i've read a proposal from an army officer before to equip the Philippine Army with B40 RPG, the same weapons used by the MILF, or its new version the RPG-7.. because its lighter compare to 90 RR,simple to use and the Gov't Arsenal can easily manufacture the ammo.. what do you think about this suggestion?

Most Valuable Weapon: the RPG
By Gary Brecher ( war_nerd@exile.ru )

"The weapon of choice for the Iraqi resistance is the rocket propelled grenade (RPG)-7."

George J. Mordica II
USA Center for Army Lessons Learned

If you‘ve been reading my columns for a while, you probably noticed I don‘t talk military hardware as much as most war buffs. There are a lot of people who‘ll talk all day about whether the Russian T-90 or the US Abrams is the best MBT. I don‘t do that much, for the simple reason that wars these days don‘t come down to one model of tank vs. another. It‘s pretty rare to find a war where both sides even use tanks. Most of the time it‘s guerrilla vs. guerrilla, or conventional army vs. guerrilla. The odds of an all-out hi-tech war between two conventional armies like the US and Russia are about...oh, zero-point-zero. So it just doesn‘t matter that much whether their tanks could beat ours in some make-believe replay of the Kursk Salient. If you want to play that kind of war, buy a computer game. God knows there‘s enough of them. If you want to know how people make war now, in the real world, you need to study people, not hardware.

Sad but true, boys: war these days is more like Social Studies than Metal Shop. It‘s about tribal vendettas, military intelligence, propaganda, money--just about everything except pure hardware.

Don‘t get me wrong, I love the hardware as much as anybody. I used to spend every free hour, back before there was an internet, going over those big heavy reference books in the library: Jane‘s Tanks, Jane‘s Missile Systems, Jane‘s Combat Vehicles. I had those things memorized. Seriously, you could open any of Jane‘s handbooks at random, read me the name of a weapons system, and I‘d recite its stats from memory--Norwegian anti-ship missiles, South African APCs, you name it.

But eventually I had to face the facts: most of those weapons are never going to get used. If you look at all the real wars going on right now, you come across the same two weapons, over and over: the AK-47 and the RPG-7--both Russian designs, and both older than your Dad.

They‘re the weapons that matter, because they‘re already out there, millions of units, enough to equip every guerrilla army in the world, simple enough that you can teach a peasant kid with hookworm and a room-temperature IQ to fire them, and cheap enough to buy in bulk.

And the RPG is the best of all, even better than the Kalashnikov. This simple little beauty just keeps getting more and more effective. This cheap little dealie, nothing but a launcher tube and a few rockets shaped like two ice-cream cones glued together, has kicked our *** (and Russia‘s too) all over the world since back when the Beatles were still together. In fact, more and more guerrilla armies are making the RPG their basic infantry weapon, with the AK used to protect the RPG gunners, who provide the offensive punch. The Chechens fighting the Russian Army are so high on it that they‘ve switched their three-man combat teams from two riflemen and an RPG gunner to two RPG gunners with a rifleman to protect them.

There‘s another stat that‘s even more important right now: the RPG has inflicted more than half--half!--of US casualties in Iraq. This is the weapon that‘s hurting us. And it‘s been doing that for one **** of a long time.

The Soviets created the RPG for use by Soviet infantry squads against US tanks, APCs and personnel in that big NATO/Warsaw Pact war everybody was dreaming of back in the sixties. The design was an example of beautiful simplicity. It was a classic of Warsaw-Pact reverse-engineering. Warsaw Pact weapons designers had this attitude that it was a waste of time to design from scratch when you could count on your spies (and the Russians had the best spies in the world back then) to get you the specs on the weapons other countries had spent billions designing. So they just put together a cross between the two best shoulder-fired anti-armor weapons around, the Wehrmacht Panzerfaust and the US Army bazooka. And that was the birth of the most important weapon in contemporary warfare.

