Defense Tech: Marines Quiet About Brutal New Weapon

[unhappycamper]

Marines Quiet About Brutal New Weapon

War is hell. But its worse when the Marines bring out their new urban com­bat weapon, the SMAW-​​NE. Which may be why theyre not talk­ing about it, much.
This is a ver­sion of the stan­dard USMC Shoulder Mounted Assault Weapon but with a new war­head. Described as NE — “Novel Explosive”- it is a ther­mo­baric mix­ture which ignites the air, pro­duc­ing a shock­wave of unpar­al­leled destruc­tive power, espe­cially against build­ings.JPGA post-​​action report from Iraq describes the effect of the new weapon: “One unit dis­in­te­grated a large one-​​storey masonry type build­ing with one round from 100 meters. They were extremely impressed.” Elsewhere it is described by one Marine as “an awe­some piece of ord­nance.“

It proved highly effec­tive in the bat­tle for Fallujah. This from the Marine Corps Gazette, July edi­tion: “SMAW gun­ners became expert at deter­min­ing which wall to shoot to cause the roof to col­lapse and crush the insur­gents for­ti­fied inside inte­rior rooms.“

~snip~

The man­u­fac­tur­ers, Talley, make bold use of its track record, with a brochure head­lined Thermobaric Urban Destruction.“

The SMAW-​​NE has only been pro­cured by the USMC, though there are reports that some were ‘bor­rowed’ by other units. However, there are also pro­pos­als on the table that thou­sands of obso­lete M-​​72 LAWs could be retro­fit­ted with ther­mo­baric war­heads, mak­ing then into effec­tive urban com­bat tools.

But in an era of pre­ci­sion bombs, where col­lat­eral dam­age is expected to be kept to a min­i­mum, such mas­sively bru­tal weapons have become highly con­tro­ver­sial. These days, every civil­ian casu­alty means a few more hearts and minds are lost. Thermobaric weapons almost invari­able lead to civil­ian deaths. The Soviet Union was heav­ily crit­i­cized for using ther­mo­baric weapons in Afghanistan because they were held to con­sti­tute “dis­pro­por­tion­ate force,” and sim­i­lar crit­i­cisms were made when ther­mo­bar­ics were used in the Chechen con­flict. According to Human Rights Watch, ther­mo­baric weapons “kill and injure in a par­tic­u­larly bru­tal man­ner over a wide area. In urban set­tings it is very dif­fi­cult to limit the effect of this weapon to com­bat­ants, and the nature of FAE explo­sions makes it vir­tu­ally impos­si­ble for civil­ians to take shel­ter from their destruc­tive effect.“


Rest of 2005 article at: http://defensetech.org/2005/11/14/marines-quiet-about-brutal-new-weapon/

[SergeStorms]

1. Wonderful.......

corporate America can always come up with new and exciting ways to kill people. It's the backbone of American industry.

If only these companies pooled their collective genius toward something positive for mankind.