles at it, or a number of decoys first to have the system run out of ammo (thinking of very simple rockets with maybe a minimal charge but a large heat signature to draw out lots of this fire before launching a heavy, relatively expensive ATGM at the vehicle) One would need more manpower to combat this kind of tank, and especially the guys launching the decoy would be in deep doodoo if the tank wouldn't be taken out by the ATGM or the ATGM would fail to get fired.

The best way of countering this system is a command detonated mine, or IED, which is still the most effective way of taking out a tank.

I heard reports of troops in Iraq buying cell phone jammers out of their own pockets as protection against IEDs, and even that was only a temporary fix as the bad guys found something else to trigger the mines. IEDs are still the #1 killer of troops in Iraq, not the RPG.

Say your infantry dismounts accompaning the vehicle are equipped with IFF tags (which I think are a great idea! Why are they spending money on a new system to defeat the RPG when infantry IFF tags are still not in place?) Trophy detects an incoming RPG round, sees that there are friendly infantry within the danger area, and decides not to activate. Fat lot of good it's doing anyone at that point.

And any situation in which an Abrams is going up against a bad guy with an RPG is a situation in which the US will have infantry nearby on the ground. Okay, the occasional thunder run, but not 90% of the situations a tank is likely to be in.

I'm not opposed to systems that keep troops alive—I'm an enthusiastic supporter of these things. I'm opposed to wasting time and dollars on expensive fixes to low-threat scenarios.

Colonel Hammer and the Slammers WOULD be proud of us, wouldn't they?

Clay

If the equipment works as advertised there will be less of a need for infantry support close by.

Granted, it doesn't eliminate the need, but it does signicantly reduce it.

The ground troops will just need to learn how far away they need to stay from the heavies to be safe.

The IFF tags are a great idea, until the enemy starts copying/cloning them. Shades of the WW II nightfighter war technology battle, where each side kept trying to outdo the other, and scientific improvements were used against the other side continually.

Wonder when our ships will be equipped with "sandcasters", as listed in Traveller 30 years ago, to defeat the SSM threat?

The first I heard of this I was immediately struck by an incongruity. Trophy Active Protection System has the acronym "TAPS".
Not perhaps the most positive indicator going…

"The first I heard of this I was immediately struck by an incongruity. Trophy Active Protection System has the acronym "TAPS".Not perhaps the most positive indicator going…"

:-) Yes, hilarious. I'm sure that whoever dreamt that up either had no idea of the "other" connotation or thought that it would be taken as TAPS for the enemy….