The RPG got its start against our guys in Vietnam. The Viet Cong and NVA used them as squad-level anti-armor weapons, and they were so **** good at it that we never got our money‘s worth from the tanks and APCs we sent over. Our APC back then was a really lousy dumptruck, the M113--basically a light-tank chassis with flat slabs of aluminum on the sides and top.

Sometimes you can see how good a design is just by the way it looks. One look at an M113 and you can see that this was a lousy vehicle. It was about as tall as Yao Ming, which meant it was a real big target. The aluminum armor didn‘t have firing ports, so the soldiers inside just had to put their helmets over their balls, close their eyes and hope the crew would open the hatch and let them out ASAP. The armor was just thick enough to slow the thing down, but not nearly enough to stop an RPG round. Which is no surprise when you know that an RPG armor-piercing round can penetrate 300mm of rolled steel--more than a foot of steel. Not a bad punch for such a little weapon to pack.

GIs who‘d seen what an RPG hit could do to an M113 got in the habit of saying, "I‘ll walk, thanks." The RPG warhead does something called "spalling," which means the warhead turns the aluminum side armor of an APC into molten shrapnel which goes zipping through the guts of everybody inside like a Benihana chef‘s knife, only it‘s a knife as hot as the surface of the sun.

If GIs in Nam did have to ride an M113, they wore a lot of St. Christopher medals and sat on top. They were a lot less scared of getting shot by a sniper than of being hit by an RPG sitting inside.

We had nothing like it and still don‘t. We had the LAW, another shoulder-fired rocket originally designed to penetrate armor, but it wasn‘t nearly as easy to carry, because it didn‘t have the reuseable launcher the RPG featured. If you wanted to throw a dozen rockets at an enemy bunker, you had to carry a dozen LAWs along, whereas the RPG gunner needed just one launcher and a sack full of warheads.

Nam was just the beginning of the RPG‘s career. Just think back to Mogadishu 1993. The whole Blackhawk Down mess happened because some Afghan Jihadis who‘d retired to Mogadishu--guess it was nice‘n‘restful compared to Kandahar--showed the Somalis how to use the RPG-7 as an anti-aircraft weapon, which its Russian designers never even thought of. The RPG was the key to the whole battle that ended up killing 18 Ranger and Delta guys (Jeez, remember when 18 GIs dead was supposed to be "unacceptably high" losses?), getting us to bug out from Somalia, and getting Ridley Scott‘s directing career back on track.

First the Somali RPG gunners, firing up from the streets where they‘d dug holes to channel the big rocket backblast, hit our Blackhawks, bringing them down in the maze of slums. That drew our troops into the slums, where everybody from toddlers to grandmas started potshotting them with AKs.

The Afghans worked out how to use RPGs as AA back in the 80s, fighting the Soviets. I guess it was a little bit of poetic justice that the first helicopters to get brought down were Russian. The Afghans didn‘t have much to use against choppers except captured Russian heavy 14.5 cal. machineguns, which didn‘t have enough punch to bring down the Mi-24. And Reagan, the wimpiest hawk that ever flew, waited five long years to give the Mujahideen the Stingers that could take down an Mi-24 every time. So the Afghans started playing around with using the RPG against Russian CAS.

They came up with some great improvisations. There‘s nothing like war to bring out the inventor in people! One thing the Afghans figured out was how to use the self-destruct device in the warhead to turn the RPG into an airburst SA missile. See, the RPG comes with a safety feature designed to self-destruct after the missile‘s gone 920 meters. So if you fire on up at a chopper from a few hundred meters away, at the right angle, you get an airburst just as effective as SA missiles that cost about a thousand times more.

When the Chechens took on the post-Soviet Russian army in 1994, the good old RPG was the key weapon once again. By this time, the Russians must‘ve been cursing the name of the man who designed the thing. What the Chechens found out in their first war against the Russians in 1994 was that the RPG is the perfect weapon for urban combat. The Russians sent huge columns of armor into the streets of the city, and the Chechens waited on the upper floors, where they couldn‘t be spotted by choppers but still held the high ground. They waited till the tanks and APCs were jammed into the little streets, then hit the first and last vehicles with RPGs--classic anti-armor technique. That left the whole column stopped dead, and all they had to do was keep feeding warheads into the launchers, knocking out vehicle after vehicle by hitting it on the thin top armor. The Russians were slaughtered, and they had to pull back and settle for saturating the city with massed artillery fires, which killed lots of old ladies but didn‘t do any harm to the fighters. So basically the RPG singlehandedly lost the Russians their first Chechen War.

Which brings us to Iraq, now. The first key to the RPG‘s effectiveness is availability, and it turns out that the one thing Iraq had more than enough of, in spite of all those sanctions, was RPG launchers and rounds. Saddam‘s army had an official license from the Russians to produce RPGs in Iraqi factories, and they made so many that, when Saddam went down, there were piles of launchers with plenty of anti-armor and anti-personnel rounds in most Iraqi towns. And after the Iran-Iraq War and Gulf War I, so many Iraqi men had trained on the RPG that there were plenty of gunners and instructors to teach the new generation how to use it.

Everything about the RPG design seems like it was designed to be used in Iraqi cities. It‘s got one of the shortest arming ranges of any shoulder-fired anti-armor weapons, which means you can fire it at a Hummer coming right down the street. It‘s light enough, at 15 pounds, for even the wimpiest teenager to run through alleys with. It‘s simple enough for any amateur to use--the original non-camera example of "point and shoot."

US doctrine for countering the RPG always stressed looking for the flash when it‘s fired, and the blue-grey smoke trail it leaves. There are two problems with that, though. In the first place, unlike, say, the TOW, the RPG is unguided, so once it‘s launched, it doesn‘t do much good to kill the gunner. You‘re still going to get hit. Second, it‘s not easy to see the blast or the smoke trail in one of these Iraqi "urban canyons." Too many walls to hide behind.

Our doctrine also used to stress laying down heavy fire in the general direction of the RPG launcher, to suppress further firings and hopefully kill the crew. But when you‘re fighting in the middle of an Iraqi city, that kind of general fire is going to kill a lot of hunkered-down civilians along with the RPG crew. And that doesn‘t look good on TV. More importantly, it makes you a lot of new enemies among the people whose cousins got shot.

Even if the RPG doesn‘t disable a vehicle, the blast radius of the anti-armor round is four meters, which means anybody in the area is going to be seeing little birdies for a good few minutes, deaf from the blast, temporarily blind, not to mention very scared and pissed off. Once you‘ve got the occupying troops in a position like that--I mean literally blind and deaf--you‘re in a guerrilla strategist‘s idea of Heaven. Troops in that mood tend to start firing blind, which makes everybody hate them even more, which suits the guerrilla right down to the ground.

The next question about the RPG is how it‘s done in its first big combat test against a whole new generation of US Armor that was designed to counter it, like the M1 Abrams, Bradley, and Stryker. I‘ll talk about that in my next column.

Better the RPG-7 than the B40 and throw in some SPG-9, and bunker busting RPG-26 to add punching power to the dismounts...

Comrade, the MILF as you know manufactures locally made RPG-2 rounds without a penetrator rod[shaped-charge effect]; the AFP can improve on this. The launcher is also locally made.

The MILF also manufactures M-79 clones, HE pressure activated landmines.
I have also seen Claymore command-det. mines manufactured by the NPA.

that's the idea.. we can create our own rpg and we can produce ammo without anymore looking for assistance from US.. and its much better for our troops because 90RR is heavier than RPG.. not to mention the additional ammo for the troops.

Wag naman ang B40 - ok na sa akin ang RPG-7, di naman problema sa ammo yun! :fire:

that is the best decison the PA made in ages!

bakit ba kau mahilig sa mga obsolete na weapon, e kung bumilina lang naman eh dapat yung di gaanong old technology, tulad ng armburst at matador

The PA Bids and Awards Committee once tried to have bidders for RPG-7s but it was a failure. I do not know what happened next. The MILF RPG-2 rounds only have HE-FRAG effect. Remember that they also have imported B-40 rounds with shaped-charge effect.

can anyone post the specs and image of B40 and why many of you like it for the army...

The RPG-2 aka the B40:



For the specs - click HERE


Externally the RPG-2 and RPG-7 look very similar. The most obvious difference is the RPG-7 tube has a conical tail pipe, while that of the RPG-2 was straight walled. However, the Chinese Type 56-1, and improved model of the RPG-2 (Type 56) also has a conical tailpipe. The RPG-7 may have an extra handgrip and an optic sight, but these are not present on some examples.

The real difference between the two systems is one of mechanism. The RPG-2 is a simple rocket launcher, while the RPG-7 is a sort of hybrid –a recoilless gun that fires a rocket assisted projectile. Although both weapons use a 40mm tube, it would be probably be catastrophic if a RPG-7 round was fired from a RPG-2. To prevent this the primers of the rounds are in different positions. It is possible to modify a RPG-7 to fire RPG-2 ammo by shortening the tube a little, although I don't know if such a modified launcher can still use RPG-7 rounds.

Askal, a weapon that has proven to be effective in shooting down Blackhawks and Apaches in Iraq and Afghanistan cannot be considered obsolete.

Imagine that - 100-dollar old tech weaponry destroying 150-million dollar advanced helicopters! :rifle:

:agree: and besides we don't have money to acquire those kind of weapons.. RPG is a battle tested weapon saka mura pa...

:agree: and Ouch!

At least 6 Blackhawks were confirmed to have been brought down by RPG fire in Iraq.

And of course the Blackhawks shot down in Somalia...

:rifle:

the PMC already uses captured MILF-made RPG-2s. some MILF RPGs included smuggled RPG-2s with armor piercing rounds. the military has US LAWs and some AT-4s. the PMC bought 20 armbrust disposable anti-tank weapons from singapore(license producer) for evaluation. i personally dont like disposable rocket-lainchers because i think a re-loadable weapon is better and more suited to a COIN war and more cost effective. but the problem with RPGS however, is that the blowback is a bitch. many of the disposable weapons have a very small recoil and can be fired from smaller more confined spaces. while RPGs have very heavy recoil and need more space to launch than disposable weapons like LAWS and AT-4s.

RPGs used by vietnamese and afghans, somalis, what have u, need some modification to them if they are to be fired from the ground and on an upward position. if not the force of the RPG exhaust if fired upwards instead of lobbing it is enough to injure and maybe kill a man. this is where some people say AL-Qaeda trained somalis, RPGs in afghan war perfected these modifications and tactics against the soviets. many say al-Qaeda trained the somalis in the modifications of these RPGs. contrary to popular belief, more soviet helicopters were actually shot down with RPG than stingers. data about the stinger use in afghanistan suggests less than 1 out of 4 actually hit their mark.

the book Blackhawk Down, by Mark Bowden has a description of how these RPGs were modified.

Ive read somewhere in PDFF that the Armbrust ATWs were handed over to the PMC from PSG stocks - which is which?

:agree: even in Iraq, the same tactics are being used, what is galling to the US forces is the way the Iraqi insurgents achieve acceptable accuracy just by firing airburst warheads in front of the incoming helo and wham baam, Blackhawk is peppered with shrapnel.

Shadow Sniper, open the plastic casing of your friends bullet-trap rifle grenade and look at the M-16 rifle grenade markings. Do you see the inscription"Ava"? That is Avacorp in Fort Bonifacio. It is locally made!

Yes , it less complicated to build an HE-FRAG RPG-2 round and launcher. It is something we do not need to import. Ask people in the internet military forums who have used the B-40 and one thing that sets it apart is that it less prone to "duds" since it will even detonate on soft earth unlike the PG-7 rounds which needs something very hard to strike in order to detonate.

Due to weight and cost savings the AFP can imrove unit forepower by making this available at the squad level whereas now the M67 is only available at the company weapons platoon.

Yes, we can locally manufacture the RPG-2 round and launcher, M-79 clones and six-shot grenade launchers like what the NPA and MILF are doing.

di ba my programmable fuze na rpg rounds

meron na po

may multi-shot grenade launchers ang mga Neps? ano ito home-made lang? :dunno:

MILF po kuya. AFP has captured some.

buti pa ang MI ... :drunk:

nasaan na? anong unit ang may hawak ng prototype?

president Estrada was shown in a photo op examining an MILF clone[South African MGL] of a six-shot grenade launcher captured during the AFP offensive in central Mindanao.

e-mail opus224. its in the sabotaged forum-image section . I hope opus can get it back.

in that image al-haj murad was shown examining it.

what happened to this weapon? dismantled or used by our troops?

only one unit shown being examined [aimed] by Pres. Estrada. revolver type.

kuya meron na-capture ang PMC na unit. Maybe the wholwe AFP has more than one unit.

http://pro.corbis.com/

type on search slot: president estrada gun marine

to po ba mga tol?


di ba to kayang gawin ng militar?

kaya... may ginawa dati ang SRDP na mutiple rocket launcher.. correct me if im wrong.. Rancudo yata ang pinangalan doon..

as in truck mounted MLRS? :armyhuh:

Jane's Infantry Weapons

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


RPG-2 40 mm portable rocket launcher
Description

The RPG-2 was developed from the German Panzerfaust of the Second World War. It fires a fin-stabilised PG-2 High-Explosive Anti-Tank (HEAT) projectile, which is loaded into the muzzle of the launcher. The fins are made of a stiff flexible sheet rolled around the cylindrical container of the rocket motor and retained in place with a ring. As the fins are pushed down into the barrel, the ring slides off. The fins spring out and are held against the inside of the launcher tube. As soon as the missile leaves the muzzle, the fins extend fully.
The metal tube of the launcher has a wood or plastic covered section in the middle to protect the firer against heat and also to make the weapon easier to hold when it is used in cold climates. The firing mechanism is a spring-loaded hammer forming part of the trigger-group. To fire the weapon, a round is inserted into the muzzle and is seated in the index cut-out; this ensures that the percussion cap is in line with the hammer. After the rudimentary iron sights are aligned, the weapon may be fired.
The rear end of the tube is usually a plain cylinder, but some later models are fitted with a small venturi at the rear which acts as a blast deflector.
The Chinese manufactured the RPG-2 as the Anti-Tank Grenade Launcher (ATGL) Type 56 (see separate entry).



Specifications

Calibre:
launcher: 40 mm
warhead: 82 mm
Length: launcher, 1.494 m
Weight:
launcher, empty: 2.83 kg
projectile: 1.84 kg
Max range: effective, 150 m
Rate of fire: 4-6 rds/min
Armour penetration: 150-180 mm


Status

Production complete.

Service

Still to be found with some militia and irregular forces in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.

Manufacturer

Former Soviet state arsenals.

Similar model

China
Manufacturer
China North Industries Corporation (Norinco)
Type: Type 56 40 mm
Remarks: Copy of RPG-2; production complete

UPDATED

RPG-2 rocket launchers with PG-2 grenade (T J Gander)


This Vietnamese grenade uses the fragmentation warhead from a US BLU-66 bomblet; this is fitted with a mortar bomb fuze and coupled to a PG-2 tail assembly (Colin King)


Warheads for RPG-2. Chinese Type 50, complete with firing charge (above) and PG-2 copy (below) (Colin King)

nope, its a ballyhoed rocket gun developed by the SRDP for the PAF

For what PAF platform? Hueys? :wow:

yup.. i wonder what happen to this project..

Look at this guys, Iraqi insurgent with RPG-7 sporting the deadly thermobaric warhead:

malupit ang thermobaric - its essentially a large fragmentation grenade and very effective anti-personnel weapon, talo ang M203...

bili tayo :demon:

Some Iraqi rebels are expert at firing their RPGs in indirect fire mode much to the chagrin of US troopers...

:demon:

Id say - lets buy some!